Mega events and urban spaces: Paris, Olympic City 2024. – Geographical reflection has now sedimented, through theoretical reflections and empirical analysis, the assumption that the organization of major events has disruptive effects on the balance, albeit always dynamic, of urban ecosystems. Infrastructure construction and preparatory governance processes are then accelerators of transformative dynamics that implicitly or explicitly impact the spaces and communities involved. The construction of the Olympic village in the St. Denis neighborhood for the 2024 Paris event explicitly seeks to intervene on the area’s marginal territorial milieu. Investment and infrastructure constitute the line of intervention on which, naturally, critical debate has been activated. This paper, based on a qualitative methodological approach, through Document analysis, and a number of field surveys aims to identify the main critical ribs specific to the case study.

Urban borders and margins as spaces of reappropriation of the city. The case of the Fontaínhas gardens in Porto. – Increasingly, urban governments, citizens and informal groups are pursuing alternative practices to feed cities. The unease provoked by postmodern urban life, which has adulterated the human/nature relationship and exacerbated the city/land divide, generate the construction of practices to contrast these processes. The borders and margins of the «Capitalocenic» city often become places of resistance where self-production initiatives can be practised through the creation of urban gardens. Of particular interest are informal experiments that emphasise the reappropriation of physical spaces for the marginalised and the community at large. This article analyses, from a critical perspective and highlighting strengths and weaknesses, the spontaneous construction experience of the La Bananeira urban garden, carried out by an informal group on the Fontaínhas escarpment in Porto, Portugal.

"Traces and interdisciplinary reflections. Writings in honor of Caterina Barilaro"

The Afghan Wars: Between Economic-Cultural effects and Similarities in the Eura-sian Geopolitical Scenario. – The peculiar geomorphological configuration, characterized by imposing mountain ranges and desert areas, makes Af-ghanistan a difficult-to-access territory. Autochthonous peoples (different ethnic groups united by the war against “the foreigner” that also promoted the Taliban affirmation) widely exploited such a scenario suitable for guerrillas based on sudden attacks, difficulty accessing heavy weapons, and re-sistance to air attacks. The ability to counter invasions has been confirmed in the pushback of great powers, like Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America, which previously financed the mujahideen against Russian occupation. This management problem translates into the unexpectedly long democratization campaign of Afghanistan led by the Americans, which ended on August 15, 2021. The Enduring Freedom program, which envisaged the Western agreement of seventy nations for the implementation of a democratically stable situation and lasting in Afghan territory, proved a failure in the coexistence of the Americans in the cities and the Taliban in the valleys and mountainous areas. The withdrawal of American troops generated a sudden change in the international geopolit-ical scenario and, consequently, the Middle East balance. Through a brief historical overview of the conflicts that gripped Afghanistan, this work aims to provide a picture of the geopolitical, economic and cultural effects that have influenced the precarious balance of the Middle Eastern area of the world system.

All true scientific progress needs controls. Verification and falsification are the guarantee of the reliability of information. For centuries, Europeans have been content to vague and unreliable descriptions of Far Asia. The classic example is of Marco Polo's Book of Wonders; but many descriptions of Inner China from the 16th century are similar: only the sea-coast were verified (since the medieval portolan charts and pilot books). The first author was really reliable for the inner land was Mar-tino Martini, in the mid-17th century; his detailed data and coordinates were immediately checked and confirmed by others (before D'Anville in 1737), such as Diestel, Grueber, and especially the Dutch patrician Johan Nieuhof.