The invisible challenge of our time.
"To be HUMAN or to be URBAN?".
It sounds like a choice but, in reality, it is a constant tension, a dichotomy that says a lot about my work made of roots and visions, identity and adaptation, territory and vocation… not a choice but a “silent and daily struggle… that runs through all of us”.
“To be HUMAN.”
It is the center… the heartbeat.
The naked truth, with its emotions, its fears, its dreams not yet told.
In your work, but also in mine (between humanistic coaching, ikigai, identity and storytelling), the human being is the starting point: it is the voice that must be listened to before any strategy, the deep “why” that cannot be drawn on a canvas without first having met it “by looking it in the eyes”.
“To be URBAN.”
It is the context… the frame.
The noise, the intersections, the contaminations.
“Urban” is what happens outside, in the speed of cities, in the rules of the market, in trends, on social media, in shops, in showrooms.
In my (your) work, being urban is the “playing field”: the one in which identities must be able to stand, communicate, position themselves, distinguish themselves… emerge (with their own “game plan”, with their own individualities, their own intuitions).
It is the place where the human becomes product, service, narrative… memory (imprinted in the mind).
The profession as a BRIDGE.
You stand in the middle.
You build (continuously and naturally) bridges between the human and the urban: you help one to be understood by the other, you help the human to inhabit the (urban) world without losing its essence... you help the urban to not become sterile, keeping a “beating heart” inside every project, every brand, every place.
The analogies:
- Human is identity. Urban is positioning;
- Human is the why. Urban is the how and where;
- Human is listening. Urban is action;
- Human is dialect. Urban is code;
- Human is the client who has a problem. Urban is the market that needs an answer.
For this reason…
"Writings on walls that seem to scream and graffiti that live before my eyes… quickly written phrases that, though incomplete, I manage to finish, to understand their scope and experience their “emotional transport”.
Too often I think I learn more from all this than from the news.
The sentiment flows through those rough and cold canvases, those imperfect streets… maybe in front of that abandoned cinema or that forgotten (but occupied) School.
There I understood that it is no longer enough to design… you need to have the courage to look and rediscover not a place (or a logo) but your own identity, aware that our job is not to choose but to train the human to “survive” in the urban and, at the same time, teach the urban “to remember to be human”.
Navigate “between the two”, interpret with respect, courage and with a story to tell.
And we all do it, each with our own daily life and our own work… every day.
Isn't it so?!
