Ex-citizens

[EX-CITIZENS] In such a disperse suburban extension as Diemlach, it is possible to read a legitimate option of the inhabitants, who choose to abandon the modern city, stunned at its thunderous failure. They become then somehow ex-citizens, and inhabit what we (from the city) call the sub-urbs.

[BORDER] The ex-citizen is looking for nature. But his ‘lost innocence’ is irrecoverable, and the result is that he brings the urban into the natural. The limit is not clear: Who colonises whom? Here, the crash of a suburban structure with a radical natural environment is deliberately not solved, and the question remains alive.

[PROPERTY] Fences subdivide the territory in properties, substituting the lost order of the city. But community gets also lost here, it cannot exist without public space. Discontinuity of property is brought to its last consequences and so downplayed. It becomes extremely interchangeable, and the suburb becomes alive in its very heart, in property relationships themselves.

[DISPERSION] The fundament of suburban dispersion is the market’s obsession for the product, for the saleable object. This objectual dispersion is here amplified and a new texture arises, where objectuality and interchangeability become the fundament of relationship. The whole becomes a field where the relations of the ex-citizens can configure a new beginning for their community.

[URBAN LIQUIDITY] The result remains suburban, but house and city are no more mere products: they are (again) open to a process; they become a liquid that adapts to their changing social reality.