Living with austerity, rebuilding care. Social infrastructures in crisis and practices of self-organization in Antico Corso, Catania. – This paper examines how the dismantling and partial rebuilding of care-related social infrastructures in the Antico Corso neighbourhood of Catania has reshaped everyday life and local power relations. The closure of three historic hospitals—an outcome of prolonged urban austerity—has profoundly altered the neighbourhood’s sense of place. Drawing on a qualitative approach that includes ethnography, interviews, document analysis, and participant observation, the paper shows how institutional narratives present these closures as inevitable and beneficial, legitimizing top-down “urban regeneration” while excluding residents from meaningful decision-making. Many inhabitants respond with a mix of anger and resignation, perceiving the loss of the hospitals as a wound to the neighbourhood’s identity. At the same time, feminist collectives, civic committees, and grassroots organizations are developing alternative narratives and practices of social and territorial care. These initiatives contribute to redefining the neighbourhood from below and contest the spatial consequences of austerity. The paper argues that the crisis of social reproduction manifests not only as an economic issue, but as a spatial and political struggle that generates both new forms of marginalization and innovative practices of resistance and belonging. The case of Catania highlights the specificities and contradictions of austerity urbanism in Southern Italy.

Olympic mega-events and digital urbanism: the case Tokyo 2020. – This article analyses the relation between Olympic mega-events and digital urbanism, by underlying the role of megaevent as accelerator of urban experimentation and the implications of the pervasive spread of smart technologies and digital platforms on the transformative processes of the spatial, social and political urban landscape. By drawing on the case study of Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the attention is focused on three main and intertwined transformative dimensions, which characterize the spatial techno-politics of the digital city: the production of urban space, in its immaterial and material dimensions; the mechanisms of urban governance, and of its governmental logics of control and regulation; and the question of urban citizenship and the transnational fight for the right to the city in anti-Olympics movements.