Nature

International audienceFrom the ancient times to the present debates on nature and environment, the idea of Nature has been one of the main concepts which interested Geographers. This paper deals with the representations of this idea in the works of thinkers who played a major role in shaping modern Geography, with a special focus on the Mediterranean world. It aims to clarify how Nature was important in defining heuristic strategies of the geographical sciences and their explications of reality. In the first part of the paper, we start from the early definitions of Geography, provided by Greek authors, and arrive to the establishment of the classical geography between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th, stressing the line which started from the German Erdkunde and led to the creation of classical national schools in Europe at the end of the 19th century. In the second part, we deal with the relationship between Geography and different ecological and environmental ideas in the last century. Finally, we state that the role of Geographers in shaping the present environmental topics, dealing with ecology, landscape and planning is more important than what is normally believed, and that the role of the Mediterranean world in that is a major one

Nature

International audienceFrom the ancient times to the present debates on nature and environment, the idea of Nature has been one of the main concepts which interested Geographers. This paper deals with the representations of this idea in the works of thinkers who played a major role in shaping modern Geography, with a special focus on the Mediterranean world. It aims to clarify how Nature was important in defining heuristic strategies of the geographical sciences and their explications of reality. In the first part of the paper, we start from the early definitions of Geography, provided by Greek authors, and arrive to the establishment of the classical geography between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th, stressing the line which started from the German Erdkunde and led to the creation of classical national schools in Europe at the end of the 19th century. In the second part, we deal with the relationship between Geography and different ecological and environmental ideas in the last century. Finally, we state that the role of Geographers in shaping the present environmental topics, dealing with ecology, landscape and planning is more important than what is normally believed, and that the role of the Mediterranean world in that is a major one

Il lapidario del seminario vescovile di Susa (Torino)

Dopo aver accennato alla formazione storica della collezione, se ne descrivono brevemente allestimento e consistenza documentaria; si propone poi una valorizzazione del lapidario, nel rispetto della sua originale disposizione antiquaria.After mentioning the historical formation of the collection, the article describes its exposition and epigraphical documentation. It is then proponed a valorization of the Lapidary in respect of its original antiquarian placing

Agent-Based Models of Industrial Clusters and Districts

Agent-based models, an instance of the wider class of connectionist models, allow bottom-up simulations of organizations constituted byu a large number of interacting parts. Thus, geogrfaphical clusters of competing or collaborating firms constitute an obvious field of application. This contribution explains what agent-based models are, reviews applications in the field of industrial clusters and focuses on a simulator of infra- and inter-firm communications.Agent-based models, industrial clusters, industrial districts

LA PERCEZIONE DEL RISCHIO AMBIENTALE NEI CONTESTI DI VALUTAZIONE IPOTETICA. IL CASO DELLE INFRASTRUTTURE URBANE PER LO SMALTIMENTO DEI RIFIUTI

This work highlights how, within the context of contingent valuation, supporting the assessment of monetary measures of mitigation of environmental damages, has not been sufficiently clarified the role played by the perception of environmental risk, particularly in an ex ante context, where the effect of psychological anchoring to the status quo and the amount / type of available information have an important role driving the individual preferences. The contribution to experimental economics - of which the contingent valuation takes share - of the theory of choice under uncertainty and of behavioural economics is briefly traced and, in order to provide empirical evidence, the results of a choice experiment implemented in Turin, in order to assess the effect of the disamenity due to the location of solid waste infrastructure, are showin

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

Astrologie alchemiche: Ermetismi in transizione e culture occidentali

Alchemy is the “sacred art” of the transmutation of metals or human beings, and often these two tendencies are expressed together in an allegorical mode infused with an astrological imager reflecting their mystical nature. The astrology is bound to alchemy in the search for the most favorable moment for commencing an enterprise (catarchic astrology) or in the form of the interrogational method, in which the horoscope of the precise moment at which a query is made to the astrologer is interpreted to provide an answer. Finally, the article illustrates these themes in some ancient manuscripts from Turin’s National University Library

