Human beings are social beings, and thus they need to have relationships with other human beings in order to grow and develop. These relationships are an essential part of human nature. On the biological level, each one of us exists because two persons – the parents – have met and mated. Then, from birth onwards, life enfolds as a continuous growth through interaction with the others and the world around us.

By Ilaria Pedrini

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"I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world".

(Socrates, Greek philosopher)

"We are running the risk of making our cities places where business goes ahead, but where life, in the proper sense of the word, is lost".

(Hubert Horatio Humphrey)

"The city is the master of man".

(Simonide di Ceo, Greek philosopher)

"The city is not merely a mass of bricks. It is that strange thing that is relationships between people".

(Italo Calvino)

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"It’s enough to remember that the metropoli are the real platforms for a culture that exceeds and towers over its personal elements.  Here, in the constructions and places of entertainment, in the miracles and comfort of a technology that wipes out every distance, in the formation of communitarian life and in the visible institutions of the State, a fullness of the spirit manifests itself which has crystallized and become so overwhelmingly impersonal that – so to speak – it loses its personality.  On the one hand life is rendered extremely simple, since it is offered stimuli, interests, ways to fill one’s time and mind from every corner that it is as if it is swept up in a current where you almost don’t need to bother swimming.  On the other hand, however, life consists more and more of such contents and impersonal representations, that tend to eliminate its more intimately particular colourations and idiosyncrasies; so in order to survive the more personal element has to show a peculiarity and particularity which is extreme; it has to exaggerate to make itself heard, even by himself".

(Georg Simmel, philosopher and sociologue)

"[...] The city is something more than a cluster of individual men and women or of social services, like streets, buildings, lamps, tramlines and descending paths; it is also something more than a simple constellation of institutions and administrative instruments, like courts, hospitals, schools, police and public servants of every kind.  Instead, the city is a state of soul, a body of customs and traditions, of attitudes and feelings organized amongst these customs and transmitted by means of this tradition".

(Robert Park, sociologue)

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"The city’s future depends much more on the customs and culture of its citizens than on the beauty of its buildings or on how well its institutions are run"

(Cardinal Martini: farewell speech to the city of Milan– 28 June 2002)

"What would become of humanity if it didn’t have [cities], the essential centres of the civil world … the ‘living units’ where the essential values of the past and the future are concentrated?"

(Giorgio La Pira, 1954)

"A city is not designed it comes about of its own accord.  It’s enough to listen to it, because the city is a reflection of so many stories".

(Renzo Piano)

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