EUROPE AND ITS ‘OTHER’: FREE TRADE AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINERIES OF EURO-MEDITERRANEAN POLITICS

The creation of a Free Trade Area is the main pillar on which regionalization in the Mediterranean has been pursued since the establishment of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership in 1995. The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the relation between commercial integration and region-building in the Mediterranean from an interpretative perspective, in order to offer a critical evaluation of the aims, the impact and the evolution of Euro-Mediterranean policies. To this end, we will show some evidence about the intensity and spatiality of cross-Mediterranean trade relations. We will see how the idea of constructing a Mediterranean region does indeed coexist and conflict with other geographical imaginaries: the idea of the Mediterranean as a border and the attempts to establish a regime of managed and differential relations in the area. Moreover, we will present the different delimitations which have been proposed for the Euro-Mediterranean area, in order to give an idea of the struggle between alternative geopolitical representations which is behind regionalization strategies in the Mediterranean. We will discuss the attempts to use conditionality to promote reforms in the partner countries, and the Eurocentric character of such attempts. Finally, we will reflect upon the concept of ‘selective’ Europeanization: the spatial metaphor that, in our opinion, best captures the content and the outcome of the recurrent attempts to construct a Mediterranean region

Politiche pubbliche e orti condivisi a Roma: tra promozione e controllo

Gli orti condivisi sono stati interpretati in letteratura come pratiche attraverso cui i cittadini possono reclamare il loro diritto alla città, ma anche come forme di governance collaborativa in un contesto di neoliberismo. Il lavoro si propone di riflettere su questa ambivalenza e sui suoi effetti sulle politiche pubbliche, attraverso l’analisi del caso di Roma. Dopo una ricostruzione della diffusione degli orti urbani a Roma e delle risposte istituzionali messe in campo dal comune negli ultimi dieci anni, il contributo si focalizza sull’analisi del “Regolamento per l’affidamento in comodato d’uso e per la gestione di aree a verde di proprietà di Roma Capitale compatibili con la destinazione a orti/Giardini urbani”, approvato a Luglio 2015. L’analisi – basata su fonti secondarie, osservazione partecipata e interviste in profondità – consente di mettere in luce gli effetti perversi e contraddittori di questo intervento, nominalmente volto a promuovere il radicamento, l’attivismo e la partecipazione delle comunità locali

cross border cooperation in the euro mediterranean and beyond between policy transfers and regional adaptations

Since 2007, the Euro-Mediterranean area has been included among the mesoregions covered by the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Such a choice has not been exempted from criticisms, insofar as the geographical coverage of the "European Neighbourhood" has been judged too wide and too diverse to be the object of a single policy. The aims and scope of the European Union's strategies towards Mediterranean countries, moreover, are different from those towards the Eastern European Countries, while policy instruments, implementation procedures and political narratives are more or the less the same. The paper addresses the case of one of those policy instruments: Cross-Border Cooperation, an important component of the ENP; it presents a comparative analysis of Cross-Border Cooperation initiatives in the Euro-Mediterranean area vis-a-vis similar initiatives launched in other ENP's mesoregions. The implementation of the policy, it is argued, is based indeed upon a mixture of policy transfers and local adaptations, and produces both homogenizations and differentiations. The aim of the paper is to see how a single policy instrument (Cross-Border Cooperation within the ENP) is adapted to the specificities of each mesoregion, what kind of regionalization and bordering/cross-bordering processes it produces, and what role the Euro-Mediterranean area is supposed to play in this frame

Dynamics and Scaling of Particle Streaks in High-Reynolds-Number Turbulent Boundary Layers

Inertial particles in wall-bounded turbulence are known to form streaks, but experimental evidence and predictive understanding of this phenomenon is lacking, especially in regimes relevant to atmospheric flows. We carry out wind tunnel measurements to investigate this process, characterizing the transport of microscopic particles suspended in turbulent boundary layers. The friction Reynolds number Re = O(104) allows for significant scale separation and the emergence of large-scale motions, while the range of viscous Stokes number St+ = 18–870 is relevant to the transport of dust and fine sand in the atmospheric surface layer. We perform simultaneous imaging of both carrier and dispersed phases along wall-parallel planes in the logarithmic layer, demonstrating that streamwise particle streaks largely overlap with large-scale low-speed flow regions. The fluid–particle slip velocity indicates that with increasing inertia, the particle streaks outlive the low-speed fluid streaks. Moreover, two-point statistics show that the width of the particle streaks increases linearly with Stokes number, bounded by the size of the coherent flow structures. Finally, the particle-sampled flow topology suggests that particle streaks reside between the legs of hairpin packets. From these observations, we infer a conceptual view of the formation of particle streaks in the frame of the attached eddy model. A scaling for the particle streaks’ width is derived as a function of Re and St+, which reproduces the measured trends and predicts widths O(0.1) m in the atmospheric surface layer, comparable to aeolian streamers observed in the field

