Cagliari’s urban landscape: a commons?

Cities are the mirror of globalization; they reproduce and anticipate the same trends and contradictions from the inside. The controversial notion of urban landscape is here explored in connection with the commons paradigm, those resources which have been studied by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel prize for economic sciences in 2009 and Author of Governing the Commons, the fundamental text for the study of collective institutions and the governance processes of natural and artificial resources. In the text the landscape is excluded from the list of commons because these identify self-governed microsystems of local-territorial resources, that is to say, a set of practices and rules of access and fruition that are the exclusive pertinence of the users of local communities. The landscape is perhaps more similar to public goods, with one condition: that its fruition from a specific point of view does not impede the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation of others, nor compromises its own existence. Nevertheless, apart from this, the “health” of urban landscape is given by the simultaneity and compresence of different spaces, as is shown by the “fight” against the commercialization of public spaces of the inhabitants of the Marina neighbourhood in Cagliari

When Music Invades the Urban Spaces: the Piano City Festival in Milan, a New Paradigm of Sociability?

In 2010 the pianist and composer Andreas Kern organized Piano City, a metropolitan piano festival with original and innovative elements: the locations for the concerts are living rooms; the profile of the executors and interpreters include professional musicians, but also piano students, teachers, amateurs and piano-lovers; the heterogeneity of the musical genres (classic music, rock, jazz etc.); last but not least, the use of the Internet as a medium to publicize the event. Inspired by Kern’s idea, Ludovico Einaudi first organized a Milanese edition of Piano City in 2011. Since then, the piano-festival has represented a significant episode in the recent revamping of the city image after a period in which it had become dull and weak. Milan has interpreted at its best the philosophy of this event: the promotion of typical places, the use of the web and of social media, the urban hospitality and the free exhibitions, the inhabitants’ involvement, the incentive to explore the city in order to rediscover and reappropriate the public spaces; these are just some of the strengths of Piano City Milan: these elements make this piano festival an opportunity for the construction of a collective sense of place and a new paradigm of urban sociability that offers the city the chance to redeem itself, its own identity and to activate new forms of self-narrative

Sensus maxime cognitivus. Sinestesie come critica della “Ragion spaziale”

“Think mobility rather than stability is a challenge that makes to the social sciences giddy”. Geography is one of these social sciences that both must think about the mobility of the globe and at the same time redefine itself because of the processes of spatial dematerialisation and fragmentation that characterize the contemporary world. Therefore it is necessary to overcome the contradiction between the thesis that argues that with globalization the space is insignificant and the thesis that argues that globalization produces an increasing spatial differentiation. This oscillation depends on the fact that the word “globalization” does not describe a state of affairs (the immobile Earth) but a whole of many processes (the Mobile Earth). “Think mobility rather than stability is a challenge that makes to the social sciences giddy”. Geography is one of these social sciences that both must think about the mobility of the globe and at the same time redefine itself because of the processes of spatial dematerialisation and fragmentation that characterize the contemporary world. Therefore it is necessary to overcome the contradiction between the thesis that argues that with globalization the space is insignificant and the thesis that argues that globalization produces an increasing spatial differentiation. This oscillation depends on the fact that the word “globalization” does not describe a state of affairs (the immobile Earth) but a whole of many processes (the Mobile Earth).&nbsp

Sardinian Territories as Told By Google Street View: the “ISPERIADAS” Project

In this paper, I would like to consider some geographical implications of Google Street View and more precisely of Isperiadas - Sardigna Street View a photographic project about the contemporary Sardinia began on 2012. The peculiarity of Isperiadas – the use of Google Street View as a source to tell the contradictions and trans-formations facing Sardinian territory – triggers questions concerning the possibility that the new technologies can help us build original narratives, which are different from the official ones and at the same time respectful of the complexity of the territories. These are clearly open matters (to which it is unthinkable to give a final and complete answer), and with which we have been dealing for not long

Sensus maxime cognitivus. Sinestesie come critica della “Ragion spaziale”

