Biofuels and bioplastics between opportunities and opportunisms in a regional experience. – Global and European strategies on renewable energies increasingly highlight the need for a paradigm shift in socio-spatial relations in agriculture. The territoriality of the renewable energy supply chains re-proposes the top-down characteristics of the fossil fuels era, deferring the support to coherent initiatives linking energy and territorial systems. The contribution explores European biomass strategies and their effects on a territorial level in Sardinia. The EU and Italian government strategies aiming at consolidating bioenergy and bioplastic production, both in terms of regulatory regulation and financial incentives for production, are reviewed. Starting from the agriculture and biomass energy production literature and based on a series of interviews carried out between 2018 and 2020 with local stakeholders, the effects of policies are investigated. The energy production process from biomass in Sardinia and the internal and external variables connected to it are examined.

Financial Systems between conflictuality and territorial coexistence. Islamic Finance and the United Kingdom case. – Recent years are characterized by the increasing spread of Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) in the Western countries. This could be explained, on the one hand, because the Islamic communities are even more numerous, becoming an important interlocutor and an opportunity for the western economies. On the other hand, Islamic finance Islamic finance has several ethical characteristics that could identify them as a more stable financial model.
The present contribution aims to address the particular issue of Islamic finance, looking at the global diffusion of the phenomenon, in order to understand its differences and conflicts with the traditional financial model.
To this end, it will be treated the case study of the United Kindom where the phenomenon seems to have had more success than in other countries.

 

The crisis of the city in the age of the privatization urbanism. – We are seeing an unprecedented crisis that is sweeping many Italian cities and will affect also the urbane welfare. Health care was the first victim of this vision. Cancellation of hospitals, health centers and clinics and then the closing of the courts, of the Post Office and of the decentralized State's structures. Today even the primary schools of smaller municipalities risk of disappearing . Some cities go out, entire populations living an unprecedented setback and they lose their social integration prospects.

So if we want to maintain an acceptable standard of living and socializing in our cities we have to identify the real causes that led to the financial meltdown of italian municipalities and find the solutions to restore a perspective to the system of local governments. Otherwise, we risk to close a millenary urban history.