The invisible thread of Raissa: Utopian desire and urban conflict in Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities"

Abstract

At the beginning of the seventies, just when Italo Calvino finished building his Invisible Cities, an ideological struggle is being fought between three main forces in the streets of the capitalist societies: a dominant one (whose urban model is the bourgeois, rational and modernist city), another emerging (the postmodern city) and a third type reactive or resistant (the oniric-situationist city). The substratum, that is, the ideological unconscious in which the text germinates, is the same one from which the debates of urbanists, architects and political geographers of the late sixties are developed and the consequent resemantization of terms such as “citizenship” or “public space”. As we will try to demonstrate in the present article, in the Calvinian work the ideological conflicts and the transformations suffered by post-industrial cities are thematized in a dialectic between collective desire and collective trauma, desired city and suffered city, and, ultimately, in a deconstruction of the antithesis utopia vs dystopia in favour of a structure that we will call intopian.