LO SGUARDO DEI BAMBINI E LA CITTÀ COME COMUNITÀ EDUCANTE: RAPPRESENTAZIONI, SPAZI VISSUTI E PRATICHE SOCIALI

Nowadays, a political and academic debate is emerging around the city as an educational space and the conditions to turn it into an educational community. To contribute to this debate, this article adopts Lefebvre’s theory of space for problematizing life in contemporary cities and those forms of cultural, political and economic power that organize urban spaces. Interrogating the hegemonic representations of contemporary cities in the Western world, this work points out the ongoing economization of the city as a represented space and how this subsumes the experience of children, objectivating them as passive recipients, consumer-actors and/or individuals “at risk”. Instead, this article invites us to think the city as an educational community that works to deconstruct the primacy of economic representation. In addition, it calls for a full recognition of children experience, that gives them a voice to shape the representations of urban space and the city as a represented physical space.