Giustizia sociale, spazio e città. Un approccio teorico-metodologico applicato a un caso studio

Social justice, space and the city. A theorical methodological approach applied to a case study. - Traditional approaches at the studying of “social justice” issues within cities do not usually define clearly how we can understand both “justice” and “the city”. This article faces this issue, tracing an account of justice based upon both an explicit ethics and the relative principle of justice. With these concepts, the article defines a methodology of work that might be useful to grasp social justice matters within the urban, understanding these issues only in relational terms arguing, in other words, that it is necessary to look within the relational processes of the production of urban space to retrieve injustice. Hence, it would apply this methodology to a specific case study based on Turin. The conclusions will offer some suggestion upon the limitations and the opportunities of the path just outlined, as well as some proposition concerning its possible future developments.This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently embargoed pending publication

Homeless Subjects and the Chance of Space. A More-Than-Human Geography of Homelessness in Turin

This work is based upon an ethnographic enquiry in Turin, North-West of Italy, to interrogate homelessness as a subjective condition that emerges from the entanglements of the individual and the city. Arguing that canonical framing of homelessness do not take into full consideration the relationalities and nuances that intervene between homeless people and the mechanosphere of the city, this work develops a detailed theoretical and empirical investigation of the more- than-human entanglements through which homeless subjects emerge in the opening and closures of urban spaces. Three research questions are pursued: the first two investigating how subjects are constituted in the process of being and becoming a homeless individual, and the third questioning how the public and private institutions that provide service to homeless people actually open or close opportunities to them. The concept of chance of space has been developed to sustain the hypothesis that city’s space offers infinite potentialities to homeless subjects, which however are constantly codified and normalized by the discursive and relational powers consciously and unconsciously at work in the urban fabric. The research questions have been tackled through an in-deep ethnographic investigation developed in three long chapters, which lead to theoretical and political outcomes. This work shows that interrogating homelessness in a more-than-human fashion a world of multiples subjects emerges, with various attitudes, capabilities, relational and affective characterizations. It opens the door to the recognition of spatial chances that might lead, if recognized and enacted, to enrich homeless subjects’ perspectives. According, a critique of the mainstream normative approach on homelessness is developed, arguing in favour of new ethical stances that extend the validity of this enquiry beyond Turin’s case. This ethics claims the necessity to take seriously the entanglements between space, time and the homeless subject; advocates a right to difference and consequently to differentiated interventions; and argues for the necessity to challenge the rigidity of certain urban contexts in order to enact homeless people own capabilities

Truthful social science or:<i>how</i>we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2013.77497

Inhabiting Dispossession in the Post‐Socialist City: Race, Class, and the Plan, in Bucharest, Romania

The paper explores the racialised geography of a series of socialist blocs located in the southern periphery of Bucharest, labelled as a contemporary Romanian “ghetto”. Through extensive ethnographic and archival work, it expands on contemporary Western race‐aware urban scholarship, advancing an expansive reading of the “plan” as a key element to account for the endurance of foundational dispossession in the context of Bucharest. The goal is to trace how the social segmentations of “class” and “race” have been diagrammed through discontinuous city‐making in the last hundred years, refuting a reading of these complex processes as a matter of evolutionary stages between economic regimes, which ends up reproducing a stereotypical representation of the Eastern “other”. The paper contributes to a situated approach to racial urbanism, offering the basis for a trans‐Atlantic dialogue around the makings and unmakings of urban dispossession