City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, actionPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:The presence of immigration in the European urban landscape contributes to the re-questioning of taken-for-granted use and meanings of the urban texture. In Italian cities, we witness a contemporary struggle between different groups and individuals for the physical and symbolical production and appropriation of public space. This paper is based on qualitative research in the city of Padua (north-eastern Italy, Veneto region) on the territory around the railway station where migrants try to seek out symbolic and material resources while using specific spaces. However, in the process of manipulating urban spaces, migrants are accused of surpassing the 'upper threshold of correct visibility'. In other words, the level of visibility of their different bodies as well as the nonconventional uses of urban space challenge a 'spatial order' which is essentially taken for granted as the 'right way'. The paper highlights how local policies and the local mass media create an atmosphere of continuous 'moral panic' through the circulation of a stereotypical image of migrants. The paper concludes by calling for a radical shift in the policymaking process that has to be strongly informed by the physical, symbolical and emotional production of urban space. Difference today typifies the urban dimension of Italian cities and the development of contextual and coherent strategies to manage diverse urban societies is now of utmost importance.
The article examines the territorial conditions, actors, and processes that facilitate or hinder the emergence of social innovation in the inner peripheries. It investigates three social innovation initiatives taking place in the Italian Apennine through a discourse analysis of policy documents and a number of semi-structured interviews of project promoters and local actors. The research findings show that social innovation emerges as an act of territorial provocation practiced by a coalition of actors that weave strong ties with the local community. Provocation takes the form of an adaptive response of the local community to the dynamics of territorial marginalization, a reaction to tackle what we called the “wanna be” feeling, namely, a sense of constriction and frustration found in local inhabitants and linked to conditions of physical and social isolation, inertia, and a lack of future perspectives. This reaction has allowed them to shape new socio-institutional networks and structures that have catalyzed local communities’ capacity to mobilize particular resources or specific assets existing in places, improving their living conditions.
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