Breed contra beef: The making of Piedmontese cattle

In the spring of 2014, one of the authors (Paolo) was visiting the Green Market on Union Square, NYC, one of the most renowned farmers’ markets in the United States, performing a direct connection between producers and consumers of food, allegedly alternative to the mass retail channel (Tiemann, 2008), but also promoting what Sharon Zukin terms, from a critical standpoint, ‘the consumption of authenticity’ (2008). Exactly in the middle of the square, a farmer from Pennsylvania displayed a sign to attract customers claiming ‘Piedmontese Only’. Less than half a mile away, on Madison Square, at Eataly – the sumptuous sanctuary of ‘high-quality’ Italian food – the sophisticated New York consumer could already purchase a taste of Piedmontese beef at the butcher’s counter and at the Manzo restaurant (literally ‘beef’ in Italian) since the opening of the food mall, on 30 August 2010. The Piedmontese was officially recognized as a cattle breed in the 1850s. In 1996 it became the first presidium established by Slow Food in Bra, Piedmont.1 Its beef is now well renowned among gastronomists and listed in Michelin-starred restaurants (NAPA, 2010, p.6) and it is Eataly’s official beef in Italy and the US. But, what is, exactly, the link connecting these moments and places and which establishes a relationship between an apparently endangered cattle breed in the motherland of Slow Food and the sophisticated consumption practices of the world elites in New York City? La Granda, in its twofold role as a sociocultural and economic actor, provides the most obvious nexus, which articulates the connection between the past and present of the Piedmontese breed and the refined New York City cosmopolitan consumer. La Granda is the name of the Slow Food presidium of the Piedmontese breed founded by veterinarian Sergio Capaldo in 1996 to summon a small number of breeders and preserve the rearing of this apparently endangered cattle breed. La Granda Trasformazione is the meat-processing company, owned by Capaldo and Eataly’s founder Oscar Farinetti, established in 2004 to supply the Italian branches of the food mall with premium Piedmontese beef directly from the Slow Food presidium (Colombino and Giaccaria, 2013a).2 La Granda, rather obviously, does not directly supply the beef for Eataly New York. The beef sold at the butcher counter and used to cook at Manzo’s is more simply called ‘Piedmontese’ and is supplied by North American companies. The breed has in fact been reared in the US since 1979.3 However, La Granda and its founder play a key role in maintaining the consortium’s original quality conventions (Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006) – fixed and codified by the disciplinare di produzione (specifications of production), the document that establishes how exactly the cattle must be farmed, including strict rules on fodder and hygiene – by organizing workshops and training for Eataly’s butchers. Importantly, as we claim in this chapter, La Granda is only the final outcome of a contested process, originated in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, which has radically modified the political ecology of the Piedmontese breed. In this chapter, we ‘follow’ (Cook et al., 2006) the Piedmontese starting with a peculiar event that took place in 1886 in Guarene d’Alba, a small locality in the province of Cuneo (in Piedmont, Northern Italy) and ending on the butcher’s counter at Eataly, in contemporary New York City. In discussing some of the spatio-temporal trajectories of the Piedmontese, we bring to light the process that undergirds the transformation of a specific morphological feature – known today as the ‘double muscle factor’, and appearing randomly in some animals of this bovine population in the second half of the nineteenth century – from a (monstrous) anomaly to be eliminated into a key trait to be preserved. Consistently with a political ecology/actor-network theory approach (Bennett, 2010; Latour, 1999), we show how the current status of the Piedmontese, as a cattle breed that produces what is marketed as premium beef, is not a reflection of the animal’s genetic characteristics (see Holloway et al., 2011; Morris and Holloway, 2013). Rather, it is a matter of ‘natureculture’ (Haraway 2008; see also Latimer and Miele, 2013), that is the result of the complicated negotiations among veterinarians, livestock technicians, farmers and butchers, which have taken place from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. This chapter is structured into three parts. First, we follow the development of the making of the Piedmontese breed from 1886 until the late 1950s. We bring into light how an intense and heated debate between experts and breeders focused on the ‘nature’ of the breed. Second, we move on to discuss how this contested negotiation between academics and practitioners eventually ‘fixed’ the purpose and ‘nature’ of the Piedmontese as a breed for meat, through the inclusion in this bovine population of animals previously constructed as ‘anomalies’, and the exclusion of other animals beforehand considered as ‘normal’. The last part of this chapter deals with the shifting status of the Piedmontese breed from an apparently endangered local animal species in the mid-1990s into a food specialty for the cosmopolitan consumer in contemporary New York

Towards a post-mathematical topology

This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of topology both overstretch topology’s conceptual merit and limit its insights for spatial thinking. We show how topology, with its structuralist and modernist baggage, requires some theoretical reworking to be put to work by poststructuralist geographers. Our purpose is not to consolidate a specific topological approach for geographers, but to call for an ongoing consideration of what topology offers poststructuralist spatial theories