Utopian Hours’ contemporary trilogy on the future of the city draws to a close, having begun in 2020 with “The City at Stake.”

A premonitory statement in the post-pandemic era, which anticipated the 2021 edition of “The 1000-Minute City,” inviting us to look to the future with a positive outlook, to find new energy and meaning in the international dimension, in connections, in a new form.

With “A World of 8 Billion Cities,” the 2022 edition of the festival comes to a coherent conclusion, and it is a happy ending. The city is freed from its physical, modern, capitalist, industrial dimension: it becomes a category of the spirit, back to being a mental image first and foremost, a way of life, linked to the qualities and wills of us people before spaces and buildings, and thus regains a positive role in human history and evolution.

The city “in crisis”, caught between global tensions and a hyperlocal vision, finds its contemporary place in the world at large. Every inhabitant of the planet, if they wish, can experience their own urban dimension through their own choices: a value-based urbanity, linked to gestures, consumption, behaviour, rather than places.

By introducing the idea of “making citizens”- now that the world is approaching being inhabited by 8 billion people- and the desire to refound the concept of the city at the planetary level, the focus of Utopian Hours shifts to a new urban teleology.

More on torinostratosferica.it / Tickets: utopianhours.it/en/tickets / Visitors can access the festival according to these in-person or live streaming options: full festival, full day, and live streaming.