Regenerating Urban Spaces under Place-specific Social Contexts: a Commentary on Green Infrastructures for Landscape Conservation

This study investigates the issue of green infrastructures in contemporary cities, adopting a strategic vision for increasingly complex metropolitan regions. Green infrastructures play an important role in ecological services and biodiversity preservation, improving significantly the quality of life of residents and visitors. The social dimension of gardens and parks at local (e.g. urban district) scale and green infrastructures at larger spatial scales is also addressed, fostering the relationship between local communities and urban landscapes. With economic crisis, urban parks are increasingly considered a primary component of integrated strategies for urban regeneration with a bottom-up approach, addressing the demand for "natural landscape" in peri-urban areas. By recovering public spaces with social purposes and providing a comprehensive strategy for aesthetic improvement of common goods, the analyzed case studies give examples of specific measures for promoting environment-friendly urban regeneration strategies under place-specific social contexts

Human capital, technological spillovers and development across OECD countries

In this paper, we study the relationship between the level of development of an economy and returns to different levels of education for the panel of OECD countries over the 1965-2004 period, in a club convergence framework. The connection between growth and human capital measures of primary, secondary and tertiary education in a multiple-club spatial convergence model with non linearities and spatial dependence is considered. By decomposing total schooling into its three constituent parts, we are able to evaluate their impact on regional growth without imposing homogeneous returns from each level of education. We contribute to the identification of two regimes for OECD countries, each characterized by different returns on physical and human capital accumulation and technological spillovers. We also find that the non-monotonic pattern of convergence is strongly influenced by human capital stocks and technology diffusion process is stronger in the club less close to the technological frontier.

<i>Morts pour la France</i>: Things and memory in the ‘destroyed villages’ of Verdun

This article considers the power of things to affect how the past is remembered in the aftermath of mass violence, through the case of the ‘destroyed villages’ ( villages détruits) of the battlefield of Verdun, theatre in 1916 of one of the most destructive battles of World War I. As well as causing mass military death, the battle also led to the ‘death’ of nine small villages, declared to have ‘died for France’ and incorporated into the post-war commemorative landscape of the battlefield. The article illustrates the 21st-century discourse and practices that surround the remains of these villages, from emplaced ruins to photographs and other documents. A century after the ‘death’ of the villages, people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants gather at the sites and through these objects evoke their ancestors and the pre-war settlement, momentarily reconstituting a space that they can ‘inhabit’ physically, imaginatively and affectively. However, bids to restore a ‘village’ space and time are overwritten by the commemorative framework in which the sites and remains have been embedded for the past century, that identifies the ‘dead’ localities with the human Fallen and their history with the moment of their ‘death for France’. So, while the surviving traces of the former villages retain their power to affect and thus to evoke the pre-war, civilian past, their ability to produce a new memory for Verdun is limited by their incorporation into a memorial landscape dedicated to heroic military death for the nation. The physical expropriation of sites and vestiges during the post-war reconstruction of the battlefield and their preservation as tangible tokens of mass death has enduringly fixed and overdetermined their meaning, in a form of symbolic expropriation that limits their power to produce memory. </jats:p

Singular solutions for coercive quasilinear elliptic inequalities with nonlocal terms

We study the inequality {\rm div}\big(|x|^{-\alpha}|\nabla u|^{m-2}\nabla u\big)\geq (I_\beta\ast u^p)u^q \quad\mbox{ in } B_1\setminus\{0\}\subset {\mathbb R}^N, where $\alpha>0$, $N\geq 1$, $m>1$, $p, q>m-1$ and $I_\beta$ denotes the Riesz potential of order $\beta\in(0, N)$. We obtain sharp conditions in terms of these parameters for which positive singular solutions exist. We further establish the asymptotic profile of singular solutions to the double inequality a(I_\beta\ast u^p)u^q\geq {\rm div}\big(|x|^{-\alpha}|\nabla u|^{m-2}\nabla u\big)\geq b(I_\beta\ast u^p)u^q \quad\mbox{ in } B_1\setminus\{0\}\subset {\mathbb R}^N, where $a\geq b>0$ are constants.Comment: 26 page

