Uqbar and surroundings
Sometimes the signs on a geographical map tell us about cities better than the pages of a book: to those who observe a map of the province of Naples it appears as a huge and irregular dark spot representing the built-up areas.
Here, these are the "surroundings" of Uqbar: a huge shapeless black spot expelled or swallowed, if you prefer, by the great capital. The borders of the various Municipalities are not easily distinguishable, confused in the tangle of spontaneous constructions, the sense of disorder that the map transmits is such that no urban planner could reconstruct what has happened in recent years.
We believe that the shape of the territory also describes the inhabitants who live there; let's try to imagine: they will certainly be spontaneous, messy, confused, and why not, even indifferent because the territory is decidedly abandoned to itself. And it's precisely for fighting this indifference, this disorder, that the periodical "Uqbar and surroundings" was born, to make a contribution, through the form of dialogue, to accelerating the advent of mutation, the reversal of direction that follows every highly chaotic process and that everyone wearily awaits...
This periodical, then, wants to become the voice of all those who, stuck in city traffic, continually complain about the thousand evils that afflict our towns: from rubbish to the lack of equipment, from the occupation of public land by the shopkeeper on duty to the rampant petty crime, from smog to roads, from the municipal villa that they have been waiting for for years to the abandoned cinema and so on. However, all this has been approached with a new spirit: the formula chosen is in fact that of the opinion newspaper, which takes news events for granted, but which offers reflections on them and puts forward ideas and not complaints, projects and not the usual "I would have done it differently". Our editorial staff will publish the material that will be sent with great interest, and will activate, using our cultural association, public debates and conferences on the problems it deems most important. This is what we mean by the term opinion: a newspaper in which people find the pleasure of feeling united towards an idea, and where they find the pleasure of shouting it out because there is someone who listens and tries to give an answer.
“Uqbar and its surroundings” was born with the hope that it will become a bit of a virtual square, an agora of opinions, because we believe in the written word as an antidote to the confusion that surrounds us, to the vacuous words of our administrators, drifting towards a dormitory suburb where the big city is taking us.
Perhaps in this way we will begin to redesign our territory by marking squares, equipped parks, theaters and museums on our geographical map, and not just houses and streets.