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)

Dynamics of small heavy particles in homogeneous turbulence: a Lagrangian experimental study

We investigate the behavior of microscopic heavy particles settling in homogeneous air turbulence. The regimes are relevant to the airborne transport of dust and droplets: the Taylor-microscale Reynolds number is Re = 289 - 462, the Kolmogorov-scale Stokes number is St = 1.2 - 13, and the Kolmogorov acceleration is comparable to the gravitational acceleration (i.e., the Froude number Fr = O(1)). We use high-speed laser imaging to track the particles and simultaneously characterize the air velocity field, resolving all relevant spatio-temporal scales. The role of the flow sampled by the particles is spotlighted. In the present range of parameters, the particle settling velocity is enhanced proportionally to the velocity scale of the turbulence. Both gravity and inertia reduce the velocity fluctuations of the particles compared to the fluid; while they have competing effect on the particle acceleration, through the crossing trajectories and inertial filtering mechanisms, respectively. The preferential sampling of high-strain/low-vorticity regions is measurable, but its impact on the global statistics is moderate. The inertial particles have large relative velocity at small separations, which increases their pair dispersion; however, gravity offsets this effect by causing them to experience fluid velocities that decorrelate faster in time compared to tracers. Based on the observations, we derive an analytical model to predict the particle velocity and acceleration variances for arbitrary St, Fr, and Re. This agrees well with the present observations and previous simulations and captures the respective effects of inertia and gravity, both of which play crucial roles in the transport

La cooperazione transfrontaliera tra Italia e Tunisia: esperienze e prospettive

The article presents the main results of a field research conducted be-tween 2012 and 2013 on the Italy-Tunisia border, aimed at investigating regional development options through policies and practices of cross-border cooperation. Starting from the specific context of the Italy-Tunisia border, the article presents the main aims, achievements, limits and prospects for cross-border cooperation across the channel of Sicily, also in light of the perceptions and expectations of local private and public stakeholders. The priorities to be addressed at different scales in order to improve the impact of the cooperation between Sicily and Tunisia in-clude, in our opinion, the support to democratization in Tunisia and to the local civil society; to pay attention to the social as well as the eco-nomic aspects of cooperation; to ensure to local actors both political and financial support; to improve the cross-border cooperation instrument through a better targeting; the setting of a coherent multilevel political framework for addressing each of these issues effectively