The ambivalence of the city. From classical thought to the pandemic

Since the first sociological approach to the city, its ambivalence has been linked to opposing human needs (Simmel, 1903; Elias, 1936, 1989). Park (1915) and Wirth (1938) expanded on the ambivalent features of the city as the coexistence of maximum expression of individual freedom and the pressure of social control. This is the context in which the social figure of the flâneur (Benjamin, 1927-1940) was developed. Modern sociologists contributed to the hypothesis that large cities demonstrate a variety of am- bivalent aspects (Goffman, 1971, 1974). At the end of the century, the metropolis became the embodiment of the second modernity (Lofland, 1973; Inglehart, 1977; Lyotard, 1979; Beck, 1986) that the post-modern individual tests out along with the uncertainty of biographical pathways (Bauman, 1999; Touraine, 1990; Tabboni, 2006). The current pandemic, however, marks a new stage in the reflection on the metropolis and on its ambivalence: it reveals new kinds of problematic relationships, evolving into the fear of others, in the absence of a sense of community. In this scenario, a new topic of interest for urban theory becomes evaluating the influence that the pandemic has had on the relational and value aspects that characterize the metropolis, including in terms of health and sustaina- bility (Lenzi, 2021).