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.

Cartographies of the Repressed: The Crisis of Social Reproduction in the Processes of Urban Extractivism. – According to Jameson, erasure is a key mechanism by which dominant ideology shapes collective consciousness in capitalism, sidelining social contradictions via symbolically charged narratives (Jameson 1981). Based on a cartographic workshop with Rione Sanità Educational Network in Naples, Italy, this article deconstructs the hegemonic urban regeneration narrative by uncovering the hidden wounds of the district, which have been removed from the official discourse on urban regeneration. In particular, the empirical findings of the study illuminate three dimensions of the repressed: the labour-intensive burden of educational work upon which the weight of the crisis of social reproduction falls; the thinning of public spaces for children and adolescents; the loss of essential social infrastructures for the district and its habitability.

Listening to the nights of Fez a fragmentary narrative. – In how many ways can one listen to a city – or rather the city – that excludes the noise of traffic while preserving the ancestral channelling and sonic configurations of its alleys and of materials belonging to a time discreet yet not immobile? The soundscape of the medina of Fez emerges not only as a visual space, but as a stratified acoustic landscape, oscillating between public, discreet, and sheltered spaces on the one hand, and private, reverberant, and communal ones on the other. The calls to prayer from the minarets, the flight of storks, and both human and non-human voices contribute to the construction of a sonic geography that defines urban spatiality. Architecture itself functions as an acoustic device that amplifies, attenuates, or trans-forms sounds, making Fez one of the most significant “cities of sound” in the world. Nighttime, in particular, discloses the sonic intimacy of the me-dina, transforming it into a natural conservatory of phonetic effects—an intangible heritage belonging not only to history, but also to the daily practices and sensory perceptions of its inhabitants

The policy of museum free admission and the enhancement of cultural sites as a potential tool for the transition of territorial gathering spaces. – The choice to adopt museum policies that provide free admission to museums could impact the increase in visitors. It could generate social repercussions on the territory and act as a tool for transforming meeting spaces, with particular attention to some European realities. The study aims to analyze the correlation between free admission, frequency of visits to museums and propensity to return. The literature outlines an overview of the current situation of the economic, social and territorial impact of the museum sector and the use of the museum as a possible new aggregation space for the younger population. The methodology used is a qualitative em-pirical approach through interviews aimed at a sample of young people, aged between 18 and 26, identified among student groups. The sample survey will make it possible to establish, specifically, how much the income of the subjects interviewed and the difference in admission policies between the various European museums and territories considered can affect the degree of use of the museum facilities.

The river in the city: requalification and shared management of the water resource. – The watercourse of the Basento river, in the segment that runs through the regional capital of Basilicata, Potenza, has undertaken enhancement and redevelopment initiatives, in order to allow its reintegration into the urban fabric. The pourpose of this contribution is to outline the process that is leading to the requalification of the river area – in the context of the Basento River Park – as well as the ex Cip-Zoo, a former industrial area. The aim is to return them to the community, which is attempting to participate in decision-making processes through voluntary and spontane-ous actions. A qualitative analysis, based on questionnaires addressed to citizens, reveals that the community is searching for a space of agency, hence the demand of governance tools that can make these participatory processes more structured and effective.

Relational goods, imbalances, and the society-environment relationship. – The interactions between the economy, the environment, and territorial systems form a complex network that influences the structure and development of regions. The reflection is carried out both in relation to imbalances and in the reinterpretation of ecological and socio-spatial relations, collaborative processes, and the organisation and reorganisation of space as relational goods. The issue of territorial imbalances is linked to the question of conflicts within political ecology. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to present a theoretical reflection that aims to deepen the relationship between the economy, the environment, and territorial systems, focusing specifically on relational goods in the context of two spatiotemporal dimensions and referring to a territorial system as an alternative approach. The complexity of the territorial system, therefore, suggests taking into account the communicative and relational interdependencies between local actors, that influence economic growth and sustainable development. Finally, the responsible use of territorial resources requires public policies that reduce spatial inequalities, promote the active participation of territorial actors and the sustainable management of resources as components of local development.