“Think mobility rather than stability is a challenge that makes to the social sciences giddy”. Geography is one of these social sciences that both must think about the mobility of the globe and at the same time redefine itself because of the processes of spatial dematerialisation and fragmentation that characterize the contemporary world. Therefore it is necessary to overcome the contradiction between the thesis that argues that with globalization the space is insignificant and the thesis that argues that globalization produces an increasing spatial differentiation. This oscillation depends on the fact that the word “globalization” does not describe a state of affairs (the immobile Earth) but a whole of many processes (the Mobile Earth). “Think mobility rather than stability is a challenge that makes to the social sciences giddy”. Geography is one of these social sciences that both must think about the mobility of the globe and at the same time redefine itself because of the processes of spatial dematerialisation and fragmentation that characterize the contemporary world. Therefore it is necessary to overcome the contradiction between the thesis that argues that with globalization the space is insignificant and the thesis that argues that globalization produces an increasing spatial differentiation. This oscillation depends on the fact that the word “globalization” does not describe a state of affairs (the immobile Earth) but a whole of many processes (the Mobile Earth).&nbsp

L’algoritmo del paesaggio. Selfie e sprezzatura del reale

Mettere insieme nella stessa frase le parole |algoritmo| e |paesaggio| può risultare di primo acchito un po’ spiazzante per l’innata distanza che siamo soliti riconoscere, direi quasi istintivamente, tra questi due termini. Laddove |paesaggio| evoca l’ambito dell’esperienza sensibile, dello sguardo geografico-estetico sul mondo, del “bello” (naturale o meno) e della Stimmung, |algoritmo| indica invece uno schema o procedimento matematico di calcolo e più recentemente in campo informatico una sequenza finita di istruzioni che permettono l’esecuzione di un programma da parte di un computer. Parlare di “algoritmo del paesaggio” suona quindi straniante per la manifesta inconciliabilità dei campi semantici coperti da queste due parole: l’una rimandando alla soggettività e al sentimento, alla percezione e all’ambito dell’arte; l’altra alla calcolabilità, alla tecnologia e alla messa a punto di sistemi di software sempre più complessi

Geografia e filosofia: istruzioni per l’uso

This article explores the relationships existing between geography and philosophy. The absence in the past of a serious reflection on the subject today gives way to vir-tuous connections where the two disciplines interact with each other. First of all, the paper analyses the different ways in which this relationship is studied: proceeding by themes and problems and identifying one or more keywords to link the investigation to a sufficient number of issues without over-wide generalizations; focusing on some concepts with a historical-diachronic reading in a long-term perspective; showing four dialectical categories: Geography of Philosophy, Philosophy of Geography, Geography in Philosophy and Philosophy in Geography. Then the article focuses on “cultural turn” and conflictual relationship between the “principle of evidence” and the “perti-nence principle” in geography. In conclusion, I talk about the philosophy of geographers through a reference to some theoretical positions in Italian geography

Cose, rappresentazioni, pratiche: uno sguardo sull’ontologia ibrida della Geografia

This article explores the ontology of geography. The main characteristic of this ontology is to be a hybrid, because the entities that inhabit it – that is things, representations and practices – are heterogeneous and irreducible to a common root. These three regions of Being have in fact different properties. The attributes of things are spatiality and presence; the attributes of representations are the symbolic and intentionality; finally, the attributes of practices are embodiment and unintentional action. Each of these corresponds to a “moment” of the evolution of geographical thought: geography of things is classical geography, based on “naive realism” and “metaphysics of the object”; geography of the representations coincides with the post-structuralist phase of social constructivism and symbolic landscapes; non-representational geographies instead are one description of what happens, of pre-cognitive aspects of embodied life, affects, performative efficacy of our concrete relationships with the world. The central idea of the article is that we must never forget that the realm of geography, its ontology, strictly needs these three diverse levels of reality

Chapter Massimo Quaini, bricoleur. Su un libro che avrebbe potuto essere e non fu

This article contains the text of an e-mail I received from Massimo Quaini in 2017. Through this mail he was answering to my invitation to participate in the fourth edition of “Dialoghi tra geografia e filosofia”, a ‘dialogic’ seminar I have been organizing since 2014 to enhance the discussion between geographers and philosophers. Due to his illness, unluckily he was unable to attend the conference but he wrote me an e-mail in which he invited me to write a book together, four-handed. This e-mail is one of the last documents ever written by Quaini: here we have many of his landscape ideas, as well as many thoughts on the identity and the future of geography, and much more. For this reason I thought making this mail public could be the best way to honour his memory