A cycle of exhibitions entitled "City after the City" presents a series of situations conveying people's aspirations for a different kind of city, without resorting to any nostalgia for the mythical, ideal city and without expecting to return to one's roots.
At the heart of this reflection on the future of town-planning in the 21st century lies the idea that a city must go beyond its current mix of values and motivations, an idea stemming from the conviction that it has reached the limit of its survivability and what we have at our disposal is not enough to trace a new perspective. In many places, we see a tendency towards the impulse to go beyond the set limits, a yearning for a new type of city which the usual expressions can no longer satisfy. Furthermore, this new assessment of values is made all the more relevant to today by a sense of unease, verging on irritation, about the oppressive nature the city has assumed in its efforts to exalt an artificial lifestyle to the detriment of the “natural” values of instinct and biology. If we admit that the city no longer fulfils the role of asserting our traditions and roots, we can say that we are facing an event with major repercussions, a process of dissolution which, apart from anything else, confirms the lack of clarity in the urban models at our disposal. With City after the City, we examine the symptoms of a global tendency to go beyond the conventional city type, symptoms that we want to present and properly explain to the wider public. Many of the phenomena presented go far beyond the status quo, emphasising the explosion of life observed when the conventions of the city are deconstructed.