Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. New realities for changing lifestyles.
Rethinking Happiness
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
New realities for changing lifestyles..
The historical period in which we live faces us with conditions and challenges that could generate substantial changes in our way of thinking and a different, more contemporary approach to design activity. The economic crisis has revealed the limitations of a development model and, at the same time, the environmental emergency is forcing us to radically rethink our way of confronting the future.
On their own, these two problematic areas suffice to make us understand that many things will no longer be as they were before; but if we decide to try to do something, to get a glimpse of hope, we realize we are faced with an incredible opportunity to redesign life, to trigger a process of mutation.
We have to prepare ourselves to see with new eyes, to think about a tabula rasa situation in which to redefine needs, habits, activities, dreams in relation to new conditions of existence, to think about a more up-to-date idea of contemporary life.
The challenge arises on different levels:
if we think about how we can produce meaning, we have to understand which references and which modes can be used to try to construct a path.
Where the references are concerned, even though the future may seem dark, because we cannot glimpse positive certainties, we do know about many things we can take into consideration, and we have access to great quantities of information; the constraints within which we can operate are known to us, and outline a reality that does not permit waste, that can no longer be based only on strictly individualistic, utilitarian logic, but has to take form through a model in which multiple parties work together.
This is because the individual disciplines, in the lack of general a priori visions, are no longer capable of providing responses on their own that can make us understand how, and under what conditions, we can implement transformations.
In this moment, the major perceived difficulty has to do with the courage to look toward ideal projects and the capacity to overcome obstacles often caused by unsuitable legislation, by political and economic vested interests, by the inertia of habit and cynicism that see change as a futile effort or even a threat.
By ideal projects, I mean a project approach that attempts to generate an improvement in the quality of life of people on the social, economic and environmental levels. The great frustration that can be sensed on many sides comes from the difficulty in understanding which actions we can be involved in to reactivate the sensation of being part of a process, in which we are doing what is best for the future of our communities.
Many of the themes, problematic issues and critical points on which we need to work are there before our eyes, every day. Just to name a few, they range from problems connected with security (personal, nutritional, economic, energy) to themes of the landscape (greenery, nature, agriculture, but also urban and industrial peripheries), to the problem of refuse and, upstream, the issues of recycling and models of consumption, as well as the situations of emergency regarding young people and senior citizens.
There are also critical nodes that can be transformed into opportunities: one emblematic case, and an embarrassing one for Italy, has to do with our country’s relative inability to encourage tourism; in a country with such a wealth of unexplored potential, a great deal of work can be done to rethink models of development in a more up-to-date way.
Creative action in a multidisciplinary perspective consists in producing, with respect to the reality we can observe, ideas, reflections, proposals capable of outlining specific design processes to address multiple themes, to develop in-depth, detailed project briefs.
This way of working is more like the production of a film than the traditional professional approach of the world of architecture, urban planning and design, in the sense that there is not necessarily a client who commissions a project. Instead, there may be, for example, a group composed of economists, sociologists, architects, designers, urban planners, landscape designers and interested citizens, capable of proposing specific projects that address one or more theme areas at the same time, to produce the entire project cycle by considering both the more conventional aspects of the project, and the activation of social and economic dynamics.
Superbazaar
A place to live, meet, buy, sell, swap. more
Rural Urbanism
The city enters the countryside, the countryside enters the city. more
A campus in the fields.
Venice agri-techno valley. more
New communities, new polarities.
How a small center becomes a large center. more
Read also: A lovely place.
The heart and soul of places and the aesthetic in the search for harmony
Thinking about Rethinking Happiness by Aldo Cibic.
