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This article provides the reader with a theoretical framework and a method of representing cities called cartographies of infrastructural imaginations. The study employs mapping methods from the fields of architecture, urban geography and visual cultures. The research inquires about the role of cartography in the analysis of discourses that define policies of water supply, food distribution and land-use regulation, which are three environmental challenges in cities. How can we identify and situate the urban actors that attend to such challenges in cities from the Global South?
The research is empirically grounded in Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangalore, urban settlements with a history of colonial occupation in previous centuries. Their foreign interventions still shape urban imaginaries of these cities. The method of blending photographic analysis with maps aims to offer objective precision of geographical data and subjective street-level views of local stories. The intention is to understand where the infrastructural ideas come from, and how imaginaries flow to communicate visions about the development of the city. A central task here is to frame how power structures interact and represent their interests via utopian and dystopian narratives.
This study draws attention to the role of urban redevelopment practices in shaping indigenous social infrastructures and community life in the post-displacement and resettlement period. From decolonial and relational perspectives, I explore how relations with social infrastructures change because of urban redevelopment practices following displacement and resettlement in Hasankeyf caused by the Ilısu Dam. To understand the relations between Indigenous resettlers and social infrastructures, I focus on residents’ lived experiences, practices and sense of belonging by examining the affective implications of the changes in the social infrastructures and affordances resulting from urban redevelopment practices (before and after the flooding of Hasankeyf in 2020 and resettlement in 2021). A mix of qualitative methods was used by combining a decolonial method of cuerpo-territorio, interviews and observations. The intertwining of the colonial framework with the practices of urban redevelopment in Turkey is evident in the process of the resettlement of Hasankeyf. The downplay of the reconstruction and protection of indigenous social infrastructures during urban redevelopment after the Ilısu Dam has damaged the sense of belonging, community relations, affective experiences, indigenous cultural practices and social development of the resettlers. I extend the understanding of indigenous social infrastructures in the social infrastructure literature introduced by Klinenberg and by Latham and Layton. I outline five key aspects that highlight the need for and importance of indigenous social infrastructures in the context of urban redevelopment through resettlement.
In 2017, the Swedish parliament committed to making the country fossil-free by 2045, prompting an exploration of experiences and perceptions of transition in three cities hosting carbon-intensive industries – steel, cement and petrochemicals, which currently top the list of Sweden’s industrial emitters. From 2019 to 2024, a Swedish–UK research team employed conventional qualitative methods to gather insights from various stakeholders, including industry, municipal actors, and residents, supplemented by arts-based research methods for co-creating data on affective-emotional life in transition towns. This article argues that arts-based research serves as a valuable tool for accounting for and understanding affective-emotional life in frontline transition towns. The arts-based research (ABR) challenges prevailing technocratic and rational frameworks, aligning with ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s call to address the ‘ecological crisis of reason’ that serves to inhibit achieving sustainable futures. The primary value of this article lies in its contribution to the development and refinement of ABR within the context of just transition studies that I argue can help add citizen perspectives and consideration of affective-emotional life to the just transition discourse.
Drawing on a methodological approach that involved visual ethnography and combined content and narrative analysis, my research aims to analyse the role that emotions play in the territorial–ontological conflict between British Columbia provincial government, Coastal GasLink and the Wet’suwet’en. Using high-quality online audiovisual material produced by the Wet’suwet’en – allowing a critical perspective throughout the article on the politics of self-representation – I was able to get into the conflict with a phenomenological approach, employing my senses to analyse body movements, tone of voice and language. Theoretically, I articulate a framework made up of Ingold’s phenomenology, Blaser’s ontological conflicts and Escobar’s studies of culture. Then, I build on the spiderweb, a metaphor developed by Ingold, to expand the scope of González-Hidalgo’s emotional political ecologies. The results show that Coastal GasLink, taking culture ‘as a symbolic structure’, proposes as a central mitigation strategy, through their environmental impact assessment, what I call ‘an ontological interruption’ of the Yintakh. Besides, I demonstrate that the processes of political inter-subjectivation sought at the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre help understand the worry, frustration and stress of the Wet’suwet’en facing the world-creating practices of Coastal GasLink. On the other hand, the Healing Centre also reveals how the affections for the other-than-human and their spiderweb (Yintakh or relational world) inform Wet’suwet’en resistance. Lastly, I unveil how Coastal GasLink and the Ministry of Aboriginal Rights, through practices of inclusion and gender equality, seek to blur radical cultural differences, delegitimise the Wet’suwet’en precolonial governance system, and create affections for the Western-modern world.
The COVID-19 pandemic reveals economic, social and cultural fragilities even in those countries that were considered structurally solid. Among the most damaged sectors, the higher education and training sector stands out with serious consequences for its stakeholders. This chapter deals with the COVID-19 emergency in Italian higher education. The emergency pointed out some vulnerabilities of Italian universities but also enlightened their resilience. In a short time, most of them were able to ensure teaching activities continuity by moving online. Teaching activities are among the main aims of higher education, but they are often taken for granted and undervalued, with research activities receiving more attention. The pandemic brought teaching activities back to the centre of attention. Therefore, it became fundamental to redesign teaching activities using distance learning methods even if almost all stakeholders (including university lecturers) were unprepared. In addition to the difficulties in accepting and using information technologies, lecturers challenged themselves with planning and designing new forms of teaching to protect students’ attendance and ensure adequate learning. The chapter reflects on the experience of the University of Milan-Bicocca. It discusses the outcomes of survey research administered to university staff and proposes new teaching strategies moving beyond the emergency.
