Rethinking the urban role of nature in climate change. The project for an urban green wall. – The paper discusses the Green Urban Oases project that aims to reconverse more than 500,000ha of land into new urban forests and restor about 300,000ha of forests in the Sahel and Central Asia. The project is part of a broader reflection that sees cities at the centre of the debate on climate change and aims to rethink the relationship between society and nature. Since, on the one hand, nature is increasingly becoming a protagonist in the process of urban adaptation, on the other hand it seems continuing to be conceptualised only in terms of human needs.
The aim of this contribution, part of a broader work, is to reflect on the role that nature-based solutions, implemented in particular through the above-mentioned project, have in cities and if they represent ways for the ‘nature’ to go beyond the marginal, passive and anthropocentric interpre-tation it has had until now in climate change depate.

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.

Migrants, abandonment and reuse of historical centers. The case of Riace in Calabria. – Italy, a migratory crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, has always been affected by migratory movements that have affected its regions in different ways. In recent decades, they have assumed a synergistic demo-graphic dimension between population and depopulation, which modifies the structure and composition of the population, mitigating the unstop-pable demographic decline along with the depopulation of historic cen-ters. This is possible through urban redevelopment and socio-economic revitalization paths linked to the reception of migrants. The contribution analyzes possible causes and effects of migratory processes on the Cala-brian population, using the Riace case study as a model in which the “wel-come path” has had positive results and revitalized the historical center with the return of residents and the construction of a society with high values of cultural pluralism.

Some “precedents” of Covid-19 amidst geography, history, diffusion, and contain-ment. – The epidemics which throughout history have caused the deaths of thousands of people always find a common denominator in the travelling and moving about of people and goods. The contrasting actions re-call consolidated procedures, the memory of which has since been lost. Covid-19 has shed light on these aspects, related here to two historical cases: the plague of 1348 that from Asia reached Italy and Europe, and the one that spread to Alghero in 1582, relevant for the way in which the containment measures adopted – a sort of compulsory quarantine, similar to our red zones and lockdowns but applied with greater severity – succeeded in preventing the spread of the contagion beyond the city walls. By re-interpreting the data in geographical terms, this work aims to contribute to the analysis of the plagues from a geo-historic perspective, with the intention of verifying whether the spread, development and ef-fects of these phenomena have common trends, while taking into ac-count the different socio-economic and territorial aspects that characterize the various contexts.

Covid-19, from Venice to Wuhan: a historical recognition and potential mutations of globalization. – The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic follow an east-west direction (from Asia via Europe to the Americas) which matches the flow of Modernity. This work aims to assess how these events are resulting in a comeback of what we might envisage as modern measurable space in Geography, through a historical comparison with containment measures put in place in the 18th century by Venice, during the plague. Indeed, Venice may be considered an archetype of global powers dealing with risk management issues and struggling to harmonize public health policies with the „needs‟ of trade. After offering an overview of the most common containment measures put in place by the countries affected by Covid-19, we will see how some of the measures implemented by the Venetians are showing their effectiveness today, and we will assess the extent to which the space recovered in this process is likely to transform the idea of globalization as it was known up until very recently.

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.

Ennio Flaiano, The discontented traveler. – Ennio Flaiano appears to have had an adverse relationship with travel. In much of his work he was often skeptical and not interested in the idea of travel, but, in contrast he was a tireless traveler who has visited Europe, America and Asia and, towards the end of his life, he wrote and starred in a documentary search for the secrets of Canada. Rediscovering this person is a way to learn more about one of the most subtle and forgotten intellectuals that Italy has produced.