The Gaza War: how the language of destruction on Israel and the Palestinians overlooks the greater tragedy of the Nation-state. – In the global battle over public opinion regarding the 2023-24 Gaza War, and more specifically within U.S. university campuses, the historical complexities of the geopolitical situation have been reduced to slogans asserting the absolute “right” of one side or the other not only to disregard but also to potentially eliminate the other. Consequently, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is often interpreted as advocating the removal or destruction of the approximately seven million Jews currently residing in the region, just as the Islamist group Hamas is equated with all Palestinians, rendering them collectively deserving of elimination-a nihilistic claim to destruction mirrored by the opposing side.
The historical reality, however, is far more complex. The creation of the State of Israel was intended to serve as a refuge from persecution for a widely dispersed group, offering Jews protection from the hostility and consequences of historical anti-Semitism. In doing so, however, any possibility of a collective Palestinian political future was necessarily compromised for the population that had historically predominated in the area. The competing claims to the same territory that this process entailed cannot simply be resolved through the adoption of “better language.”
The war over language obscures the fundamental issue at stake: both Israelis and Palestinians are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation-state, imported from nineteenth-century Europe. This underscores the broader tragedy of the nation-state that the Gaza War exemplifies. A shared political space remains inconceivable as long as this logic prevails.

V. Zelensky, J. Biden and the geography of body politics. – How does the body enter the media fabrication of the event? Does body politics have to do with the emotional characteristics of place? How can transcalarity, as the geographical foundation of geopolitics, be conceived not only in quantitative and dimensional terms, but also in qualitative and symbolic terms? To answer these kinds of questions, the essay analyzes the public profile of the corporality of Presidents V. Zelensky and J. Biden, on background of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis intertwined with the upcoming US presidential elections.

Animal cities. Mediated experiences and collective narratives for unnatural geography of the wild. – The clear separation – conceptual, ethical, spatial – between man and wildlife (Whatmore, 2002) remains to this day one of the most fascinating topics of reflection around our relationship with the environment. The cultural history of the wild, especially in its North American roots, hinges on the preservation of territories marked by the absence of appreciable anthropic traces, an exotic, ahistorical nature, in open contrast to urban and peri-urban areas, understood in an Enlightenment sense as spaces of civilization, themselves purged of the presence of the non-human. A binary biogeography that unequivocally identifies the right space for the human, placed at the centre, and the non-human, at the margin. Yet, this stark contrast has been brought to the centre of both scientific debate and public interest, especially during the historic 2020 lockdown, when images and multimedia content have extensively documented the fragility of this strict division of space. Starting from a reconstruction of contemporary mass media discourse, the contribution, therefore, aims to document how the emergence and circulation of grand narratives such as that of ‘nature spaces’ or the ‘awakening of nature’ can reveal epistemological dynamics common to different socio-economic contexts, but also substantially different responses to the various phenomenologies of the wild. The very notion of the margin as a dividing border between man and nature is discussed in relation to the descriptions and representations mobilized by newspapers and social media, to explore the possibilities and potentialities of a reunion between human and non-human, even in non-domesticated forms, in anthropized environments such as those of cities.

Itineraries in the Rome of immaterial art: between sidewalk, traffic lights and interstitial spaces. – The interest of geography for the urban art (street or public art) has increased in recent years. Not all the arts that take shape in the city leave a tangible mark in the urban space that can produce new rela-tionships and territoriality (Brighenti e Reghellin, 2007). There are also extemporaneous performances – which can be admired only when they are realized – and immaterial performances – which do not mark the ter-ritory with the localization of a semi-permanent product. Precisely because these forms of art are immaterial and not constantly visible, they are fluid and “elusive” even in the eyes of those who wish to investigate them. Therefore: marginal is considered the artist who practices them (Caccamo, 2005); marginal are defined some urban spaces frequented by artists and geographies that investigate these forms of art. In this contribution some itineraries will be presented, built in three years of field research in Rome, that connect the urban spaces of immaterial art.

