VVZ API is not affiliated with ETH Zurich. Data might be outdated or incorrect. Please view the official ETHZ Vorlesungsverzeichnis for binding information.

851-0320-00L 3 Credits DS , DR D-GESS

Hypothesis Rome

Ipotesi Roma

Lecturers & Examiners: Dr. Lorenzo Romito
VVZ CR n/a

Last Updated: 2026-02-05 16:38:26

Abstract

Hypothesis Rome: an ontology eco-myth to regenerate, once again, the World City practices, politics and poetics to escape the Contemporaneity. What can we still learn from Rome?

Objective

The course hypothesizes that Rome can express an interpretative paradigm of the world, one alternative cosmology to the dominant contemporary one. The course will investigate this hypothesis by weaving the Stalker practice, which has created 30 in years, continuous cosmogonic action aimed at exploring/narrating/imagining the reality of Rome with traces of the myth of eternity and universality.

Content

The course hypothesizes that Rome may express an interpretive paradigm of the world, an Cosmology alternative to the dominant one of Contemporaneity. A cosmology based on three elements that have mythically and historically allowed Rome to regenerate itself through the historical epochs, thus far granting it eternity, as well as the universality, that is, the ability to extend itself almost to the point of coinciding with the world itself. The hypothesis is that Rome is a complex life form, a sympoietic eco-myth-system, with its own emergent organization capable of spontaneously evolving and self-regenerate over time. A living reality, at once mythological and ecological, characterized by its ability to include any otherness that might otherwise lead it to its end, of which would consist its eternity, or which might limit the expansion of its urban to the entire planet, of this would instead consist its universality. Thus Rome has always confronted and included: the wilderness, its alter ego Latium; the foreigners, cyclically summoned to regenerate the city; and time itself, conceived as circular so as to make origin and end points of tangency of a time continuum potentially infinite. This assumption is contradicted by the ideology of human domination over the environment, characteristic of modernity, which has dominated urban development over the past 150 years in an attempt to realize a thesis, that of Modern Capital Rome, the fulfillment of which threatens to erase definitively the Rome, World City hypothesis. The conflict between the Rome, World City hypothesis and the Rome Capital thesis is not yet widely perceived, but it has for battlefields precisely the sense and role that wild nature, foreigners and time have in the transformation of the city. Center of the investigation are those margins of the city, irreducible to clear boundaries, territories of confrontation with otherness, spaces neither planned nor regulated in which the spontaneous confrontation between the ruins of the past and the life forms that find refuge there generates highly bio- and socio-diverse, insurgent, "possible adjacencies" in which a new reality principle among the folds of a now depleting reality. The Rome hypothesis is therefore an open construction site for the verification of emerging eco-social processes, to the complex study of their natural and urban history, as well as to the experimentation of human practices and theories that can demonstrate their consistency at local and planetary. An open construction site to test whether and how the Rome World City hypothesis can constitute a socio-ecological perspective of escape from the irresponsible, reductive and violent human attempt to dominate the other and destroy life on the planet.

General Information

Language
Italian
Levels
DS , DR

Examination

Type
graded semester performance

Course Components

Type Title Time & Place Hours
lecture Ipotesi Roma
  • Mon 14:15-16:00 (LFV E 41)
  • Mon 14:15-16:00 (RZ D 8)
2 h weekly

Offered In