The city: an educational and narrative space La città come spazio formativo e narrativo

The principle inspiring this essay is rooted in the idea of city as a space marked by narratives, stories and personal experiences, shared tales and existential plots. At the same time, conceiving the human being as a symbolic animal tending to build his own self in a narrative way, as in the theorisations of authors like Cassirer, Ricoeur and Bruner, this work aims at illustrating how inhabiting the space of the city carries within it a pedagogical reflection regarding the very constitution, civil and political, of the human. The city is, therefore, the place where peculiar forms of socialization, human coexistence, conflict and marginalization, coexistence of multiple differences that cannot be reduced to an absolute uniformity, are revealed; it is an emblematic space marked by processes that build up narrative identities and self-edification, empowered by a constant dialectic among human subjects, engaged in reciprocal practices of recognition, within a constant dialectic between singularity and plurality, between the human and the not-human