Tracce urbane. Rivista italiana transdisciplinare di studi urbani

Interfaces. Urban design education facing green transition, demographic shift, and environmental crisis

Francesca Frassoldati — 2023-12-31

The post-crisis measures are perceived and anticipated as significant opportunities for the recovery and revitalization of cities and regions. Such opportunities for change mobilize spatial design efforts, even if their actual effects in regions that experience complex demographic and economic challenges remain open for debate. With our contribution, based on three-year design studio at Politecnico di Torino, we would like to reflect on how education in architectural schools addresses notions of marginality, places that are out of focus, and whether exploring ecological transitions in education may provide more conscious practitioners for the future. In the pedagogical process, ordinary villages intersect the interests of an international academic community; those same villages exemplify transition in context – questioning conventional agriculture and old industrialization processes; and through the experience international students are exposed to practices that broaden critical thinking.

Genealogies and evolutions of the ecological thread in urbanism and spatial planning in a post-growth perspective

Claudia Faraone — 2023-12-31

In the face of the demands urged by climate change and socio-ecological transition, the article reconstructs how in the last century ecological thinking has traversed urbanism with projects and models called upon to bridge the city-countryside and society-nature opposition. This exploration, generically chronological, does not follow a systematic method of historical-disciplinary analysis. Rather, the aim is to trace the various strands of thought that, directly or indirectly, have addressed the issue of the ecological dimension in the theory and practice of human settlement planning and design. This discussion aims at tracing a genealogy of multidisciplinary proposals that have been oriented towards dynamics other than those that are merely expansive, of accumulation or revenue, or have taken them into account and attempted to counterbalance their effects. The final aim is to provide some elements for a renewed contribution of urbanism to the critical debate currently underway on the future of urbanised territories in a post-growth perspective.

Community Development on Renewable Energy Literacy by Symbiosis Bioenergy Model

Alicia Sinsuw — 2023-12-31

Indonesia, an expansive archipelago of 17,000 islands spanning 1.9 million km², faces a population of 267 million people spread across its diverse regions. As per Government Regulation No. 79 of 2014, Indonesia aims for a renewable energy mix of 23% by 2025 and 31% by 2050. Despite abundant renewable energy potential, such as biogas, there's a need for innovative approaches to meet these targets. The Symnery model, introduced in Manado City in 2018, involves a two-stage biogas production pilot plant utilizing slaughterhouse wastewater and agricultural waste. This model brings social, economic, and environmental benefits to rural communities, offering employment, training, and additional income. Energy literacy, crucial for understanding and managing energy complexities, is enhanced through the model. The government, adopting the two-stage symbiosis bioenergy model, simplified it for small islands around Manado city, distributing 18 units with local materials. Local training programs focus on knowledge transfer, monitoring, and demonstrating biogas advantages, aiming to improve living standards, promote cleaner environments, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Manado City by 6.29% in 2022-2023.

Green transition: new ingredients for old recipes

Francesca Pietrangeli — 2023-12-31

The theme of the so-called green transition, if approached with a vision that goes beyond the simple adoption of green technologies, involves an epistemological dimension which has its roots in the interconnections between economy (man) and ecology (nature). This leads to the difficulty of offering an exhaustive reading of the topic, because of the diversity of approaches to refer win satisfying the growing need to find solutions to long-term human development.

In such a framework, this contribution proposes an interpretation of the relationships between economy and environment that takes into account the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of sustainability.

This paper opens with a brief review of the evolution of economic doctrine up to neoclassical thought, whose limits in describing the relationships between the economy and the environmental and social dimensions are highlighted. These considerations represent the basis for discussing the anthropocentric moral roots underlying orthodox economics and proposing a different paradigm which, moving from an ecocentric vision, is able to explicitly consider the environmental implications of the economic process and provide an unambiguous definition of sustainability.

Ecological transition: where is it going?

Barbara Pizzo — 2023-12-31

Collective Rome: pictures from the CFFC, Centro di Formazione Fotografica Contemporanea

Alessandra Valentinelli — 2023-12-31

Artificial natures

Nicola Toffolini — 2023-12-31

Etnografie delle Smart City. Abitare, relazionarsi e protestare nelle città intelligenti italiane A cura di Lorenzo D’Orsi e Luca Rimoldi, Ledizioni (2022)

Anna Giulia Della Puppa — 2023-12-31

Edit by Anna Giulia Della Puppa

Ripensare le città oltre il paradigma della crescita: riflessioni e proposte per trasformazioni urbane ecologiche e socialmente sostenibili

Federica Rotondo — 2023-12-31

Edit by Federica Rotondo

How to research something that doesn’t exist?

Karl Krähmer — 2023-12-31

In the context of the debate on socio-ecological transformation, over the last years beyond growth perspectives have emerged with strength. In this contribution, I focus in particular on the fast evolving literature at the intersection of degrowth and studies of human geography and spatial planning. I do not propose a review of the contents but rather focus on the methodological challenges of a field that researches something that does not (yet) exist: the spatialities of a degrowth transformation. I identify four main approaches used in the existing literature: case studies of what goes wrong and of good practices, utopian imaginaries and the development of pathways, policies and strategies for change and suggest ways to develop other methodologies.

