Ordine e sicurezza nella città biopolitica: vecchi scenari e nuovi immaginari

Abstract

Starting from Michel Foucault’s reflections on the relationship among space, power and city, this paper explores the urban space as a biopolitical organization. The city is considered as a form of dislocation of space-power, a concept introduced by Foucault to analyze how urban space is thought and designed by the contemporary governmental rationality. These models of production of the urban space constitute some of the elements of the biopolitics of space, in which disciplinary and securitarian concerns arise, both in terms of order and management of life. If, as Foucault has effectively shown, the concept of biopolitics of the population is a spatial one, its dislocation in the city may tell its plot, seeking the possible meanings it offers rather than the urban landscape. Its aim is to trace some of the possible points of an urban cartography of the contemporary governmental rationality which find some examples in the centre-suburb as a modality of symbolic organization of social inequality, the public space as a space of symbolic subtraction of the idea of citizenship, the shadow cones as “spaces of exception”, areas for the symbolic reproduction of power into space.