Volumetric velocimetry for fluid flows

In recent years, several techniques have been introduced that are capable of extracting 3D three-component velocity fields in fluid flows. Fast-paced developments in both hardware and processing algorithms have generated a diverse set of methods, with a growing range of applications in flow diagnostics. This has been further enriched by the increasingly marked trend of hybridization, in which the differences between techniques are fading. In this review, we carry out a survey of the prominent methods, including optical techniques and approaches based on medical imaging. An overview of each is given with an example of an application from the literature, while focusing on their respective strengths and challenges. A framework for the evaluation of velocimetry performance in terms of dynamic spatial range is discussed, along with technological trends and emerging strategies to exploit 3D data. While critical challenges still exist, these observations highlight how volumetric techniques are transforming experimental fluid mechanics, and that the possibilities they offer have just begun to be explored.SD was partially supported under Grant No. DPI2016-79401-R funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (SRA) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). FC was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, Grant No. 1453538)

La cooperación transfronteriza en la región del Trifinio y la difusión de modelos europeos de gobernanza de las fronteras en América Latina

En la región del Trifinio se concentran algunas de las experiencias más avanzadas de cooperación transfronteriza de América Latina. Dichas experiencias son promovidas por las instituciones europeas y se han inspirado fuertemente en el modelo europeo de gobernanza de las regiones transfronterizas. Al mismo tiempo, este modelo no ha sido simplemente trasladado de la Unión Europea a la América Latina, sino que también se ha adaptado a las condiciones del contexto y a las características específicas de los procesos de reterritorialización e integración macrorregional que tienen lugar en la región y, más en general, en América Latina. A la luz del debate relativo a la europeización, el artículo pretende mostrar cómo el potencial y los límites de este tipo de iniciativas pueden ser adecuadamente comprendidos solo a través del balance que se crea, caso por caso, entre contaminación transnacional y adaptación local, y entre la transferencia de modelos y narrativas (que son típicos de la Unión Europea), y la apropiación de estos por parte de los actores locales. Some of the most advanced cross-border cooperation initiatives in Latin American are to be found in the Trifinio region. These have been promoted by European institutions and have been inspired by the European model of cross-border governance. The model, however, has not simply been transplanted from Europe, but has been adapted to local circumstances and to the specifics of rescaling and macro-regional integration processes in the region, and in Latin America more in general. In the light of academic debates about Europeanization, this article aims to show how both the potential and the limits of such initiatives may only be properly understood in light of a balance between transnational contamination and local adaptation, and between the transfer of models and narratives that are typical of the EU, and their appropriation by local actors

Turbulent thermal convection driven by heated inertial particles

The heating of particles in a dilute suspension, for instance by radiation, chemical reactions or radioactivity, leads to local temperature fluctuations in the fluid due to the non-uniformity of the disperse phase. In presence of a gravity field, the fluid is set in motion by the resulting buoyancy forces. When the particle density is different than the fluid, the fluid motion alters the spatial distribution of particles and possibly strengthens their concentration inhomogeneities. This in turn causes more intense local heating. Direct numerical simulations in the Boussinesq limit show this feedback loop. Various regimes are identified depending on the particle inertia. For very small particle inertia, the macroscopic behavior of the system is the result of many thermal plumes that are generated independently of each other. For significant particle inertia, clusters of particles are observed and their dynamics control the flow. The emergence of very intermittent turbulent fluctuations shows that the flow is influenced by the larger structures (turbulent convection) as well as by the small-scale dynamics that affect particle segregation and thus the flow forcing. Assuming thermal equilibrium between the particles and the fluid (i.e. infinitely fast thermal relaxation of the particle), we investigate the evolution of statistical observables with the change of main control parameters (namely the particle number density, the particle inertia and the domain size), and propose scaling argument for these trends. Concerning the energy density in the spectral space, it is observed that the turbulent energy and temperature spectra follow a power law, the exponent of which varies continuously with the Stokes number. Furthermore the study of the spectra of the temperature and momentum forcing (and thus of the concentration/temperature and velocity/temperature correlations) gives strong support to the proposed feedback loop mechanism. We then discuss the intermittency of the flow, and analyze the effect of relaxing some of the simplifying assumptions, thus assessing the relevance of the original studied configuration