There is no origin or becoming an artist. Like Don Milani who writes sentence by sentence. In his works, one point calls another for simplicity of imagination and honesty of social thought; and quantum physics, precisely in these days at the end of October, alerts us that the Whole is cyclical, recursive, undulating, probable, and not one-way. We make a choice and, through connection and vibration, our past reappears to us in the present. In India, this belief has been refined over centuries of spiritualism and is called Karma; in Geneva, it is a field of excitement among bosons. Time seems to whirl around itself, and our human genius loci lies in the fairy tale we tell ourselves in order to perceive, to trace back the Congo, to thicken the geometry of everyday possibilities. But the straight line remains infinite from elementary school onwards, and we will never know where it goes or where it comes from.
The beginning is a forest. A world drunk with stones, roots, mud, and sudden open areas of light among the dense tangle of branches. When one begins to write, nothing is neutral, nothing is white; on the contrary, beginning is one of the names of the impure. To begin is always to sink one's hands into what already is, what is already given, what has already happened. To begin is an assault of specters, a coming to blows with the ghosts of millennia. It means slipping into a noisy, bewildering dialogue, placing oneself among the babbling and screaming, the rumblings, the exaltations, the cries: the regrets. The beginning is a forest: a threshold of apparitions, a request for glances. When we begin, at the exact point of beginning, the past—which is not such—takes shape and becomes a real force of gravity. The past only happens when we start something. Only when we enter the noisy forest of the beginning does something bind us and hold us in its grip. The past is nothing more than this present force: it is nothing more than the grip of the beginning, its icy thrill, its strange fever of inertial fear.
The new beginning of the digital era might be the end of human creativity. This could be one way of understanding our current digital predicament. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, in particular in its relatively novel form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), may be read in an apocalyptic way as threatening to colonise human life up to an extent that human intelligence becomes entirely subjected to AI or even obsolete. To elucidate the current human predicament, it is of great importance to grasp what we mean by creativity, and also to clarify how we assess the work- ings of GenAI in terms of intelligence, imagination, and creativity.
Nearly 20 years ago, in lo Squaderno no. 01, I pondered about political agency as a question concern- ing the possibility of new beginnings. Following the lead of prominent critical and radical political philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis among others, I recognized that the imagination and the creation of new political subjects was – and, arguably, still is – the main quest for democratic emancipation.
In research dealing with the people-environment relationship, one“new beginning”is recent phenomenological work on place, place experience, and lived emplacement (Casey 2009, Donohoe 2017, Janz 2017, Malpas 2018, Manzo and Divine-Wright 2021, Seamon 2023b).1 The last term – lived emplacement – is particularly valuable because it speaks to the fact that all human beings are always already bound to their worlds as those worlds necessarily include a place (Malpas 2018, Seamon 2018). Lived emplacement refers to the noncontingent, existential fact that human beings are inescapably enmeshed in some place, whether the situation is as small as a waiting room or as expansive as the view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower.
Following Arendt’s unsurpassed lesson, each new beginning is closely linked to action. As Arendt makes clear, action is distinct from doing, producing, operating, or accomplishing. Manifesting itself as a break with an already existing pattern, that is, as a new beginning and as something utterly unexpected, action is much rarer than everyday language sug- gests. So much so that the new beginning made possible by action“always appears as a miracle”(or the“constitutive magic”referred to in the introduction to this issue), when that“abyss”Plato opened up be- tween undertaking and accomplishing escapes from philosophical taxonomies and bursts into the world.
Among the dedications my students gave to me for on of my consecration anniversaries, one struck me particularly:“Twenty-five years are longer than most of our entire lives.” I had never thought about it: the years of my own rebirth coincide with their birth. In this quarter of a century, time has passed in handfuls – swiftly, intensely – and none of us has remained the same.
