Foto di Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes

Inequalities Affect Us All

September 26 2024

From Milan to the world, from the microscopic life of bacteria to great migrations, speakers at the ‘Inequalities’ forum explored the many facets of one of the inescapable questions of our time: the inequality of economic, social, health and cultural resources among the inhabitants of the planet, and they sought to understand how to reverse its course.

10% of the world’s population is responsible for producing 29% of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere every year. However, it is not they – and certainly will not be in the foreseeable future – who are paying the highest price of global warming. If, as experts think, the average temperature of the planet increases by three or four degrees within the end of this century, half of the earth’s surface could become uninhabitable, triggering huge waves of migration from the global south to the global north as well as a further siphoning off of resources and skills in that direction.

Forum Inequalities

A boy or a girl born in Japan can expect to live beyond the age of 85, whereas life expectancy at birth in a number of sub-Saharan countries, from Chad to Somalia, is less than 60 years. 85% of the victims of the fire at Grenfell Tower, the London skyscraper that burned in 2017, belonged to ethnic minorities. According to the latest OCSE PISA survey, among the 80 participating countries, Italy has the most significant “math divide”, that is, the gap between males and females in learning math. This means that many girls will tend not to pursue STEM majors in universities and later, will be excluded from a whole range of particularly rewarding careers, including in terms of economic rewards.

Richard Sennet, Forum Inequalities

These facts represent just some of the reams of data cited on September 11 during the first forum leading up to the next International Exposition, scheduled for May to November 2025, but they are sufficient to remind us of the urgency of this issue. In fact, inequalities are more present than ever in the world of today and are likely to become even more extreme in the near future in the wake of technological development and the ecological crisis.

The many experts, artist and researchers called upon to contribute to the forum, setting in motion a sort of collective intelligence, explored different aspects of the problem, working on a multiplicity of scales. These range from the global dimension of geopolitics and migrations (the subject of talks by British journalist Gaia Vince, who spoke of the “nomadic century”, and by the philosopher of science Telmo Pievani, who focused on the link between biodiversity loss and social trends) to the more local dimension of inequalities in the distribution of resources between the center of Milan and its outlying areas (subject of an analysis by Bocconi University’s Social Inclusion Lab), to the infinitely small dimension of bacteria and their role in our lives and our homes (the focus of architectural historians Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley).

Francis Kéré, Forum Inequalities

Federica Fragapane, Forum Inequalities

Since urban space is the main arena in which the needs of groups of people with different economic, social and cultural capital clash, urban planning is necessarily in the forefront of the study of inequality. The American sociologist Richard Sennet, a senior advisor to the UN among other prominent positions, spoke in a lecture of the “right to the city” and the different ways in which residents can exercise their power over the physical environment. One of the key concepts is the porosity of buildings that allows for sharing and the interpenetration of functions. This is what happens, for example, along the walls of Avignon, colonized over the years by small stores and bazaars run by immigrants, or in Delhi, in India’s largest electronics market, which grew informally in Nehru Place, today one of the few oases of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Hindus.

The architect and urban planner Carlo Ratti presented the case of the city of Porto, studied as part of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, which he directs. A series of geolocated tweets and data concerning residents’ income were cross-referenced and used to map the phenomena of social segregation – the so-called “ghettos” where new policies must be put in place before something serious happens, as in the aforementioned case of Grenfell Tower, where, according to the architect Nazanin Aghlani and the lawyer Kimia Zabihyan, a lethal mix of prejudice and neglect led to the death of 72 people.

While urban planners are committed to breaking down the barriers that separate people, literally but also metaphorically, artist have a valuable role as mediators and can help reduce inequalities by using their art to enhance the value of objects and people suffering discrimination. The multifaceted intellectual Theaster Gates – who a few years ago analyzed the monumental archive of Johnson Publishing Company, the historic publisher of cult magazines of the African American community such as Ebony and Jet – is convinced of this role, showing everyone the richness of “black” culture. Constructing a positive narrative of “blackness” that can be useful for new black and brown Italians, turning the spotlight on Italian artists of African descent – ironically defined as “Afrospaghetti” – and on historic figures such as the Italian-Somali partisan Giorgio Marincola, also recounted by writer Wu Ming 2, is also the goal of Black History Months Milano, one of the initiatives inspired by the American experience that have been proposed in the main Italian cities in recent years.

Another effective example of “community storytelling” is a project of the Serpentine Galleries in London related to Radio Ballads described by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: following on from the BBC radio program of the same name, which aired in the 1950s and 60s, the museum has gathered ballads and stories from various communities of the metropolitan area, giving a voice to groups of people and issues that rarely benefit from media attention.

According to anthropologist Tim Ingold, author of a keynote lecture on the topic of the new humanism, artistic and creative skills will be indispensable for the man of tomorrow, along with senses, voice and the ability to manipulate objects. In fact, once the “digital bubble” is exhausted, and when we realize that the artificial intelligence so fashionable today is too energy-intensive to be sustainable, we will return to living in a mostly analog world where we will necessarily have to talk, touch, do and imagine to get by.

Watch the forum, held on September 11, 2024