ABSTRACT
The recent impasses of economic and urban processes under neoliberal logic has required a critical revision of the disciplinary procedures of architecture and urbanism. Resistances to the rapid deterioration of social life and of the environment suggest that a new collective meaning is the condition for altering the present state of things. How can and how should this meaning, that may be captured in the actions of different agents, guide architecture and urbanism’s disciplinary imagination? What are the constitutive elements of the contemporary social framework that are at the base of these wished-for transformations? Through a matrix considering the polarities between, on the one hand “rationalizing strategies” and “tactics of everyday life,” and representations of private and collective space on the other, the text proposes an historical reflection on the paths of modernity’s architectural ideologies and those who reacted to it since the second post-war period. It seeks to revisit a few critical remains of formulations that, in their dealings with history, have been changed into their opposite.
