Moving beyond binary thinking to engage in new forms of interaction with the diverse nature of territories: what forms of knowledge, planning and action?

Abstract

Starting from a critique of the cultural tradition of modernity, based on the separation between subject and object, mind and matter, nature and culture, the author highlights the profound implications that binary thinking has had on the way we conceive, construct and manage territory, interrupting those millennial dialogues between communities and places to which we owe the diversity of our landscapes. This disconnection - transforming the territory into a disenchanted support functional to the processes of industrialisation, urbanization, and the new extractivist economy generated by the alliance between technology and finance - is at the root of the profound socio-spatial inequalities and ecological, social, and environmental crises we are experiencing. Through a series of critical steps, the author seeks to identify how universities, rethinking the ways in which knowledge and projects are constructed, can embark on promising paths to try to trigger new forms of co-belonging and interaction with the manifold diversity of local territories, overcoming those forms of extractivist rationality that have produced the dissociation between us and the world.