A critical exploration of the transformation of urban life—from industrial migration to globalized sprawl—reveals how city growth, economic delocalization, and suburbanization have reshaped human experience. The traditional urban dweller becomes a “territoriante,” a transient figure more aligned with consumption and spectacle than civic engagement. Social ties dissolve into anonymity, and cognitive overload becomes a coping strategy in hyperdense, overstimulated environments. Public space, once a site of democratic life and spontaneous interaction, is reduced to themed zones governed by surveillance and commercial logic. Gated communities, edge cities, and fortified suburbs exemplify a shift towards privatized, exclusionary landscapes, replicating global models and erasing local particularities. The ideal of the “garden city” mutates into sanitized enclaves promising security and elitism at the cost of diversity and public life. This vision demands a renewed urban psychology that abandons outdated paradigms and incorporates postmodern constructionism and ecological frameworks. The contemporary city is portrayed as a fragmented, multicentered, and paradoxically planned system, where identities are hyperconnected yet territorially uprooted. Utopian ideals give way to dystopian imaginaries drawn from cyberpunk culture and media, where spatial experience is increasingly shaped by speed, technology, and remote control. Geography itself is destabilized, replaced by virtual presence and interface-mediated existence.
