A New Social Map of Metropolitan Areas: the case of city businessmen in Rame

Abstract

Contemporary metropolises are not defined in the international urban context by their territorial dimensions, population's density or high skyline, but by studying a group of phenomena related to processes and quality of production, cultural patterns and, above all, human relations throughout space. Geographers, sociologists, planners analyse the metropolitan "texture" and they try to describe processes which involve rnillions of people, expressing transformations of society and underlining in each case the cultural topics. So it was possible to speak of an ecologica! city (WHO, 1992; Alberti et al., 1994) directed toward a sustainable development', a technological city, where innovation leads the organisation of social life (Castells, 1989; Salomon et al., 1994), a multiethnic city, where social exclusion and spatial segregation take piace (Wieviorka, 1994), a global city, with an economie system that push_es low-income people (with a lot of women) to take informai jobs, increasing social problems (Sassen, 1991 ), a retail city, with diffusi on of shopping malls and "no-places" without specific identity (Augé, 1992), and a city with 4 populations (Martinotti, 1993; 1996), where studies highlight social characters who live together in metropolitan places, but according to different spaces.