Our magazine is getting ready to celebrate the extraordinary and coveted publication of its one thousandth issue. The event comes as a truly unique opportunity to reconsider the epic cavalcade achieved by this glorious publication. For close on a century now, it has been covering the history of human habitation and our next issue will be especially conceived to mark this landmark occasion. It will also spur us on to keep up the good work, in the certainty, moreover, that we are now at a very important stage in people’s lives, a point where things can once again be changed in a big way.

Indeed this is now possible. We have several times paused to consider a circumstance of our lives to which, unfortunately, little attention is paid: that every human being is granted only their own time to live, a time forced upon them, the only one that belongs to them and to which they also belong. This circumstance, superbly evoked and described in the thinking of Ortega y Gasset, in its evidence and its being definitive and unappealable, for the lives of all humankind, has in fact been neglected and forgotten by humanity itself. It has not been taken into proper consideration. This circumstance being an established, incontrovertible and unalterable fact, it may perhaps be right not to attach too much importance to it and therefore to take it for what it is. Nevertheless we think it would be a mistake not to treat it as a subject of reflection. In this way, we can draw on it for elements that may be of use to our actions and lives.

Likewise however, a reflection on the time, the time granted us to live, our time, compared to the whole long time of humanity, might help us to situate our actions within a perspective better attuned to our own lives, as adequately and appropriately as possible. If we think of our time as being precisely situated between a time past and a future time, and not as an autonomous entity in itself, we can for example begin to choose and select with a heightened awareness the courses of action to be followed today; setting store by what our past can best suggest as possible answers to benefit our present, but in such a way as not to hinder our future.

In our coverage of these topics here in this magazine, we have often complained of having to live in a period of time characterised by a veritable system of life, rooted and deeply consolidated now internationally: a system that prevents any real change. Only outwardly free and hospitable, it is in reality a closed and sectarian system. It seems even not to be hostile to change, whereas on the contrary it continues to churn out an old and worn-out consumer recipe: that of newness for newness’ sake.

To go back now to the disciplines that concern us, the ones that deal with habitation, we feel the need to act in order to get out of the contemporary deadlock. Since we do not wish to deceive ourselves, we know well that these actions can only come from those who stand as aloof as they possibly can from the system, from those least embroiled in it. And from this point of view the “young” are certainly the best suited to that purpose.

It is precisely the younger generations that can spearhead the demand for change. They and only they can bring about that upsurge needed to spark a renewal. Only their impact, their wishes and future hopes, can trigger processes capable of blazing a new trail. So there will be trouble if this does not come true. If this longing for change were left in the hands of the ruling systems and consolidated powers, of the situation as it is today, the result would be a catastrophe. Indeed we already have warning signs of what might happen.

But unfortunately they would be compelled to do so with “clipped wings” – as Vittorio Gregotti so aptly wrote some time ago on the subject; and indeed those wings are increasingly clipped, in what seems like a never-ending motion. Thus the young are prevented from being truly young. As a result, they are forced to fix their attention wholly and only on the “moment” of their being, falling easy victims to the miscellaneous consumer-technological ideologies that crowd our contemporaneity.

It is just that we cannot bear the idea of their being deprived of history and memory, in a word, of a past. We must admit that among the various effects of these first few years of this 21st-century, lived dangerously up in the stunning clouds of technology, perhaps the most disastrous has been that of burning up generations in a hurry, one after the other at a relentless pace. Luckily however, this phenomenon now seems to be giving way to a renewed and healthy pragmatism.

Of course, we do not know what this may lead to, though as a matter of fact we don’t really care. We are not prophets. What we are sure of, however, is that this contact is essential to our time, to us too as well as to them and that we must do our utmost to make that happen. The freshness of youth and the beauty of the masters can become a lively explosive mixture, the only one that can at this time save us from the terrible conformity that we have sunk into, the only one that can break the ineluctable civil regression to which our contemporary life seems doomed.

Our main job then is to promote, organise and encourage this contact both institutionally and privately; 1, 10, 100, 1,000 contacts, or maybe even conflicts – endless opportunities which we are sure could spark a new Renaissance. With the capacity to look and to see what is happening around us, to consciously reject what does not convince us and instead to go after what we would like to fulfil and now lack, to share common objectives for a better life.