Le città simili a un mondo

In the cosmopolitan cities of the past, modern urban reality aspired to mirror the world: coastal cities built commercial relations, networks and exhanges of ideas taking the whole globe as their frame of reference. In this essay, we will investigate some historical examples of this transformation: how Venice in the 15th century paved the way for the creative city, a model that is still imitated in major urban labs of innovation along the US coasts and in the new far Eastern cities. We will also see how the cities in the Levant (Constantinople, Alexandria, Beirut) became extraordinary scenes of intercultural coexistence, a vivid proof of the fluidification of barriers and modern transmutation of territory into space open to movement.