Our horizontal Babel

摘要

Already more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urbanisation process advances at so vertiginous a rate that we will soon be able to describe the planet as a built globe, with its population agglomerated in metropolises and the surrounding environment transformed into an artificial landscape. From the city's mesh of relationships comes its potential and lure, manifested in the territory like a magnetic field that is irresistible to rural populations, a multitude of iron filings dragged beyond remedy towards the metropolitan magnet.