Edgar Degas: from public space to landscape. For a configurative geography of the Belle époque. – Edgar Degas geographer. The artist “does” geography, that is, he gives territorial meanings to the spaces that he crosses and that he represents. The impressionist painter participates in artialisation, which is an essential cultural ingredient in the construction of emotional territoriality. And he also contributed to the strengthening of the spirit of the Belle époque, thanks to the landscaping that the society of the time equipped itself with. Once again proposing geography as the outcome and condition of the territorialization process, in its triple articulation: constitutive, configurative and ontological.

Participatory public art and creative workshop: murals in Bergamo’s suburbs. – The paper examines some urban regeneration and social inclusion projects implemented through collective artworks in Bergamo’s suburbs. Here, for about a decade, murals and graphic design worshops have been adopted as agents of change and active citizen participation. In particular, Tracce Urbane and Pigmenti were conceived as opportunities to modify the urban space by producing murals based on issues such as inequality, gender equality, memory and marginalization. On the one hand, these initiatives involved international artists, in order to give aesthetic qualities to the works and make them colorful re-aesthetization operations (Trione, 2022); on the other hand, street art as a «geographic agent» (Dumont, 2019), has allowed the involvement of vulnerable groups of citizens such as immi-grants and disabled, in order to regenerate and co-construct their everyday landscape. The objective is to provide, with the help of documentation and semi-structured interviews, a critical analysis of the various approaches advocated by local stakeholders. This allows to define the dynamics of the participatory processes implemented and the effectiveness of community empowerment agency; finally, it allows to understand whether these experiences are able to generate conscious communities (Bazzini, Puttilli, 2008), bearers of a common narrative with a peripheral point of view.

Landscape education as a practice of geographical mediation in the processes of resignification of places and reduction of conflicts in San Lorenzo district in Rome. – San Lorenzo district has a marked historical-identity component which, however, has not managed to safeguard the neighbourhood from phenomena of deterritorialization and gentrification. The main cause of the recent condition of degradation and conflict has to be found in the urban layout which has triggered a series of interferences in the identity of the place, for example the external pressures exerted by the university. In this case, therefore, the “configurative profile” (Turco, 2010), made up of relationships, emotions and feelings, has been impoverished and has been transformed.
In this context are inserted the landscape education practices (Turco, 2020) promoted by geographers of Sapienza University of Rome, which propose themselves as cultural mediators in the process of re-signification of places and spaces. The presence in the field and the response to the cultural requests from the immediate surroundings of the University have been translated into events open to the public such as the International Night of Geography or the Roman Summer in San Lorenzo which combine the presence of institutions with activities of Public geography. The territory as a common good is such only if the community is the architect of its definition and recognizes the anthropological value of the space. In this direction, landscape education, strongly characterized on an emotional and cognitive level, contributes to implementing those reterritorialization processes which are the privileged tool of geography for the resolution of the impoverishment phenomena caused by situations of conflict and violence.

Making a roundabout happen. Rondabout, unlilly location an autonomous politi-sation. – The article looks back at the daily experience of some sixty activists on a roundabout in the Isère region that was occupied continuously from November 2018 to March 2020. The ethnographic point of view assumes the double empirical posture of engagement in the yellow vest movement and a participatory observation methodology with about sixty interviews. On the roundabout, the yellow jackets show a constancy in participation, debates, popular education workshops, own actions or convergences with other organizations. The interaction between the development of the «no place» of the roundabouts and the construction of a new public space for living and deliberation is the source of a new creativity and political maturation opening up an instituting process of individual and collective autonomy in Cornelius Castoriadis’ sense.

