Emerging from irrelevance with critical thinking

Abstract

Urban and regional planning disappeared from public debate just as this expression gained unprecedented diffusion, success and banalization.
The text refers not to participatory practices within urban planning procedures, but to the general public debate, the one that creates public opinion and which has changed today because the main tools have changed. The question is posed in relation to some of the changes that have occurred in recent decades: loss of the democratic role of public opinion increasingly directed by the power of the mass media; loss of measure of the relationship between public and private to the advantage of the latter; loss of the political-interpretative role of the urban planning disciplines to the advantage of a political-executive role, therefore merely functional to power.
In the first case, the difficulties for a discipline that is based on complex analyzes and tries to give substance to long-term visions derive from the presentification of horizons which makes it difficult to find a listening ear from public opinion.
In the second, the retreat of the role of the State and of the "public" kneeling with respect to the hyper-liberal economic model has pushed urban planning to no longer contribute to the constitutional task of removing the economic and social obstacles that effectively limit freedom and equality of citizens.
In the third, the responsibility lies with the urban planners who have abandoned their political-interpretative role in favor of a political-executive role, merely at the service of power.
The text argues the thesis that it is necessary to restore the urban planner to the role of intellectual, capable of intervening in the public debate starting from the specificity of his knowledge, to propose "subversive" perspective readings and solutions compared to the status quo, to be made available to those, citizens and territories, who remained unheard.