Marta RODESCHINI, University of Bergamo, Italy
Elisa CONSOLANDI, University of Bergamo, Italy
Place can be considered - with landscape and environment - as a configuration that evokes the representational modes through which we perceive and process territory. Indeed, we understand the territory, not through its functions, but thanks to what we emotionally perceive (Turco, 2014). To inhabit a place means to build with it a vital understanding, to actively participate in a creative dialectic that involves the "spirit" of the place (chora) and its "body" (topos) (Turco, 2014): the place, in fact, has its material dimension, commensurable with other places, but it also has a deeply immaterial, qualitative, and immeasurable, which makes it significant for human beings and their culture (Tuan, 1974). To understand this value, we can rely on emotions, which are closely related to action and direct us towards our well-being (Nussbaum, 2004), constituting a powerful factor in shaping our relationship with the world. This relationship and our inhabitation of places have undergone major changes in recent years due to the Covid-19 pandemic (Casti, 2021). The contribution, therefore, aims to investigate how inhabiting in a specific category of places has changed. Hyper-places (Lussault, 2017) have shown the greatest fragilities during the health crisis; actually, the temporality related to viral propagation has highlighted how global hyperconnections have favored contagion. In this context, the links established between the different physical and social realities take on particular importance and are mainly visible and frequent within the hyper-places, where the intensity of connections and relationships is greater. This typology of places is therefore configured as vulnerable, since to limit the force of the virus it was necessary to marginalize the system linked to mobility and interpersonal relationships: the emptying of these structures during the lockdown showed the establishment of new practices and new relationships between inhabitants in urban space.
Mots clés : geography|Covid-19|places|emotions|hyper-places
A104911MR