Safe and non-safe space: an investigation on new dwelling strategies in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. – The experience of Covid-19 gave us the need to rethink organisational methods of contemporary society, particularly public and domestic spaces. Our research used the pandemic struggle to examine current ways of looking at the safe and unsafe, entailing new practises of social action.
This research was structured in two different stages. First we investigated a series of behaviours and perceptions within public and domestic spaces. Second we examined the strategies through which the subjects reorient the spaces and define new habitus and practices of dwelling. In both cases we focused on hygiene procedures and alternative measures undertaken to diminish the risk of contagion.
The case studies are grouped by three different ranges of contagion in northern, central and southern Italy. They are discussed with reference to theoretical and methodological debates within social geography and cultural anthropology.

In this paper we suggest that, to approach the actual urban configurations, we are in need of new geographies. To critically understand the production of socio natural space we propose two methods: Planetary Urbanization and World Ecology. Consistent with the ongoing debate in Urban Political Ecology, we approach the Covid-19 pandemic as a result of the ecological crisis which is, as we show, an urban crisis. In order to immagine new methods of living with and
within nature, we suggest to go beyond the normative dichotomies developed by the Capitalistic culture. Considering this problem, we approac h to the urbanization as a multiscalar and uneven process, with a specific attention on public spaces (common), mobility (daily or wide ranging) and the relationship between infrastructures and nature (the Mapuche case).

Geographies of the Pandemic and Capitalism of Surveillance: Italian Reflections. – The current pandemic is therefore a geographic matter that must be addressed according to diverse scales, also including the bodies of single individuals as a primary and smallest dimension. Moreover, since the virus especially affects fragile people and communities, it is sensible to study these phenomena with an intersectional approach. Since national governments have made a massive use of digital instruments to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, the reflections of the present analysis will also be focused on digital issues, meant either as digital illiteracy and lack of access to digital technologies.
The aim of this study is thus to investigate the extent to which the digital weaknesses are affecting private and public spaces. The analysis provides a reflection on the new geographies that are emerging in Italy since February 2020.
More in detail, the reflection will focus on surveillance technologies devised to prevent the spread of the virus. In order to help limit people’s movements outside their private homes, national governments are often relying on digital technologies; these also include digital tracing systems useful to tackle infected individuals which are of great interest due to the many geographic implications.
Italy’s controversial contact tracing application, Immuni, has raised questions on the advance of surveillance capitalism, an issue that will be dealt with in the present analysis after an introduction on the geographic implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

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.

Cultural heritage and urban regeneration. Roma Capitale suburbs Announcement for the launch of a culture driven development. – The management and the rethinking of urban spaces, old and new, central and peripheral, in use or in assignment, is an essential and unavoidable challenge for the competitiveness of any urban systems. This implies a profound change of policy and relations between the actors and the stakeholders that act in it. In this challenge, the culture is a new, and so far underestimated, competitive advantage, able to act as a catalyst to encourage and stimulate creative and innovative processes of territorial development, starting from available local resources. In fact, in the current globalizing scenario, each territory must continually generate local revitalization processes, in order to remain economically competitive and culturally attractive. In this context, urban areas characterized by inadequate spaces and public services, in which there are abandoned structures with particular emphasis on those connoted by landscape features and historical architecture of a certain level, may represent flywheels and natural incubators with a cultural background from which starting to redefine the overall structure of any local systems. The recovery projects proposed for three areas of the northwest area of the city of Rome, falling in the suburbs Announcement recently presented by the municipality, fit in attempts to develop urban resilience proposals according to an approach of culture driven development.

Social organization in space: a case of scientific neighbourliness. – Sociology, as a general science of social relations and interactions, shares with geography a call to work as an accepted consolidation pivot for contributions coming from different fields.

After showing how space as a topic is seen from the micro- and macro-sociological perspectives, the paper is mostly devoted to the Author’s studies on regional small industry development in so-called “third Italy”.

The research methodology includes references to different disciplinary fields, the unifying perspective being the combination of four regulation mechanisms for local economy: market, organization, reciprocity, political exchange.

The same methodology is then applied to Torino, an industrial city undergoing deep transformation. This kind of analysis has proved itself useful when private and public actors were engaged in strategic planning for the city.