The earthquake that occurred on 23 November 1980 has been one of the largest disastrous seismic events in Italy. It affected a large area in Southern Italy, destroyed dozens of towns and caused thousands of deaths. After four decades, the traces of destruction, temporary solutions and reconstruction are still evident in the landscape. Above all, we can find personal experiences and interpretations of these long-term processes in the memory of affected population. Through the analysis of some testimonies collected in the affected areas, this chapter illustrates how the inhabitants perceive the changes that occurred and transmitted their experiences within the community and through the generations. These changes concern the sudden disappearance of the lived space, the loss of human life, the mourning, the choices for reconstruction and the economic changes, as well as the trauma and a shared social experience that has influenced people’s lives and expectations for years. These elements are embodied in the social fabric and, in their testimonies, local communities give a new meaning to their history. The chapter demonstrates that a long adaptation process begins after each disaster. A perspective on memory helps us to investigate in depth the complex relationships between human beings and their environment.
Vesuvius is one of the most worrying volcanoes in the world, because it is located in a vast urbanized area with millions of inhabitants. After its last eruption in 1944, volcanologists believe that Vesuvius is in a dormant phase of unknown duration. To prepare for future eruptions, the Italian government issued a ‘National Emergency Plan’ in 1995, which divided the exposed area into several danger zones (red, yellow, and blue). The red zone now includes the 24 municipalities closest to the volcano and potentially affected by volcanic material. The yellow zone includes 63 municipalities across three provinces (Naples, Salerno and Avellino) and over 1 million people. While the political agenda focuses on the red zone, it dedicates less attention to the yellow zone, which is considered, wrongly, less dangerous. This chapter focuses on the Agro Nocerino-Sarnese, an area in the yellow zone comprising 16 municipalities and around 300,000 inhabitants. Historically agricultural, this area has radically changed since the Second World War, in a combination of limited restrictions on urban development and scarce prevention and preparedness measures. Therefore, the yellow zone continues to grow by pursuing chaotic patterns of urban expansion, which prevent proper risk planning.
This book aimed at exploring to what extent disaster (and disaster recovery) change the affected places. The book argues that after a disaster the affected places change how people make sense and perceive their place, how politics provides for the needs of the people, how different knowledges interact in managing affected places, as well as how organizations perform their everyday activities. The book provided a journey about these changes occurring in different post-disaster contexts in Italy. Its chapters focused on cases from the North to South of the country, from islands to mainland, and from rural to urban areas, covering a range of post-disaster environments after hazards occurred very recently (from earthquakes in 2016–2017 to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020) or decades ago (the Vesuvius eruption in 1944 or the Irpinia earthquake in 1980). In Part I, contributors shared their views on how case studies can illustrate main changes into society. In this regard, some contributors focused on the different perceptions about risk. As internationally demonstrated, risk and disaster perceptions must be taken into account to communicate and elaborate public actions and interventions (Alcántara-Ayala and Moreno, 2016). However, these perceptions vary greatly across people and communities. In Chapter 1, Dall’Ò explored this variety, demonstrating the existence of different perceptions across local communities, experts and institutions about landslide risk in a mountain area of Northwest Italy. In this area, the struggle is how to build social and political consensus around landslide risk reduction measures. To do this, exploring the way risk is negotiated, understood, and both accepted and contested locally is important to undertake fruitful ways to implement disaster risk reduction.
This chapter deals with the pandemic management in Italy. It portrays the entanglement of different administrative levels and unveils both the nature of the complex game between these levels and its resulting blurred configurations. Local set-ups are the outcome of adaptive processes that combine both technical and political aspects. Indeed, for much of the Italian political world, Covid-19 has become both a stage and an opportunity to climb the ladder of power and blow political competitors. A similar situation results in a complex framework, which does not bode well for effectiveness. Things get even more complicated when similar configurations develop within an ideological scenario that is characterized by institutional distrust and diffusion of irrational beliefs. In such a situation, social cohesion decreases, and the population follows different emotive and cognitive tactics to deal with uncertainty and fear. One of these tactics consists in the diffusion of forms of political reliance that turn into charismatic forms of political worship, a necessary condition for the consolidation of populist authoritarianism. I analyse the surrealistic case of the city of Messina (Sicily) and its Mayor, Cateno De Luca, as a particular case and ‘stage’ to expose the biases of the Italian way to the pandemics.
From earthquakes to oil spills, Italy is recurrently affected by different kinds of disasters. This book brings a critical perspective to post-disaster reconstruction and recovery, which can impact in both the short- and long- term upon society, politics and organisations.
It is often assumed that disaster-hit areas return to normality or even ‘build back better’ thanks to the interventions of experts. Giuseppe Forino considers the complexities of disaster recovery and the sometimes radical changes in individual and collective behaviours that persist following such events. Bringing together the impacts of natural hazards (including climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic), this edited book will stimulate debate on policy and practice in disaster recovery.
