To hold the territory. I care

The author goes by what he has experienced working for 35 years in communities of marginalized addicted young people and immigrant teenagers, and he proposes a meditation on the existential condition of the man today. In the modern world, heavily driven by individualism, we need to retrieve the awareness that each man is deeply embedded within society. Territory and community must be therefore a rich soil for individuals to grow. We are living in hard and confusing times, inhabiting "non places", i.e. spaces that serve a function, but that do not offer neither identity nor relationship occasions. The arising state of insecurity draws the man to retreat into oneself for fear of the future or to pretend to be able to understand the present and the future according to a "knowledge" that is miles away from a true wisdom. It is necessary to get rid of any knowledge illusion and to accept to re-create ourselves, what we know and what we want, to build on the real experience, on the real man that every day walks at our side and is a mirror of what we really are. To undertake this path, we have to learn to work on difficult situations, in order to modify them, to rebuild a collective knowledge and to transmit these skills to the others, nowadays and generation after generation.

Keywords: Non-places, community, identità

Angelo Cupini, Il territorio dalla stiva. <i>I care</i> in "CHILD DEVELOPMENT & DISABILITIES - SAGGI" 2/2010, pp 43-51, DOI: 10.3280/CDD2010-002003