Risk and risk perception: the metropolitan imaginary of catastrophe at the time of the Covid-19

The Covid-19 health emergency takes place in the list of “new risks” that punctuate the scene of the “world risk society” (Beck, 2011). This state of affairs, characterized by the worsening of the feeling of uncertainty and anguish, finds its raison d'etre also in the difficulties to predict, the extent of the effects related to the risk of contagion. The difficulties of quickly giving certain answers to people about the causes underlying the spread of the virus, how it is transmitted from the body to the other, and find out the most appropriate communication and risk management strategies (Gruzd et al., 2021), contributes to the process of construction of the social perception of risk and to the representation of the coronavirus phenomenon. The analysis of the potential effects on the social construction perception of risk produced by the urban lighting particularly during the period of first lockdown was investigated through the sociological categories of the imaginary. The visibile and the invisible dimensions – that is to say the “diurnal” and the “nocturnal” one, according to Gilbert Durand (2013) – always mixed together in the cities (as well as bodies) when silence replaced the noise and the all the lights of the streets looked dimmer. The “crisis” (Maffesoli, 2009) opens up to the emergence of an “energy”, therefore of an emotional (and moral) force that is at the basis of the interrelated processes of “representation” and meaning making in the cultural construction of a potential collective trauma (Alexander et al., 2004).