The Eutopian City: The Challenge of Urban Conviviality in the Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti Encyclicals

Abstract

This article aims to show how the concept of the eutopian city can be used as a key for reading Pope Francis’s latest two encyclicals (Laudato Si’, from 2015 and Fratelli Tutti, from 2020). We highlight the ideal of conviviality in the notion of common home, political love, and social friendship, whose paradigm in contemporary urban life would be the experience of neighbourhood. This involves thinking of the city as a space of conviviality and the construction of a common project of society, overcoming the divisions of a closed world in favour of an open world. The papal texts therefore reveal formulation of a political proposal precisely at the time when politics was dying, fostered by new climate conditions and the renewed culture of walls.