The photographer Salvatore Esposito in the publication edited by Paola Galante and Maria Lucia di Costanzo, professors of the Faculty of Architecture of Naples, deals with the theme of the western suburbs of Naples.

PREMISE. In November 2008, Paul Virilio and Raymond Depardon inaugurated an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris entitled Terre Terre. Ailleurs commence ici1. The installations, the video interviews, the blow-ups and illustrated a human community in motion and documented the causes: wars, climate changes, economic crises in a single wording: contemporary catastrophe. Ten years ago the phenomenon was already a racing tale, a redefinition of the categories of sedentary and nomadic: for Virilio sedentario was the one who, thanks to technological devices, while traveling, was “always at home”; nomadic one who, having been born in detention spaces, in protected reserves in the invisible places of the informal city, would never have felt at home2. The heart of the matter was the feeling of being rooted in the place of belonging that the simultaneous nature inexorably compromised. Among the repercussions of the phenomenon, the mutation of the concept of city from place of election to place of expulsion is specified. Able to introject in his bowels portions of humanity without accepting it. It is an exhibition, the paradox of the contemporary city / metropolis that never existed but celebrates the values ​​of those who, while traveling, do not live there. The ineluctability of this condition has been ten in the last decade in different disciplinary fields but, only more recently, international conferences and trade shows have brought the issue back to the debate concerning the architectural project3. Understanding how the native place permeates the personality of each person, also in the way of structuring relationships, can lead to a consolidated modus operandi.

Awareness is the nature of the phenomena in progress, if on the one hand our reason, its fears generating an impasse in which the reasons for the project must be refounded.
Rooting in the landscape as a fundamental state in terms of space and teaching. But for a nomadic civilization is the landscape in which to take root? Perspectives are the contradictions of contemporaneity, but it is also true that it includes the ethical dimension4.

UN SPHERICAL BOOK. Come in a spherical book, of characters imagined by Sergei M. Eisenstein, this volume collects the premises, the theoretical and experimental contributions to the treated products of the 17th international itinerant seminar of Villard design, carried out during the academic year 2015- 2016 The theme, in continuation with the Villard seminar 16 “strategic territories, ancient landings and new goals of freedom” – a series of transformations of urban spaces and characters representative of the big cities induced by a by now acquired, of United States of America multiculturalism.

The text does not lend itself so much to a linear reading. The heterogeneous contributions continue continuous references and assesses the assumptions for ever new readings in which the point of view is struggling to find a center of gravity.

Through the three sections of the volume we want: to return the background compound that has built a key to the theme – interpretations -; study in which it was possible to decline the stories relating to the more general theme – looks; reasoning on the methodologies used in school projects as a contribution to a review of the research theme – experimentation.

THE JOURNEY The soundtrack of the reading was from the journey lived by teachers and students, cadenced by the stops (Naples, Paris, Milan, Palermo, Naples) and nourished by guided tours and contributions made by the coordinators of the year (Pagano, Salerno, Gritti , Sarro). A journey that enters no previous edition of the Seminar Villard has linked the theme of research and episodes of news that have inevitably invaded the current debate, reaffirming the relevance.

On the evening of 13 November 2015, while the inaugural conference of the seminar was under way, the terrorist attacks in Paris, have disturbed the sleep and dreams of a whole Europe and, among all, of the twenty Parisian students guests in Naples. Isolated from their Nation, silent and still incredulous, compact, the group of the boys participated in the day on a guided tour, Naples Migranda, organized by the opera

Paola Galante