Territorializing the transition

Barbara Pizzo — 2023-12-31

The “Next Generation EU” presents the green transition as a plural field aiming to link the single pillars of the European action: a vision no longer limited to ecological modernization that the “European Green Deal” frames within the objectives of CO₂ emissions mitigation and land adaptation. In Italy, this vision has not matched an equal capacity to innovate tools, methods and actions to face the climate crisis, so that the PNRR still deals with a set of deterritorialized tactics, lacking an organic strategy able to address the risks and vulnerabilities to which land is exposed, at times dramatically, in the increasingly frequent climate events that affect the country. Faced with land fragility caused by the consolidated practices of emergency, the only response to climate events for too many years, territorialization offers an adequate alternative to the complexity of the environmental challenges we will have to tackle.

The supply chain among machinery, technologies and apple producers.

Barbara Pizzo — 2023-12-31

Within the framework of the European ecological transition, the paper stands as a research agenda to interpret the supply chain of the case study of Val di Non (TN). Exploring in depth these mechanisms, the operation suggested turning to the Actor-Network Theory’s framework. From the new analytical position, the focus is to understand what research avenues may emerge.
Through the supply chain deconstruction, three main elements come to light: the network metaphor, the radical symmetry, and the material turn. The three elements will guide the narrative of the Trentino case. Finally, the manuscript concludes with three main issues that would prompt planning to assume an active mediating and not neutral role, to interpret the assemblage as infrastructure, and to re-engage the environmental dimension from a socio-material perspective.

Spatialising the transition as a social, technical and ecologic process:The ‘Green Crown’ case, East of Rome

Luca Brignone — 2023-12-31

Various approaches to the green transition converge on the need to define sustainability at the local level, focusing on transformative actions driven by bottom-up initiatives that are both confrontational and cooperative. The argument is that this process can result from a multiscalar perspective that combines green and digital transition. The reflections presented in this contribution stem from action-research that advocates for the use of ‘civic technologies’ to empower existing social networks to engage in co-creation processes that enhance urban ecological networks. This, in turn, leads to a radical shift in the local development model. It follows that only a process of social ‘defragmentation’ can lead to ecological ‘defragmentation,’ and this can only occur through a bottom-up reconfiguration, facilitated by new technologies, in relational, settlement, and production patterns.

Energy and territory: Small Islands between transition and new solutions for a paradigm shift in the energy sector

Eros Manzo — 2023-12-31

This paper seeks to link the ongoing debate on the post-growth paradigm and local energy projects to the difficult energy transition of Italy's unconnected small islands. Local and small-scale energy systems may have the potential to reduce energy and resource consumption and to promote processes of energy democracy, self-sufficiency and local production linked to approaches that look beyond growth.

The Urbanization of Nature underneath and beyond ‘the city’.

Maria Kaika — 2023-12-31

In this article we outline the impact that the field of Urban Political Ecology has on academia and policy-making; and argue that this body of scholarship is in a unique position to address some of the urgent political questions around urbanization and climate change. We outline the key epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies of Urban Political Ecology and explore to what extent these can address the systemic disaster we call climate change. Our key aim is to show that academic research can − and should − remain relevant to the politics of a heating planet.

Heterotopias of transition

Luigi Pellizzoni — 2023-12-31

Ecological transition is generally seen to ask for profound changes. The city condenses many aspects of the issue, not least the variety of spatial and temporal scales involved. The article examines different declinations of the concept of change and the relationship between space and time that they entail. The issue is placing this relationship in the context of modern space-time topology. This has recently seen new anticipatory approaches come to the fore, that abandon the linearity of the relationship between present and future in favour of recursive structures centred on eschatological, catastrophic or regenerative visions. Such emerging topologies, which would seem to evoke the traditional concepts of utopia and dystopia, are examined in the light of the notion of heterotopia formulated by Foucault, with which they share much while contradicting its transgressive scope, its ability to open up at once to the elsewhere and the otherwise. The question is how to think transition in heterotopic terms. Some current experiences can be read as heterotopias, but we need to develop the ability to distinguish heterotopias from ‘autotopias’, which are designed to prevent any real change.

A scientific conversation with Jin Xue on socio-ecological sustainability and post-growth spatial design and planning

Silvio Cristiano — 2023-12-31

Filmmaking as a transformative urban research tool

Paola Piscitelli — 2023-12-31

The paper reports on the “Border[scape]s” research-action experience, conducted with young residents from second-generation or migrant backgrounds in Naples, and the ensuing collective documentary Io non vedo il mare about the invisible and visible borders of the city seen from their perspective. Reflecting on the intense and articulated process put in place, involving heterogeneous urban actors afferent to the worlds of academia, contemporary art, the third sector, and the audiovisual one, the contribution reflects critically on the performativity of documentary filmmaking as well as on the relevance of building literacy and competences about the production of ethically and politically grounded images and imaginaries. It thus demonstrates the need to more and more structurally incorporate filmmaking not only as a method for research in urban studies and urban planning but also as a tool for city-making, meant as the collective construction of spaces and futures of inclusive citizenship.

Looped Bastogi

Mario Marasco — 2023-12-31

This paper provides an ethnographic description of the Roman metropolitan area known as Bastogi, a municipally-owned property used to curb temporary housing emergency. This temporariness, for some of the interlocutors encountered, has lasted for about thirty years. As a preliminary step, an attempt will be made to place the research area in the context of Rome’s chronic housing crisis. Reference will then be made to the actions (and interactions) of public figures, militants, squatters, entrepreneurs, representatives of power and subalterns who from the 1970s to the present day – in a progressive neo-liberal drift of the urban question – have contributed to ‘found’ and then to ‘refound’ this place. Ethnographic analysis will eventually offer the cue to reflect on the meaning of space (public and private) and its forms of negotiation, linked to processes of subjectivation and adaptation to marginality.