Rappresentare la spazialità della mondializzazione

Economists are well aware of the fact that to function capitalism requires a barrier-free, conflict-free geographical space, time flowing without a pause between night and day, no holidays, no temporary closures and no seasonal festivities. Since the collapse of the USSR and since the People’s Republic of China opened up to a free economy, the capitalist system has expanded to include the whole world and over the last three decades has developed temporally and spatially to permit the flux of capital, shortening distances thanks to the presence of infrastructures for the transport of people and goods, and to a certain extent eliminating them completely with the introduction of information technology. Yet, the geography of the global economic system, or rather the effects of the expansion of capitalism in the world, describes results that are quite different from the designs of capitalism, showing instead an amplification of territorial structures that impede the fluidity of the global capitalist system. The territorial foundations of a global economy can be described more appropriately with the expression “mondialization” (Jacques Lévy, 2008, Italian edition, 2010), which comprises all the territorial, particularly urban, conformations that have already been established or are in the process of being established, for better or worse, as a result of the processes of economic globalisation. Mondialization is supported by the global nature of society, or rather it is based on rising dimensions as a whole and on the networked dimension of relations between individuals in a mondialized society. The most relevant of these dimensions relates concepts to action, the images the social actors have in mind and the object that they mould in a perspective of rising mobility. Creating new forms of representing that network and new tools of communication is the core of the problem that many researchers, territorial analysts, analysts of communication and of the complex symbolic systems are examining in order to understand the innovative scope of mondialization. It is clear that mondialization is a difficult but fascinating field of study. In fact its specific characteristics make it a unique historical process so that it is impossible to compare it to other fields of study. Nevertheless, it is by considering its uniqueness that it becomes possible to examine its progress and to highlight the multifaceted meaning which it has come to assume over time both from an economic and financial point of view and in social and cultural aspects, like governance and migration.