In all this mixture of individual territories, it is exactly the birth of a space of urban society that is delayed. We can no longer talk of any reciprocal ?contamination? of the private and public space.  The latter (if it can be called like that, beyond a legal and administrative sense) is indeed used, ?consumed?, but does not seem to have the prerequisites so as to be able to constitute a support of identity. It no longer represents the space of absolute authority of the totalitarian regime that one had to avoid as much as possible. But its present image is one of a space that needs to be traversed in order to reach various destinations, but a hostile dangerous space, or, at best, unpleasant or indifferent.

Such an image of the urban space invites and determines a lack of responsibility of the dwellers towards this one. Such an example would be the piles of garbage that, in fact, stir general reprobation. The explosion of consume and the incapacity of the municipality (partly also because of the objective lack of logistic and financial means) to maintain the public space clean, are not the only ones responsible for this deplorable state. On the face of it, it looks as if the garbage is homogeneously distributed all over the town. It is not like that at all; garbage piles could often be found side by side with gardens, yards, entrances to commercial spaces, or any other type of clearly delimited, distinctly designed and impeccably clean territories. The will of appropriation stops at the limit of each private space.

In this context of withdrawal and isolation, the above mentioned filters are progressively reduced and transformed into true barriers. The impoverishment and even the elimination of intermediary spaces as such determines a loss of the transparency qualities, which seems to characterize the period of the past ten years.

The new houses, irrespective of the chosen architectural model, are regularly available only to the ones with relatively high incomes. The main type is the one of a massive construction, with few openings, and with intermediary spaces such as balconies and loggias, reduced as number or completely absent. Irrespective of the way access is permitted into the building, the fence is invariably very high, most of the times made of concrete or bricks and with a minimum of openings (the access to the garage or into the yard) covered by metallic panels. Hardly any of the elements of these fortresses suggests a minimum opening towards the public space; although, most of the times, these are isolated houses, the atmosphere created by the dimensions and the opacity of the closing elements, rather resembles the one of some unprepossessing enclosed areas.

The transformations undergone by the older buildings, whose dwellers belong to the entire social specter, go along the same line: the latticework and the low parapets that defined the symbolic closing of the yards are now covered by tin plates, are super-elevated or are replaced by masonry walls. Often, garages and warehouses located at the limit of the building lot contribute to the complete isolation of the building from the street.