Research database

This research aims at exploring Urban Fragments (UF) in five Italian cities – Bologna, Cagliari, Milano, Napoli, Palermo. Starting from the PNRR framework – where Italian urban issues are mainly considered in terms of urban renewal following a mainstream approach based on some keywords (such as smartness, resilience, sustainability, and creativity), our purpose is to define a scattered understanding of those cities, overcoming the idea (and the desire) of the urban as an “integral whole”. Today urban issues, as climate change and socio-economic inequalities, ask for a methodological innovation as well a new stance in order to shed light upon the fragmented and conflictual nature of the urban realm, reinforcing “the idea of the urban world as incomplete, multiple, and always in the process” (McFarlane, 2022, p. XIX). To approach the UF beyond a any technocentric perspective, and to examine their affective, emotional, sensorial, more-than-human dimensions (Lorimer, 2010), the project adopt qualitative, multi-scalar and multi-layered research methodologies. In particular, the project will set and tune with direct observation, interviews, focus-groups, creative and audio-visual methods, auto-ethnography, immersive bodily approaches. By using partecipative and creative methodologies, the research proposal aims to share the PNRR principles of social empowerment and moving beyond the purely academic research to reach wider social need. The results we expect to achieve are the following. First, to build a critical analysis of policies and practices of urban renewal, urban regeneration and recovery of the 5 Italian cities, focusing on multispecies ecosystem processes; second, to define a multi-actor methodological path building an alternative reading of spatial fragility, which defines/redefines the liminal spaces of contact and exchange (of lives, actors, economies, etc.); third, to enter into the folds of the PNRR and understand the relationships between the dominant narratives it produces and the counter-narratives coming from UFs. In line with the third strategic axis of the PNRR, i.e. social inclusion, and with the plan’s mission linked to the green revolution and ecological transition, the project also aims to highlight territorial gaps and inequalities accentuated by the pandemic, helping to identify new ways of bridging them through action-research practices. The final outputs (an online platform to spread knowledge outside the academy, a book, scientific papers) will gather the variety of approaches and the diversity of the UFs, as they will emerge from the work of each RU and from RUs’ joint discussions.