Urban Spatiality and Materiality: Dialogues for a Topological Analysis of the New Post-Pandemic Resemantisations

Abstract

During the pandemic, urban spatiality has been involved in new constitutive dynamics responsible for acting on its identity and semantic value, as it is implicated in new and inevitable processes of resemantization.
The historical period in which we live therefore recalls the need to rethink spaces today as the product of new translations, born to reshape the link between city and nature, to enhance new relationships between humans and non-humans, between citizens and external space; the latter thought of as less polluted, closer and for this reason promoter of a specific effect of nature, through the inclusion of new objects made eco-sustainable by their very materiality (as in the case of wood). Through the analysis of three new spaces in the city of Palermo, the aim of this study will therefore be to investigate semiotically how today's forms of urban materiality set in motion a series of processes that will act in the identity constitution of the new post-pandemic urban imaginary.