The Italian Unesco Biosphere Reserves and proximity (eco)tourism: What are the criticalities and possibilities? – During the pandemic, outdoor recreational practices received particular attention and saw an increase in the number of users, especially in areas close to everyday life, as it was considered accessible, safe and “natural”. However, tourism negatively affects the climate and environment, highlighting the complex relationship between humans and nature in the Anthropocene. Reducing travel distances or using environmentally friendly transportation is not enough. Despite greater integration of nature and culture, the idea of unspoilt nature that must be preserved persists, encouraging the commodification of nature. UNESCO Biosphere Reserves seek to overcome this dichotomy by promoting conservation alongside sustainable development and involving local communities. By analyzing three Italian reserves, we assess the proximity tourism that occurs there, how these dichotomies are addressed, and whether they can mitigate the negative impacts of tourism. The research shows that success depends on the actors involved, community participation, and more explicit management of tourism by the MAB reserves.

“Epimedia. Information and communication in pandemic space” by Angelo Turco

The Covid-19 emergency and the repositioning of tourism in the internal areas: first reflections on Irpinia. – The Covid-19 emergency, with lockdown, travel restrictions, fear of contagion, need for distancing, have changed the times and ways of taking holidays. This work aims to be a moment of reflection on territorial and tourism policies implemented as a response to the pandemic in for internal area. Through a focus on Irpinia, it wants to understand how much these investment opportunities are capable of transforming in lasting impacts for local communities, with propulsive and sustainable effects over time, and if they are able to support the trend of proximity tourism and to encourage a social and economic recovery of notably weak areas.

The experienced space between mobility and Covid-19 restrictions. – If it is true that lived space represents our becoming and our being individual in our society, any variation on it, it implicates for the human race a physical, mental and relational disturbance. Human being lives in his territory and territory is modeled, for better or for worse, by human being. Global events, such as pandemics, force human being to confront himself with an enemy more and more underhand, able to undermine his certainties, gained until today.
Daily mobility has to be reconsidered in a new way; principles, for example, as The Schengen Agreement, is put to the test, causing a block in every region, and calling into doubt the worth of the same principle.
Which scenarios shall we face at the end of this pandemic? How is human being going to take on global future events? And what restrictions are adaptable to our freedom and democracy? Are we ready to face them?

 

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).

Covid-19 and tourism in Italy: from the devastating effects of the pandemic to the relaunch policy for a strategic sector. – The world is facing an unprecedented global health, social and economic emergency as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 has gravely wounded the world economy with serious consequences impacting all communities and individuals. Moving rapidly across borders, along the principal arteries of the global economy, the spread of the virus has benefited from the underlying interconnectedness – and frailties – of globalization, catapulting a global health crisis into a global economic shock. Travel and tourism is among the most affected sectors with a massive fall of international demand amid global travel restrictions including many borders fully closed, to contain the virus. Looking at this context, the contribution aims to evaluate the pandemic effects on this strategic sector. The research, in the future, opens a direct focus on the impact of the virus on some specific sectors of Italian tourism, to identify priority and useful guidelines for relaunching the sector.

Covid-19: which consequences on productive sectors? A focus on Italy. – The research illustrates the indirect effects of Covid-19 pandemic on the Italian production system. During the lockdown, many Italian institutions have carried out forecasts which have led to estimates of a negative impact of Covid-19 on annual GDP between 5 and 10%. The average impact on annual GDP, however, is the result of heterogeneous shocks affecting most sectors of economic activity. Laying on the evidence collected, policy recommendations are elaborated to manage the social and economic consequences of Covid-19 in Italy.

The Covid-19 pandemic within an inner area of Campania: peripherality, density and virus diffusion in the province of Avellino. – In Italy the Covid-19 emergency hit some of the territories crossed by the thickest commercial networks and the intense flows of human mobility
The paper aims to reason on the factors of territorial vulnerability that may have facilitated the spread of the virus, trying to formulate a first hypothesis about the low density settlement structure has protected the more peripheral communities of the inner areas. Starting from the epidemiological data in an inner province of Campania - that of Avellino - the analysis will try to give a first possible framework of the relationship between the degree of peripherality from the service poles, population density and virus diffusion.

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.

 

Pandemic crisis and economic crisis. The historiographical debate on the effects of the Black Death. – The great plague which hit Europe from 1348 has long been at the core of different historiographical interests. Alongside research focusing on the demographic consequences of the plague, other studies examined strictly epidemiologic issues, the socio-political effects of the crisis, or its „emotive‟ impact in the long term. Among the questions taken into consideration, the relationship between plague and economic trends has obviously played a crucial part. The essay aims to look at this debate, especially highlighting the significant interpretative changes which emerged in the past few decades. The gloomy picture of the post-plague economy, marked by a long decline, has now been replaced by a more optimistic view, which tends to underline the positive consequences brought about by the demographic drop in the medium-long term: in terms of wage growth, for instance, or increase in consumption, but also of the weakening of aristocratic control over peasants‟ work, processes of productive specialization, and the increase of commercial exchange.

