Psicoanalisi di tre città. Da Manhattan a Pudong via Chicago Loop

Abstract

This essay proposes a psychoanalytic interpretation of urban form through a comparative analysis of three paradigmatic cities – Chicago, New York, and Shanghai – each conceived as a symbolic and psychic type. Drawing on Joseph Rykwert’s notion of the city as a spiritual and symbolic construction, the study explores how urban architecture expresses the unconscious structures of civilization. Chicago embodies the “unconscious of exchange,” where the alley functions as an architectural locus of repression, revealing the moral ambivalence of commerce and the city’s low-intensity spatial rhythm. Manhattan, by contrast, represents a “city without an unconscious”: its grid system and vertical density translate financial valorization into a continuous, overexposed reality without recesses or negativity. Shanghai, finally, integrates both models, uniting the mercantile unconscious of Chicago with the financial shining of New York. In its dual nature – simultaneously Free-Trade Zone and financial district – Shanghai becomes the total city, a synthesis of material and immaterial capitalism that actualizes all historical stages of capital within a single urban organism.