Attraverso... la città che abito", Come costruire uno spazio urbano di convivialità e mescolanza

This article proposes a reflection on urban spaces and migrants starting from an interesting project of conviviality and mixing. The project “Through... the city I live” was conceived by the operators and some beneficiaries of the SAI (Reception and Integration System) of Milazzo in Sicily. The project was started using the tool of participatory pictorial art with the idea of continuing it with other communicative tools (such as music), in order to create new links between subjects also with obvious social and cultural differences. Lefebvrist thought seemed the right theoretical key to be able to understand a project that wants to act in a public space to make a change for that place and for the whole urban context. Activating a project of social and cultural construction of a public space means engaging in the processes of contamination that then affect the rest of the city, being able to generate moments of conflict and friction. The re-appropriation of the urban reopens the fundamental theme of the right to the city for all people, whether they are poor or migrants, young people or subjects with various fragilities. In addition, it also reopens a discussion on the involution in Italy in recent years of the so-called “second reception” of migrants and asylum seekers, between spaces for planning that have become rare exceptions and a management based almost exclusively on managerial criteria and economic sustainability.