ABSTRACT
Ugo La Pietra’s 1977 short film, La riappropriazione della città (The Reappropriation of the City), is concerned neither with the design of an architectural object, nor the analysis of buildings and streets that make up Milan’s city centre. In fact, throughout the film, La Pietra’s understanding of the role of the architect and architectural production within the late capitalist city appear completely disconnected from the realisation of physical structures within the urban environment. Instead, in La riappropriazione della città, architecture has become a toolkit for the individual city dweller – a series of representational techniques for understanding their own everyday experiences and behaviours. In this sense, the ‘reappropriation’ for which La Pietra argues is based on the individual citizen’s capacity to see their environment primarily in terms of their own patterns of use and experience. The city of Milan remains physically unaltered at the end of La Pietra’s film, but a series of maps and drawings made by the architect reveals multiple new cities consisting of the routes and monuments unique to the architect’s exploration of the urban environment.
