The city as a meeting point for citizens

Thinking of the city as a homogeneous space today is unacceptable, as long as it is constituted by constantly changing social subjects. Cities have a geographical dimension, on the one hand, and the other symbolic, on the other, which includes a wide variety of public spaces that characterize them and constitute their image: streets, buildings, squares, sculptures, street furniture, bridges. But all these spaces are meant by those who inhabit them, according to Rizzo García, which brings us closer to the concept of social symbolism. An urban space enters the perceived world of individuals or groups when it synthesizes identity and meaning, the latter understood as an emotional and functional implication for the subject.

Undoubtedly, the city is a complex space, with a network of social relations and a constructive environment that gives meaning to the lives of the people who inhabit it, it is the built space and also its culture.

Since the anthropology of urban life, the city has been considered as a collective stage of encounter or conflict of different cultures. As an urban space, it facilitates the emergence of new forms of interaction, dialogue or conflict. This is what Rossana Reguillo says: the city is not only the stage of social practices, but fundamentally the space for organizing diversity, clashes, negotiations, alliances and confrontations between various social groups because of the legitimate definitions of the social meanings of life. It is in this relationship of coexistence that groups seek their identity, interpret society and try to impose themselves, in the sense of giving themselves visibility as a group, to meet their expectations.

According to M. Delgado, we could say that urban relations are, in fact, structuring structures, since they provide a principle of structuring, but they do not appear structured, that is, concluded or finished, but rather structured, in the sense of being constantly elaborated and reworked.

As Calvin says, in his magnificent work “The Invisible Cities”, “in a city you do not enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders, but the answer it gives to a question of yours”.

In short, public space has as its main virtue being both a space for representation and socialization, that is, of citizen co-presence. Thus, the city is not only a busy place, but rather a place practiced, used, experienced, a territory lived in all its dimensions.

And in this sense, it stands as an ideal setting or framework for the coexistence of diverse experiences. The citizen becomes a social actor who builds a city of his own, no less true and less a city, made up of itineraries, tastes, networks of relationships, images and desires. However, it is vitally important to emphasize that this construction is with others, never individual. The interactions that can take place in urban spaces are based not so much on the relationship with others but, to a greater extent, with those who are different from us. Coexistence with the different, with the diverse, makes the limits of the urban, of the city lived, more uncertain today than ever, so that the unknown is insinuated daily in the city through the presence of the other and the strange. And, consequently, its rulers are nothing more than administrators of that space, not patterns of stay pretentious to meet their personal expectations; and, therefore, they must try to build the city according to the needs, experiences and expectations of all citizens.

The city should become the strategic place for coexistence, an old word almost in disuse, to promote individual and collective meetings, in pursuit of a better society. Each of us citizens owe each other the opportunity to discuss and exchange, but with the clear conviction that we build the city together.

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