Coercive elliptic systems with gradient terms

Abstract In this paper we give a classification of positive radial solutions of the following system: Δ ⁢ u = v m , Δ ⁢ v = h ⁢ ( | x | ) ⁢ g ⁢ ( u ) ⁢ f ⁢ ( | ∇ ⁡ u | ) , $\Delta u=v^{m},\quad\Delta v=h(|x|)g(u)f(|\nabla u|),$ in the open ball B R ${B_{R}}$ , with m > 0 ${m>0}$ , and f, g, h nonnegative nondecreasing continuous functions. In particular, we deal with both explosive and bounded solutions. Our results involve, as in [27], a generalization of the well-known Keller–Osserman condition, namely, ∫ 1 ∞ ( ∫ 0 s F ⁢ ( t ) ⁢ t ) - m / ( 2 ⁢ m + 1 ) ⁢ s < ∞ ${\int_{1}^{\infty}(\int_{0}^{s}F(t)\,dt)^{-m/(2m+1)}\,ds<\infty}$ , where F ⁢ ( t ) = ∫ 0 t f ⁢ ( s ) ⁢ s ${F(t)=\int_{0}^{t}f(s)\,ds}$ . Moreover, in the second part of the paper, the p-Laplacian version, given by Δ p ⁢ u = v m ${\Delta_{p}u=v^{m}}$ , Δ p ⁢ v = f ⁢ ( | ∇ ⁡ u | ) ${\Delta_{p}v=f(|\nabla u|)}$ , is treated. When p ≥ 2 ${p\geq 2}$ , we prove a necessary condition for the existence of a solution with at least a blow up component at the boundary, precisely ∫ 1 ∞ ( ∫ 0 s F ⁢ ( t ) ⁢ t ) - m / ( m ⁢ p + p - 1 ) ⁢ s ( p - 2 ) ⁢ ( p - 1 ) / ( m ⁢ p + p - 1 ) ⁢ s < ∞ ${\int_{1}^{\infty}(\int_{0}^{s}F(t)\,dt)^{-m/(mp+p-1)}s^{(p-2)(p-1)/(mp+p-1)}\,ds<\infty}$

Fujita type results for quasilinear parabolic inequalities with nonlocal terms

In this paper we investigate the nonexistence of nonnegative solutions of parabolic inequalities of the form \begin{cases} &u_t \pm L_\mathcal A u\geq (K\ast u^p)u^q \quad\mbox{ in } \mathbb R^N \times \mathbb (0,\infty),\, N\geq 1,\\ &u(x,0) = u_0(x)\ge0 \,\, \text{ in } \mathbb R^N,\end{cases} \qquad (P^{\pm}) where $u_0\in L^1_{loc}({\mathbb R}^N)$, $L_{\mathcal{A}}$ denotes a weakly $m$-coercive operator, which includes as prototype the $m$-Laplacian or the generalized mean curvature operator, $p,\,q>0$, while $K\ast u^p$ stands for the standard convolution operator between a weight $K>0$ satisfying suitable conditions at infinity and $u^p$. For problem $(P^-)$ we obtain a Fujita type exponent while for $(P^+)$ we show that no such critical exponent exists. Our approach relies on nonlinear capacity estimates adapted to the nonlocal setting of our problems. No comparison results or maximum principles are required

Chapter KID. Il disegno di un nuovo tipo di bicicletta

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Multiplicity results for generalized quasilinear critical Schr\"odinger equations in R^N

Multiplicity results are proved for solutions both with positive and negative energy, as well as nonexistence results, of a generalized quasilinear Schr\"odinger potential free equation in the entire R^N involving a nonlinearity which combines a power-type term at a critical level with a subcritical term, both with weights. The equation has been derived from models of several physical phenomena such as superfluid film in plasma physics as well as the self-channelling of a high-power ultra-short laser in matter. Proof techniques, also in the symmetric setting, are based on variational tools, including concentration compactness principles, to overcome lack of compactness, and the use of a change of variable in order to deal with a well defined functional

Suncus etruscus (Soricomorpha, Soricidae): A new species for Elba Island (Tuscan Archipelago, Italy)

The following study contains a report regarding the first record of presence of Suncus etruscus on the island of Elba. We considered original and literature data obtained from the analysis of Barn owl (Tyto alba) pellets. Three roosts located in different areas of Elba (Marciana: Colle d'Orano-Patresi; Campo nell'Elba: La Grotta; Portoferraio: Casa Rossa) have been monitored since 1968. The presence of the Pygmy white-toothed shrew has only been observed at one roost (Casa Rossa) since 2004. We performed a biometrical analysis of 15 skull characters on 67 specimens of 'S. etruscus. From the results, we conclude that a colonization of the island by S. etruscus is in progress, but long-term monitoring is needed in order to control the status of the population