| OIKOS members Erica Robles Anderson and Patrick Coffman recently traveled to Palermo, Italy, to participate in the first Arteficium Conference on “Exploring the Fate of Intelligence.” Organized as a multi-day engagement with the city, civic associations, and an exploration of the recently renovated Palazzo Butera. | |
Palazzo Butera |
|
|
|
We pick up conversational connections developed as part of the 204-2025 OIKOS series on Accounting. The Palazzo itself is what Paolo Quattrone calls a “rhetorical machine,” organized as a site of revaluation and exploration to move an institution from where it was to an open field of where it might be going, this time with a different set of engagements with people, traditions, innovation, and the city. |
| The Princes of Butera, part of the Branciforti family, owned several towns prior to the abolition of feudalism in 1812. The restoration of Palazzo Butera began in 2016 after the space was purchased by Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi. The rooms bear traces of both the historical project of renewal, and an open and undone quality that emphasizes how the structure operates and which layers hold the architecture together as not-yet-complete. |
|
 |
Butera’s approach to curation, restoration, and display frames a conversation about the status of the city and its history both to itself and to visitors. The Palazzo is also home to a foundation that hosts workshops, classes, research fellows, and artists. The setting itself borders a historic district of bustling marketplaces, piazzas, and narrow streets, and waterfront redevelopments ushering in new attention and flows of global capitalism that always threaten to flatten the rich diversity and mixture that gives the region its deep character and cultural sensibility. The question being posed at the scale of architecture is: what role can institutions play in cities, and how might the city reshape or reconfigure where education happens? |
|
City as University |
|
 |
|
| Recently, The New York Times reported that political leadership in Palermo is fed up with the onslaught of cookie-cutter businesses popping up to serve an endless supply of arancini and Aperol spritz to tourists from around the world. These are the ordinary troubles of global capitalism and tendencies to generate throngs that stand ready to see “tradition” and “heritage” through forms of consumption and amusement park caricatures. In response, desirable places become locked into local resistance to the gentrification that inevitably makes downtown cores unlivable, and developers’ enthusiams for bringing landmark architectures and commerce on-scene.
How do places, organizations, and institutions work with flows of mobility, migration, capital, and sociality in ways that generate deeper relationships, engagements, and connections? How do we learn from places, and how do places learn from us? |
|
| To learn from Palermo, sound artist Manfredi Clemente created an installation within a small back stairwell at the Palazzo. In it, the listener hears field recordings from a different moment in the city, years ago, but decidedly not now. Juxtaposed are many people’s transcribed thoughts about the city and its restoration in the present. To read the collective visions and wishes alongside the atmosphere of sound from another time is to think with the deep layers of growth and transformation that are a constant fabric of city life. Now is never enough to understand the layers of the present and its possibilities. |
 |
 |
The deep time and diversity of Palermo are visible everywhere. The architecture and stonework infrastructures bear traces of empires past and present. The styles and people carry traditions from so many parts of the world. The plants, even in the smallest containers on any given street, teem with a diversity and density that baffles the sense of what is possible for living together and doing it well. |
| Given time and protection, diverse entanglements can reach monumental proportions. In the city’s various botanical gardens, there are impossibly vast trees whose roots grow thick like architectural walls. They do not grow alone, isolated as pristine examples of purity or monoculture. Instead, they are structural supports and protections for one another. Growth is a form of variegation, not sameness. If there is a lesson for universities in what the city offers, it is that combinations and multiplicities are the grammar of the good life. |
|
The Associations of Palermo |
|
|
Between the experience of being in a city and living well as part of a community lies the forms of support that allow people to find what they need, to grow their attachments and engagements, and to become participants and provisioners of care for others. We were fortunate enough to be offered a glimpse into the work of several civic associations where community-building efforts have been ongoing for decades. These organizations play transformational roles in reimagining the city as a place for many people to live good lives.
|
|
| booq, a social promotion organization, began its life as an activist group organizing for human rights. They now hold more institutional status, provisioning libraries for adults and children, community space, repair shops, shared tools, and neighborhood development workshops. In taking up the role of sustained engagement with public and private institutions, self-income, and an ongoing mission-driven focus on generating space for all community members, they are an example of the work of oikonomia within the context of the polis and its pedagogical needs. |
|
 |
Palma Nana, named after a plant endemic to the Sicilian Coast, is an environmental education cooperative now in its fifth decade of continuous operations. Offering summer camps, school programs, and community space. Through slow walking, the pursuit of beauty and relationships, and an ecological approach to living, they materialize belonging within a rich urban environment and community. Their educational methods are based on decades of research on learning by thinking, doing, and loving one another and one’s environment as the basis for social change. |
| At the Center Sviluppo Creativo Danilo Dolci we learned about the peace activist Danilo Dolci’s methods of non-violent and creative community development. Dolci, nominated nine times for the Nobel Peace Prize, devoted his life to fighting the mafia and poverty through hunger strikes, protest marches, civic actions, and the development of educational centers. Today, Dolci’s work continues through the training of facilitators who work to help communities develop dialogic skills in reciprocal communication to meet the needs of all. We see in this approach the seeds of broader pedagogical projects that could bring universities, cities, and civic associations into new kinds of relationships for inclusion and sustainable, mutual thriving. |
 |
|
The Oikos in The Polis
|
|
|
|
|
| OIKOS was founded in New York City at a university that began its existence with the mission to operate as a “private university in the public service.” It has now become emblematically the “Global Networked University.” As we do the work of understanding what it means to build relationships, organizations, and approaches to pedagogy and civic life, we are working with an eye towards consortia with other groups and networks who are thinking about the needs of people who are and will continue to move across the planet seeking new ways to live together. We are interested in models that take heterogeneity and diversity seriously, not as luxuries but as necessities. We are interested in all the forms of invention and innovation that come from people who would provide care and support to one another within urban ecologies and dense, populated settings.
Our sincere thanks to Arteficium organizers: Paolo Quattrone, Santi Furnari, Fabrizio Panozzo, and Angela Nativio who remind us that no island is an island unto itself.  |
|
