Thinking of a sense of belonging. The young generation imagination in Manfredonia (Southern Italy)

This contribution explores the practices and representations through which the sense of belonging that binds to Manfredonia young people who live here, expresses oneself. We chose to interpret this sense of belonging as a product of dialogue between social space and real space, where the latter generates the first. This choice has led us to integrate the usual anthropological research methods with using perceptive and participated maps wherein young people track and told through symbols, their city. The maps, which are not about nature but culture, don’t represent places but rhetorical loci (Casey E.S., 2002) and become social catalysts capable of making explicit the young imaginary, conveyed the landscape of life idea understood as a intangible heritage founded the sense of belonging; moreover refer a relationships networks kaleidoscopic image that establish being part of a group and then of the wider city community, between hysteresis dynamic (Bourdieu P., 1998), encapsulation and integration (Hannerz U., 1992). The young generation, as we try to demonstrate, symbolically construct the space around them: the territory, through the act of signs, becomes common place (Augé M., 1993), principle of meaning for those who live there, while giving back to the identity, relational and historical remarks, recounting the social agents position in a place that let them draw geometric nature walks of life. Social relations, meetings that develop in certain areas like a street, a square, a courtyard for example, draw plots of lines that integrate young people into a common identity landscape because allows young to bring in mental constructs, particular territory spatiality that become a reference point. Manfredonia, moreover, reflects global dynamics common to other towns not only in southern Italy, but at the same time, in the narratives that will hand back his young, still hold down a specific characters that seem establish its uniqueness: creative city that lives in the binomial between contrastive and propulsive forces, individual and collective. The concepts of urban context density and heterogeneity, as well as the processes of dominance, succession and symbiosis, peculiar of the ecological-cultural approach (Park R. E., 1967) will be used to understand some conflict dynamic aspects observed in the field. The symbolic relationship with the landscape, seen as generating and generated by social practice, will be analyzed both in the light of field and habitus Bourdieu concepts (1998) and as a result of an interrelationship between social agents that move themselves within a multiple fields social structure (Hannerz U., 1992). The aim is to illustrate the identity processes operating in the young generations world, exploring the dialectic of inclusion/exclusion peculiar of bordering process that establishes the Place Manfredonia (Casey E. S., 2002), understood as semiotic system capable of changing the city into a complex unity.