The contribution investigates the imaginary underlying two new communities born between the 60s and the 70s: Parly 2 and Milano 2. Waving between difference and repetition, the developers build new residential complexes for the middle class multiplying their respective “mother cities”: Paris and Milan. Unlike the novel La possibilité d’une île by Houellebecq, where the protagonists Daniel 1, Daniel 2, Daniel (x) are generated over time, in the case of Parly 2 and Milano 2, the two communities become a synchronic space, another Paris and another Milan and their inhabitants are thus conscious pioneers of a new transfigured reality to be nourished with new imaginaries. On the one hand, Parly 2 reiterates a well-known question: if the contemporary is a consumer society, the space identifying a community is the largest shopping center in France. On the other hand, Milano 2 underlines how the imaginary of a society of the spectacle can only be based on a television community that inhabits the spaces of the national-popular collective imagination. However the glue among the individuals within the two communities and between the two case studies themselves seems to be embodied by the edenic feature of the wildness which represents the empty space among different artifacts, being capable of building desire, identity and community. In addition, in the enclaves of Parly 2 and Milano 2 the wildness constitutes a dimension where the unexpected break into the small bourgeois cosmos and at the same time symbolized an open space where difference and repetition structure a possible imaginary for the Middle Class’ Housing of the future.
Stuck in the Middle: The middle Class in the Middle of the Wildness
Andrea Pastorello
2023-01-01
Abstract
The contribution investigates the imaginary underlying two new communities born between the 60s and the 70s: Parly 2 and Milano 2. Waving between difference and repetition, the developers build new residential complexes for the middle class multiplying their respective “mother cities”: Paris and Milan. Unlike the novel La possibilité d’une île by Houellebecq, where the protagonists Daniel 1, Daniel 2, Daniel (x) are generated over time, in the case of Parly 2 and Milano 2, the two communities become a synchronic space, another Paris and another Milan and their inhabitants are thus conscious pioneers of a new transfigured reality to be nourished with new imaginaries. On the one hand, Parly 2 reiterates a well-known question: if the contemporary is a consumer society, the space identifying a community is the largest shopping center in France. On the other hand, Milano 2 underlines how the imaginary of a society of the spectacle can only be based on a television community that inhabits the spaces of the national-popular collective imagination. However the glue among the individuals within the two communities and between the two case studies themselves seems to be embodied by the edenic feature of the wildness which represents the empty space among different artifacts, being capable of building desire, identity and community. In addition, in the enclaves of Parly 2 and Milano 2 the wildness constitutes a dimension where the unexpected break into the small bourgeois cosmos and at the same time symbolized an open space where difference and repetition structure a possible imaginary for the Middle Class’ Housing of the future.
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