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

Challenges and effects of short-term rentals regulation

Abstract: Many overtouristified cities introduced limitations to the diffusion of short-term rentals, and are struggling to guarantee their enforcement, while evidence about the impact of those regulations is limited. The article provides an overview of the instruments adopted by 16 European cities, and an assessment of their effectiveness. By comparing regulated and unregulated cities, we show that the former obtained a persistent reduction in the number of listings of entire apartments, in the ratio between entire apartments and shared rooms, and in the number of professional hosts, but no significant impact on the spatial concentration of short-term rentals in the city. We also provide evidence of the effects of the diverse regulatory strategies, and of the importance of obtaining the cooperation of booking platforms.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reclaiming other geographical traditions: The hidden roots of Italian radical geography

The article recalls the history of Geografia Democratica, a collective of scholars that during the second half of the 1970s sought to dismantle the old deterministic approach and promote a critical and radical turn in Italian academic geography. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing debate about ‘other geographical traditions’ beyond the Anglo-American hegemony, to highlight the pluriversal roots of contemporary critical geographies and the influence that the transnational circulation of knowledge had in their unfolding, in light of recent quests for a more global geographical imagination. To do so, the article first engages with Geografia Democratica as a ‘rupture experience’ in the mainstream of Italian geography, and then discusses how it intersected or not similar turns that occurred elsewhere, focusing on the mostly implicit dialogue between Italian and Anglo-American critical/radical geographies of the time. By following the controversial story of the collective during and after its short existence, we question its legacy for today's geographical scholarship, and reflect more generally upon the significance of reviving other critical and radical traditions. To highlight the plurality of our disciplinary past, we suggest, is crucial not only to fill the ‘asymmetric ignorance’ between various traditions, but also to nurture and reposition the present ‘worlding’ practices of non-Anglophone critical geographers

Temporary populations and sociospatial polarisation in the short-term city

Temporary populations – tourists, temporary stayers, non-resident students – constitute a substantial share of many cities’ inhabitants. Their implications are normally the object of separate research, about over tourism, studentification, transnational gentrification. When viewed from the perspective of the sociospatial relations those populations have in and with the city, many similarities emerge in their urban practices, socio economic characteristics, locational and housing preferences. The paper aims to contribute to recent attempts to avoid traditional categorisations and investigate jointly how the inflow of temporary inhabitants produces effects at the urban and sub-urban scales. The COVID-19 pandemic will then be used as a natural experiment to estimate how they distribute in the city of Rome, Italy, which is crucial to a better understanding of their impact. Temporary populations, we argue, are a very visible source of both hard and soft urban changes, and a major driver of not only neighbourhood change but sociospatial polarisation at the whole city scale. The pandemic also offers an occasion to see how dependent cities are on temporary inhabitants and to reflect upon the ambivalence in how they see those populations as either a gain or a burden, something they struggle to attract or as a source of tensions and opposition

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

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

Chapter Intorno a Geografia Democratica. Fra Marx e Foucault, l’Italia e l’‘Ammerica’

Two main and sequential topics are emphasized. The first one is Quaini’s attention for the historically and socially determinated building of the Man/Nature relation, which mainly characterizes his first works written against the remaining positivistic and deterministic interpretations of the so called ‘“Iintegral Ggeography”’. The other topic is the Hish/Low relation, metaphorically representing the dialectic among the social popular practices involved in the territorial exploitment and its representations, usually rooted into oral-tradition cultures, and, on the other side, those linked to the expert knowledges, irreplaceable to appropriately understand the space, always actually influenced by political powers and public institutions

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

La reterritorialización de la región del Trifinio: las mancomunidades locales y la difusión del modelo europeo de cooperación transfronteriza en América Latina

En la región del Trifinio (zona de frontera entre Guatemala, Honduras y El Salvador) se concentran algunas de las experiencias más avanzadas de cooperación transfronteriza de América Latina. A la luz de la experiencia local del Trifinio, el artículo trata en primer lugar de comprender la relación entre la difusión de la cooperación transfronteriza y el proceso de reterritorialización del Estado y de reorganización de su espacialidad política y administrativa. Seguidamente, el artículo pretende reflexionar sobre el tema de la europeización. Los resultados del estudio revelan que la difusión de prácticas de cooperación transfronteriza consiste, en parte, en una transferencia de modelos que son típicos de la Unión Europea y que, en parte, dichas iniciativas se adaptan a las especificidades del contexto en el que se actúa.In the region of Trifinio (border area between Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) focus some of the more experimental cross-border cooperation in Latin America. In the light of local experience Trifinio, the article is first to understand the relationship between the spread of cross-border cooperation and reterritorialization process of reorganization of the State and its political and administrative spatiality. Next, the article aims to reflect on the issue of Europeanization. Study results reveal that dissemination practices for cross-border cooperation is, in part, on a transfer of models that are typical of the European Union and, in part, these initiatives are tailored to the specific context in which it operates