Public Urban Happiness, that is the making of our own world

Abstract

For centuries the urban environment has been painted, designed, shaped and built in order to answer to specific needs and desires. Visions and drawings of ideal and perfect places still today behave as appealing images, offered to the public domain. During the last century, well-known icons, made of visionary and seducing scenarios, designed by avan-garde architects, acted as a vehicle able to symbolize the pursuit of public happiness: working on an urban imaginary, as a body of knowledge, efforts of architects and town planners were oriented to create a new world, based on ideals of progress and prosperity, with streets, squares, architectural complexes and housing estates for our everyday lives, for a wide satisfaction and consumption of urban users.
Far from utopias, the real world hasn’t developed the ability to grant all wishes, often revealing itself as unable to find a way to connect innermost emotions of collective expectations to the outward manifestation in the urban realm. Even in their imperfections, cities expanded beyond what anyone could have imagined, sprawling along territories, scattering over the known borders.