Youth social infrastructures: dynamics and critical issues in two marginalised neighbourhoods of Palermo. – This article examines Youth Social Infrastructures (YSIs) in two marginalised neighbourhoods of Palermo – San Filippo Neri (ZEN) and Uditore-Passo di Rigano – exploring how places and organisations enable or constrain young people’s participation and sociality in contexts marked by public disinvestment and territorial stigmatisation. Drawing on ethnographic research, the study investigates formal spaces managed by third sector organisations and informal spaces of spontaneous aggregation. The analysis identifies key capacities of YSIs – including continuity, safe spaces, networking, and advocacy – alongside critical limitations: funding precarity, numerical inadequacy, difficulties in institutional co-design, limited youth self-determination, and deficit-based narratives that risk reinforcing stigmatisation. By examining YSIs in context and in contest, the article highlights the tension between grassroots vitality and structural fragility in southern European marginalised contexts.

The Creative Destruction of the Urban Social Infrastructures in the Antico Corso neighborhood, Catania. – This work retraces the transformation of the Antico Corso neighbourhood in Catania. Here, the ongoing ambitious project to convert a dismantled hospital into a multifunctional site including museum services and students’ housing is critically reinterpreted in light of processes layered over time in the district, dating back to the late 1970s conversion of a former Baroque convent into a university campus and to the gradual studentification that unfolded over three decades, recently intersecting with the growth of tourist accommodation.
The dismantling and reorganization of public services, integrated with or replaced by new, elitist or privatized functions such as university education, cultural consumption, and tourism practices, make it even more crucial to reflect through a historical lens on the district habitability and on the role of social reproduction for the local community.

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.

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Remote, inner, left behind? The actors, social infrastructures and multivelevel governance of remote habitability. – This paper focuses on the assemblage of material and immaterial infrastructures, actors and multilevel policies that enhance (or impair) what we define as “remote habitability” in left-behind, remote areas. Applying the ethnographic sensitivity urged by Tomaney et al. (2024) for understanding in-depth the “making, unmaking and remaking” of contested social infrastructures in left-behind places, we present theoretical reflections and empirical evidence that draw upon a multisite fieldwork in the municipalities that compose the “Gran Sasso-Valle Subequana” subgroup within the Italian “National Strategy for Inner Areas” national policy framework (SNAI). The archival research, semi-structured inter-views and empirical observations that engaged institutional and non-institutional actors let emerge patterns of action, discourse and perception of social infrastructures and resources that are necessary for grappling with the identification and conceptualization of “remote habitability”.

Ruolo della geografia nella ricerca sull’inquinamento da plastica e implicazioni sociali. – Il presente documento si propone di rivelare come la geografia interagisca con la ricerca sull’inquinamento da plastica e con le attuali sfide sociali, mentre questo flusso emergente di rifiuti pone rischi a una gamma diversificata di ecosistemi, regioni geografiche che coinvolgono livelli multiscala. Le relazioni specifiche tra i principali rami geografici (fisico, umano, ambientale) sono ulteriormente studiate. Pertanto, il presente documento evidenzia come i temi geografici possano essere rappresentati nella ricerca sull’inquinamento da plastica in relazione alle caratteristiche naturali di una particolare area (idrologia, geomorfologia, rischi naturali). La dimensione della geografia umana gioca un ruolo chiave nella generazione, composizione e distribuzione dei flussi di rifiuti plastici da parte di varie fonti di generazione (residenti, imprese, turisti), mentre il ruolo delle disuguaglianze geografiche, delle comunità marginalizzate o remote deve essere integrato nelle future ricerche sulla plastica. Le disparità nel monitoraggio ambientale e nelle infrastrutture di gestione dei rifiuti influenzano i livelli di inquinamento da plastica di origine nazionale, mentre il commercio dei rifiuti di plastica richiede una migliore cooperazione internazionale. Pertanto, diverse geografie e geografi di tutto il mondo devono essere ulteriormente coinvolti nella ricerca sull’inquinamento da plastica per fornire un quadro olistico della ricerca su questa minaccia ambientale e sociale globale.