Abstract

The political role of architecture in urban space design is still a significant philosophical issue. Starting from the assumption that cities can actually be understood as material texts, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has described the architecture as a creative mimesis of space. Textual hermeneutics applied to architecture, if crossed with Ricoeur’s reading of ideology and utopia, allows today to qualify the figure of the architect as a critical and transformative narrator of the urban dimension, and, thus, to identify his political task in the imaginative effort of thinking a utopian elsewhere which is, at the same time, rooted in cultural and historical identities of designed places.