Risultati per " Urban Transformations"

Beyond the Anthropocene: Industry 5.0 for Territorial Co-Design. – The present proposal, which has its basis on the concept of territorial co-design in connection with the possibilities of the Industry 5.0, aims to understand how this revolution can help geography with new instruments in order to ac-tively take part in the debate about ecology; and re-think the ways we live the territory and in the territory. The context is that of the global challenges that grip us, as climate change and geopolitical transformations. The proposal examines some works of global leaders, such as AVEVA Industrial Software, and of some important authors, like Kate Raworth with her concept of Doughnut Economics. The focus will be on the re-organization of territory in a way that can be sustainable, resilient and human-centric – as the three principles of Industry 5.0 are framed as.

From Mega Events to city’s touristification: dilemmas of Genoa’s renewed cultural capital. – The Mega Events that Genoa (Liguria, Italy) hosted between 1990 and 2004 (Expo ’92, 2001 G8 summit, European Capital of Culture 2004) have shifted the urban change and economic transition of the city towards cultural tourism, inducing administrators in the past two decades to organise a series of periodic minor events in order to maintain this trend. In this article we analyse the statistical data that demonstrate these changes and present the results of a survey disseminated to 522 citizens and users of the Liguria Region with the aim of understanding the locals’ perception about the role of such events in catalysing urban transformation and about the risks or opportunities related to the touristification of Genoa. The results emphasise the enduring gap between the “long timescales” of urban transformations and their perception, identifying the main drivers of these transformations.

Informal Work: Proposing a Dialogue between Development Studies and Labour Geography. The Case of East and Southeast Asia. – The paper brings into dialogue selected streams of critical analysis on the ILO concept of informal labour – especially from the fields of political economy and development studies – with some major insights on labour and its transformations from labour geography. Focusing on the case of East and Southeast Asia, and resorting to the multiscalar notion of “labour regime”, the pa-per details crucial actors and devices that underlie specific ways of organ-izing work, its exploitation – and its informalization – in key export industries such as garment and electronics. More specifically, informalization processes are analyzed at the intersection between international capital mobility, the state and labor organizations, and in relation to the capacity of international capital to exploit pre-existing context-specific differentials, especially along the gender and rural-urban axes. Overall, the paper discloses key labour dynamics characterizing pivotal areas of the so-called “global factory”, while more generally highlighting the co-constitutive role that spatial, territorial and scalar configurations play in the processes of labour informalisation.

The Society of Anthropocene in the material and immaterial diffusion of violence. – The contribution aims to reflect on the social dimensions of violence linked to the elements of the physical transformations of the Anthropocene. The hypothesis is that in the material and immaterial diffusion of violence there is a growing interaction and hybridization between the two dimensions and this is largely due to the globalization and the technology with a new spatio-temporal, transcalar and autopoietic configuration. This is called the Social Anthropocene.
This configuration is moving Anthropocene society into a dimension in which the abstract subsystems of the anthroposphere (society, economy, culture, politics) are increasingly dependent on the technosphere, a phenomenon already considered by other disciplines in an evolutionary dimension and extended to other living species.
From a geographical perspective, this dependence generates new relationships between abstract subsystems that relate resources, men and machines in an interdependence that generates violence, from the material to the immaterial world and in the interconnections between countries at different levels of development. This perspective, which can be explained empirically using data through the metaphorical potential of the Anthropocene, by not denying it shifts the theme of violence from a territorial perspective, linked to the individual local culture (interpersonal, familiar) and social (of an urban district, of a city or region) to a global one. It also shifts attention from a political to a biopolitic perspective.

Considerations on the regional landscape plan of Sardinia: a contribution from internal areas. – The concept of landscape is at the core of many geographical studies and is rich in different meanings that over time have given rise to numerous interpretations. According to the European Landscape Convention adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in 2000, landscape is a combination of natural and cultural elements in continuous transformation. Transformations that, if not planned attentively, can give rise to processes of deterioration and loss of quality of landscape configurations. In a Europe where there is still a significant dualism between urbanized and rural areas and in an environmental, economic and social era marked by the objectives of sustainability dictated by the 2030 Agenda, it is therefore necessary to adopt and strengthen policies and strategies for a more cohesive development and planning of the territory. The contribution, after a brief review of the literature on European and national policies on the landscape, wants to focus on the ability of regional realities to activate reconstructive interventions and environmental improvements from the adoption of Landscape Plans. In particular, the attention wants to focus on the Sardinian regional context, the first reality in Italy to have adopted a Landscape Plan in 2006. A plan that, to date, has identified only in the coastal areas the areas to be protected and enhanced. However, in the light of the priorities for a sustainable future, the Plan needs to be reviewed and a new plan that can also include the internal areas that are still not sufficiently integrated in the development process of the island.


The Invisibles of the Cities. Urban Marginality beyond the Ghettos. – Urban marginality can assume many spatial distributions. Besides the common spatial concentration of marginality – such as ghettos, slums etc. – it is possible to identify many situations of widespread marginality. In these situations, people appear, and sometimes are considered, invisible for the society. By, living this widespread marginality, people reduce their possibilities to be included in social relathionships and network and, are rarely involved in any marginality reduction process. Laying on this framework the paper aims to suggest a conceptual approach to marginality, analyzing how the urban transformations impact on marginalization processes, and the relative spatial and social distribution of marginality.