Dopo l’evento. Archeologia dello spazio umano

When catastrophes strike urban centers causing widespread damage to the built fabric, extensive coverage of events usually focuses on the material dimension of destruction and on the ordeal of residents that are displaced to safe locations. Far less attention, however, is dedicated to the dimension of human space, i.e. that dynamic entity connecting places and their inhabitants, exceeding the material constitution of physical space, and describing the existential dimension of lived experience. Human space as understood in this work gathers contributions from several disciplinary fields such as affective science, aesthetics, phenomenology, anthropology, history and architecture. All these studies converge on the centrality of the experiencing subject in the constitution of space, with particular emphasis on the affective dimension of experience. One particularly interesting – albeit so far under-explored – subject is the temporal dimension of affectivity in relation to space: how emotions are re-enacted over prolonged timespans, and if the connectedness of feelings and space is capable of intersubjectively bridging across subjects. This hypothesis is especially relevant to understand the capacities for survival of human space through disastrous events, considering parts that are lost and those that may survive, being hinged to the materiality of places.