where is home?
Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 31 2008
“And where is home? Home is not in a neighbourhood, nor in a community. Home is in the unexpected welcome of the stranger. Home is in the charity reflected in the chance encounter. Home is what you want to make of the city when you are the object of kindness. Home is what you return to in the gatherings of people, in coffee shops, street corners—in those zones where you met the human eros. It might have been at a tollbooth, at a counter, in a gallery, a parking lot, in the most ridiculous or fortunate of places. The unseen city is in the happenstance—the boulevards and paths and piazzas and atriums or in the choreography of people that build a city as homage to what they have found in each other. The city is built after the architecture of care has been improvised. And the roots of it are not in the logistical or prudently designed. The roots of it are in the mystery of grace, the appetite for each other, the gusto of being curious about each other before the conventions of the visible world. It is the invisible city that is the Valhalla of the civic dream. The structure of a city is for the furthering of kindness and intercivic munificence. We will not have livable cities until we find a reason for living in each other.
We know only that the geography of care is the true ecology and that we cannot save anything until we have saved ourselves from irreverence.â€
(from Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the creative city by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco)
Ok, I wish I had written these words. But I did not. Still I would like to share them with you today maybe because of a found resonance which you may share.
And I would like to ask all of us:
What have you done today for your home, for your city, for your globe. Yes, I mean the one you are holding right there, in your hands. The one that is labeled fragile, this way up.