The city is an organism with a slow metabolism, sedimenting and accumulating forms, functions, and meanings over time. If in recent centuries it has ceaselessly consumed and absorbed, its present condition compels it to work upon itself, to reuse and reassign meaning to what already exists, to that which is forgotten, underused, or marginal. Yet the existing fabric is not a tabula rasa. It is embedded within entrenched stereotypes rooted in the collective imagination. How, then, might we begin anew? How can virtuous processes of reinterpretation of urban space be initiated, capable of reshaping collective perceptions of place and envisioning new scenarios? How might we suggest the possibility of a new beginning? To activate such processes, a new gaze is required. A shift in perspective. But to destabilise entrenched images, elements of rupture must be introduced into the everyday. The unexpected – what disrupts the reassuring threshold of daily routine – has the power to render the ordinary extraordinary, transforming a familiar environment into an exceptional scene, temporarily subverting spatial order and opening new possibilities for use and imagination. Public art, particularly in its ephemeral forms, emerges as a critical and creative device, capable of triggering processes of perceptual and social transformation, generating new urban imaginaries and redefining the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and space. These practices, often marginal and experimental, act as catalysts that can help unlock the city’s slow metabolism, contributing to the construction of an alternative vision, one that provokes reflection on its transformation and reuse.
In November 2022 I attended a public meeting in the Tuscany region, organised by Anonymous Alcoholics, a mutual-aid organisation of people who have had or still have problems with alcohol addiction. Unlike other service meetings dedicated to support those in rehabilitation, the public meetings are primarily dedicated to publicising the work of AA, particularly among mental health professionals. On the occasion, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and professional educators working in the field of drug addiction had been invited to the meeting in view of fostering potential collaborations.
Art is an inspiration of the idea—an atmosphere that allows the artist to share with others what characterizes him as a subject. Art, despite being the closest thing to the translation of the nou- less, remains immeasurably distant from it. In measuring myself in writing about it – which is an action for others, as Sartre argues, reminding us that being-for-others leads to a subjectivity that becomes an object for the other (Being and Nothingness, 1943) – it is worth saying right away that, although we may share this communal mission, it remains impossible to use an exact abstract scheme, i.e., one that is maximally objective, to describe my subjectivation in relation to the idea. But it is the very nature of the dualistic aspects (subject/object) underlying this reflection that is antithetical to a harmony with communicative purposes, directly external to the subject.
The Jordan Valley, a once luscious ecological, cultural, and economic bedrock of cultivation and civilization (Sawwah, 2002) is afflicted today by poverty, water scarcity, food insecurity, and ecological destruction (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2021). The imposition of a modernist, and capitalist centralization of management and resource distribution began already in the late Ottoman era but crystalized with the 1952 Imperial British Land Program, leading to land fragmentation and commodification (Fischbach, 2000; Mundy and Smith, 2007). In addition, geopolitical imperialist wars over natural resources and settler-colonialism exacerbated by neo-colonial policies displaced Indigenous communities from their ancestral territories rupturing what Escobar (2017) refers to as native ways of knowing, doing, and being.
Using the case of Post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans (Louisiana, USA), this essay argues for an Empowerment Planning (EP) approach to planning practice that integrates Community Planning (CP) with Community Organizing (CO) to address growing conditions of inequality and vulnerability in urban settings. The article explores the case of planning in New Orleans Lower 9th Ward following the City’s devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It focuses on the cultural framework within which CP and CO have developed and eventually shaped the EP approach. EP has grown precisely due to the limits of CP in the absence of CO and vice versa and, therefore, from having created a practice that builds upon the combined strengths of these two approaches. It facilitates the implementation of winning practices in situations where the erosion of fundamental spatial rights has been a longstand- ing concern. In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans experienced a massive erosion of urban rights, including housing and access to basic public services. This condition prompted a social uprising that led to the birth of new alliances between residents, community organizations, and academic institutions that used EP to explore the nexus between contingent urban precarity and new urban partnerships.
A while ago, speaking of alliances, Guattari and Negri stated: “One thing [...] is to reveal new social productive forces and another is to organise them outside and against capitalist and/or socialist structures.” (Guattari and Negri 2010, 94). Translated: an alliance is one thing, its politics quite another.Take the January 6th Capitol rioters, now officially rendered as“patriots”by the seating US President. By all means and measures - even the role of urbanity in it - their coming together speaks of an alliance and one of a multitude of kinds. We do not aim to offer a gratuitous provocation, but a gesture to indicate a question from which to (re)start. Rather than asking what is an alliance, we might query what is in an alliance. What kind of affective capacity engenders the coming together of individualised subjectivities, who might or might not share structural traits (at the class level, gender, ethnicity, and more)?
