Big cities are increasingly inhabited by the elderly, often trapped in public housing. By immigrants, who squeeze into niches and settle for dilapidated homes, or personal service facilities, such as concierge lodgings and caretakers’ quarters. And by the wealthy, who are confined behind their guards. Is it really so? How is the profile of urban morphology changing? In a famous 1938 article, Louis Wirth described the city as a large, dense, and heterogeneous settlement. But for there to be heterogeneity, there need to be “others.” Who is today’s true “other”? If it is true that the city represents the most advanced expression of human civilization and that in every era the multiple layers of its complex reality remain largely hidden, then the crucial intersection between the “physical” city, or observable city, and the sociological city, which cannot be observed with any physical instrument, becomes even more essential. On one hand, we see the physical city and do not see the social city, but on the other hand, the physical city is the product of the social city, without which it would not exist. And above all, it would not exist in the forms that we recognize not only the city but that specific city. On the other hand, that object, the physical city, has a crucial influence on the unobservable city, of which it represents the habitat. The city, however, as Anthony Giddens says, “shows a false continuity with pre-existing social orders.” Its changes are continuous, like a stalagmitic growth. And we experience its immediate consequences, particularly in our daily urban practices, which are both unbearable and indispensable at the same time.
