Transurbanze: la psicologia della salute nel paesaggio urbano postmoderno

Health psychology has been mainly characterized by an individualistic and socio-cognitive perspective that demarcate its boundaries and fields of application. This results in making it less sensitive to the inequalities of the socio-political, economic and cultural determinants of health processes and to the changes and the innovative drives that characterized the onset of the new century. We need therefore to build new epistemological and methodological perspectives for “reterritorialize” health psychology, abandoning or revisiting its mainstream guidelines. In this article I propose the metaphor of “transhurbance” to suggest the urgency of a different approach to the needs and tensions in the contemporary cityscape, making it inaccessible to traditional approaches. Walking through the postmodern city districts, means getting in touch with a nomadic humanity, that doubtfully and contradictorily claims new content of citizenship. Together with this humanity, health psychology could redefine its positioning and research-intervention strategies. Two interventions in different urban contexts are presented in the appendix. They exemplify the possibility to trace, through the methodologies of the “derive” and of the “participatory maps, possible work plans coherent with the vision proposed in this article.