Mercification

Let us not forget that, from another point of view, the body, through the economics of self-care (from diets to body building, from ayurvedic care to extreme sports) acquires grandeur, social representativeness, and excellence like animated self-advertising ware in the expanding universe of mercification.

The "generic city" is the city of shopping and leisure which has increasingly claimed in modern cities to simulate reality. And indeed this phenomenon of intense mercification of society has dissolved the relationship between urbs, the city meant as a physical place, and civitas, the city as the society inhabiting it.

This character relies also on its architecture, but specifically on "its regional mercification", represented by disco-pubs, piadina booths and historic restaurants serving good fish.

The flâneur is a kind of rebel contrasting mercification, yet he is also consumer and producer himself.

When the youth of Cairo and Madrid occupied the main squares of Tahrir and Puerta del Sol in 2011, they meant to take possession of the urban fabric which had lost the meaning of being a natural arena for social action, either because of obsessive security policies (Cairo) or because of mercification into open air malls (Madrid).