Abstract

[Narratives of Urban Spaces: Actors, Places, Representations. A Law and Humanities Perspective. Proceedings of the X National Conference of the ISLL]. Space is the key word that inspired the work presented at the 10th National Conference of the ISLL. During the Covid-19 pandemic, private space became a place of safety but also an oppressive, claustrophobic dimension — a prison, for some, a luxurious one, yet a prison nonetheless — while cities and their usual hubs of social gathering emptied, becoming ghostly, both utopian and dystopian at once. What has urban space been, what is it now, and how is it changing? The end of the pandemic exposed many critical issues that were already known before but have now become tangible. The lens of the Law and Humanities approach — at times prophetic, at others simply photographic — has proved essential for capturing the current oppositions and contradictions of and within urban spaces, which, whether we like it or not, have always been both backdrop and, simultaneously, co-protagonists of human affairs and therefore of human narratives. Cities have been (and still are) places of inclusion and exclusion; of blending between public and private spheres; of overlap and tension between the desire for creativity and the need for order and regulation, particularly legal; of beauty and defacement; of history and modernity; of tradition and experimentation; of places and non-places; of belonging, identity, roots and estrangement. Migrants, with their uprooted lives — despite their wandering in search of not just imagined places — are, in our time, the most striking example of this condition. Naples, the host city of this conference, more than many other urban areas, stands as a perfect synthesis of these antinomies. Suspended between past and present, perhaps unable to envision or hope for a different future, it excels at absorbing the most jarring contrasts, yet proves inadequate in imagining a reasonable compromise that might bring them into unity.