This paper presents the preliminary findings of a militant research project on healthcare geographies, rooted in the mutualistic and transfeminist politics of the social spaces we are part of (Ambulatorio Popolare Borgo Vecchio in Palermo and Nonna Roma in Rome), both as researchers and as activists.
São Paulo, the largest South American metropolis, is the material and symbolic expression of a complex intertwining of socio-spatial processes that reveal a set of contradictions linked to the city’s production logic. These include segregating planning, visible and invisible barriers between territories and social classes, contrasts in aesthetic and environmental standards among neighborhoods, extensive peripheries lacking basic urban infrastructure and services, degradation of the historic center, idle properties that fail to fulfill the social function of property, environmental degradation of rivers, cyclical water crises, precarious maintenance of public spaces, poor spatial distribution of parks and cultural and sports facilities, tangled electricity and telecommunications wires exposed to the elements, prioritization of highway-based urban planning and individual transportation, slums and other precarious housing, urban mobility challenges, violence, prejudices (such as racism, homopho- bia and sexism), air and noise pollution, and the speculative real estate market. However, beyond these typical characteristics of contradictory urbanization, it is also possible to identify a set of actions and spaces of resistance that redefine metropolitan forms and content.
The paper focuses on the Tor Pignattara neighbourhood in Rome, describing a non-linear trajectory of transformation where demographic shifts have generated tensions and alliances between old and new residents. Located in the eastern periphery of Rome, Tor Pignattara is a territorially ambiguous area, shaped by unregulated urban expansion and characterized by hybridity in its urban landscape and social composition. Historically marked by a strong working-class identity from domestic post-war migrations, today it is one of Rome’s most multicultural districts, with significant immigrant communities from Bangladesh, China, India, and North Africa. In recent decades, the neighbourhood has faced social and urban transformations due to real estate pressure and gentrification, though distinct from the adjacent Pigneto area1. In Pigneto, transformation largely resulted from an economic-political strategy, involving substantial investments in urban regeneration and symbolic rebranding, exemplified by the“Pigneto Village”campaign(Scandurra,2007).Thisinstitutionalprocessredefinedthespaceinabstractterms, distorting its reality and aligning it with neoliberal urban marketing objectives, which have fostered socio-spatial inequalities.
In 2015, over 850,000 people arrived on the Greek shores, exposing the fragility of Europe’s migration governance and making Greece central to the summer of migration. Thousands, transferred from the islands to the mainland, were placed in hastily built camps on city outskirts or forced to sleep in the streets. In Athens, those unable to access these camps sought refuge in public squares and parks (Kasparek 2016), highlighting the severe lack of infrastructure and support. Pedion tou Areos and nearby Victoria Square became key sites where hundreds endured extreme precarity with minimal sanitation and healthcare.
The relationship between housing justice movements and the practice and politics of agroecology and feminist political ecology shares many features. Recent scholarship has increasingly addressed agrifood and housing justice claims in the Global South (Siebert, 2023; Motta, 2021; Motta & Teixeira, 2018). For urban researchers, this growing body of work presents a range of new theoretical ques- tions and challenges. While a robust critical literature has significantly advanced our understanding of housing in various fields—including social policy, human and social geography, politics, sociology, and feminism—it has been less effective in analyzing the role of ecological practices in securing adequate housing and home lives. This gap partly reflects an underexplored critical perspective: the intersection between agroecology and food sovereignty claims.
“Social ties are what keep a society standing. Law is not enough. Even less so the market”(trad. by the authors) says Gaël Giraud, at Le Monde journalist during the AFD (French Developement Agency) conference in December 2018 (Khan 2019). During the interview, he talks about the RCI (Relational Capability Index) he built with philosopher Cécile Renouard and other researchers. This index is rooted in relational anthropology (Giraud et al. 2013, p1), with the aim of redefining the notion of develop- ment. According to the authors, certain individuals who are“financially”poor can nevertheless be surrounded to such an extent that they can meet their daily needs, and benefit from relationships and networks that enable them to find financial and professional springboards. Relationships thus appear to be a structuring element in offering individuals the capacity to build new trajectories of emancipation.
For the past two years, almost every month, we have been travelling to a number of towns in the mountainous hinterland of Campania - in the Caserta and Avellino areas - to carry out two projects funded by the European Recovery Fund, which involve the regeneration of small towns and the implementation of initiatives to protect and enhance local material and non-material resources.