Geopolitics of pandemic: soft and hard power as reading keys. - The Covid 19
pandemic is one of the hardest challenge of the last century. With its
m edical emergency, Covid 19 has created a lot of changes in the
international relationships and in the geopolitical equilibrium. In this
paper, we are attempting to show and analyze global governments’
behavior against the pandemic through the use of both h ard and soft
power. We’ll see, particularly, Chinese and American government’s use of
hard and soft power. Then we’ll examine how European Union deal with
this global emergency. Each nation has carried on different diplomatic strategies to face the pandemic and to promote is own international image. Hard and soft power, in this sense, will be useful also to implement the social and economic policies and to make them effective in the post pandemic phase.

The Italian agri-food industry between global and local: food habits before and during the pandemic virus Covid-19. – The pandemic generated by the virus known as Covid-19 is an expression of an unbalanced relationship between man and environment on which geography is called to investigate and also to redefine the spaces of intervention. It will be useful to propose the adoption of a trasncalar point of view that, if in one way widens the horizon to the entire globe in a contagion and in a need for collaboration that do not recognize nor can allow us to raise limits, on the other hand, it becomes a metaphor and a warning to create a new ecology and new social political relations to weave as much at a global level as at a local and personal level.
From the forced isolation – due to the rules of social distancing adopted in many European and non – European states – paradoxically emerged a glocal dialectic to interpret. As can be seen from observing what is happening in the Italian agri-food sector, on one hand we are forced to open our economic spaces recognizing the indispensable contribution of immigrant labour for the cultivation and harvest in the fields. On the other hand we are led to close the horizon of our primary needs without being able to address the question to our trusted provider and/or topographically closer even through the network that puts us in contact with the entire rural world. The authors, also thanks to the results of the direct survey, conducted on the purchases and the alimentary habits of the families during the pandemic, underline the opportunities of growth and valorisation of the Italian agricultural and food sector.

From open borders to their seal. Lombardy armored in the time of Covid-19. – The Covid-19 pandemic, among other things, has led to the ransom of borders. If, until now, the demolition of borders, walls, barbed wire has been exalted, the outbreak and the spread of the pandemic has produced a radical rethinking of the importance of sanitary cordons. In Lombardy, the most emblematic example is that of the area around Codogno. The area was armored, calling it Red, and the effect was that, in a few days, of bringing the infections to zero. In this paper, however, by borders, we do not mean only the territorial ones, but also the social distancing, at various levels, according to the places of contact between oneself and the other. We also include masks, “altruistic” or “selfish”, which become a relational boundary, as it is difficult to distinguish the physiognomy because they hide the pleasure of a mutual smile. The lockdown, however, was a necessary response, which, with the exception of other waves, serious or not, of Covid-19, is driving Lombardy and the whole of Italy towards a better living condition, compared to the one that occurred to Whuan. Although it involves a series of rules to fol-low, first of all the prohibition of “movida” and, in general, crowd.

Geographical scattering in the inner areas in the diffusion of covid-2019. –Regarding the high probability, highlighted by the epidemiologists regarding the repetition in the near future of other epidemic events, this contribution is aimed to highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary preventive strategy. This value was declined according to the specific geographical perspective, offering some ideas on phenomena typically subject to study of the discipline that could for the future constitute an important source of direction in the system of support for strategic decisions of a medical-political type used during pandemic phenomena.
Particularly, the phenomenon of the geographical scattering characterizing the internal areas was investigated, which unfortunately has been confirmed in the real spread of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Geographies of Covid-19. – A first analysis of the scenario occurred as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic puts in evidence the changes in the way people deal with the spatial-time dimension, in the human rela-tions and in the consequent socio-territorial configurations.
Since the first moments of the pandemic geography gave an important contribution in the study of the phenomenon and in the analysis of its territorial consequences, useful to elaborate solutions from the global to the local scales.
In this path, the reflections made in the field of geography, and in partic-ular in this issue, regard on one side the global modifications on interna-tional assets, travels and mobility, globalization and borders, on the other side the changes in the daily way of living, furnishing tools useful to con-trast the pandemic and models for a sustainable development.

Global Event and Local Responses: The Case of the Flu Pandemic 1918-1919. – The experience of the flu pandemic in the year 1918 is considered an important event for understanding the First World War. The flu showed the interconnection due to political-military, commercial, information and news that allowed the virus to be physically transported to every continent and from there to find the possibility of spreading in every nation. Beyond the medical- health characteristics and the consequences derived from its seriousness, this episode shows the ability reached since the early years of the twentieth century to think of itself as an interconnected network that was used by the disease to advance rapidly and pro-voke its harmful consequences.

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.

The impact of Covid-19 on air transport and tourism: possible evolving scenarios. – This study aims to provide a critical reflection on the current and potential impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on air transport and tourism, with particular attention to the effects on a global, European and Italian scale.