This article investigates the intricate interplay between ressentiment—as social emotion—social love, and solidarity in democratic societies, focusing on the urban environment as the primary stage where these processes materialize. Far from being a marginal emotion, ressentiment is deeply intertwined with democratic life, arising from the gap between proclaimed values and lived conditions. It represents an affective reaction to the perceived betrayal of the promise of equality inscribed in democratic ideals. The discussion explores how perceptions of injustice can fracture trust and intensify divisions, but also how they, under certain conditions, can be redirected toward political engagement and common action. The city, characterized by density, diversity, and the continuous negotiation of difference, can serve as a privileged arena for this transformation. Urban space does not merely reflect inequalities; it actively shapes social processes and provides the infrastructure through which collective sentiments are articulated. In this context, “social love” is conceptualized not as a sentimental aspiration, but as a relational force capable of redirecting the moral indignation of ressentiment, far from strategies of grievance politics toward constructive forms of social and political belonging. Cities can function as laboratories of solidarity where grievances are reframed into collective projects that strengthen social cohesion. Mitigating the destructive potential of ressentiment requires addressing its structural roots through inclusive urban policies and dialogical spaces. An approach grounded in social love can counter fragmentation, mobilizing emotions in the service of substantive equality. In this perspective, the city can become a space and a laboratory for change, where resentment can be channeled as a generative force capable of sustaining widespread forms of social love and a sense of the common good.

The rapid ageing of the European population demands a reconfiguration of housing models and place-based welfare systems. This contribution proposes a conceptual framework that interprets public space and domestic space as interdependent components of a spatial ecology oriented toward active ageing. The article highlights how integrating urban design, proximity-based policies, and technological innovation can support autonomy, social participation, and well-being among older adults, thereby contributing to the development of resilient and inclusive environments. When integrated into a framework of territorial governance, these dimensions can serve as strategic levers for the construction of long-lived, inclusive, and resilient cities. In conclusion, promoting active ageing entails recognizing the home, the neighbourhood and the whole city as complementary infrastructures of well-being and orienting technological innovation toward objectives of spatial equity and social cohesion.

The aim of this study is to develop a multidimensional assessment tool based on findings from the AGE-IT comprehensive study conducted from April to June 2025. AGE-IT aimed to explore differences in quality-of-life perceptions among older Italians, drawing on data from 1,631 participants across three diverse Italian regions (Emilia-Romagna, Abruzzo, and Puglia), and collected with a range of standardized tools. Given the lack of evidence-based data on the comprehensive evaluation of objective and subjective quality-of-life perceptions among older people, this study proposes an index that explicitly accounts for a review of these dimensions, including both objective and subjective QoL. Thus, for this present study, the Quality-of-Life Perception Index was developed using data from the AGE-IT study to provide a more holistic and nuanced understanding of quality of life by assigning greater specific weight to a set of territorial variables. The objective Quality-of-Life Perception Index demonstrated acceptable reliability and showed significant variations across regions, sex, age, and mobility status. Women reported significantly higher objective quality of life than men, and transport autonomy emerged as a critical determinant of well-being. The index showed moderate positive correlations with subjective quality-of-life measures, supporting its criterion validity. These findings provide a foundation for comprehensive quality-of-life assessment in older populations and demonstrate that digital skills are strongly linked to advanced forms of e-health engagement, while similar skill levels translate into different uptake levels across countries. For practitioners, this implies that improving ehealth adoption requires not only digital skills training but also user-centred service design and system integration, while for researchers it highlights the need to move beyond single indicators and treat laterlife digital health inclusion as a context-dependent, hierarchical process rather than a binary divide.

For many decades, the large part of developed countries has been experiencing the progressive ageing of their populations. This quantitative change is also accompanied by a qualitative shift in social representations of the third age. Within these changes, a fundamental role is played by the desire to experience opportunities for socializing, leisure, and culture that can shape a new and more complex concept of well-being. Within this context, tourism experience plays a crucial role. The focus is therefore on the new characteristics of senior tourism and the conditions under which it can represent a full and satisfying experience, going beyond the classic offerings of “sun, sand, and sea” or medical tourism. To this end, a qualitative study was conducted, revealing a typology of individuals that can serve as a useful reference for the tourism market to diversifying its offerings.

This article aims to explore the role of the right to walkability for older adults within the broader goal of developing age-friendly cities, with a focus on the intersection of urban policy and tactical urbanism. In light of Italy’s demographic ageing and shifting urban dynamics, the study investigates how cities can support pedestrian mobility for older populations by improving walkability, understood as one of the key indicator of health, autonomy, and social inclusion. The article outlines how tactical urbanism, characterized by low-cost, temporary, and community-driven interventions, can complement institutional planning efforts and foster more accessible, inclusive public spaces. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Bari’s metropolitan area in late 2024, which included 86 interviews with people over 65, the study identifies four typologies of urban walkers and highlights how the local urban environment significantly affects older adults’ mobility and perceived well-being. The findings emphasize the need for participatory approaches and localized interventions that address physical, social, and psychological barriers to walkability. The article concludes by advocating for integrated strategies that recognize older citizens as active participants in shaping urban space, positioning walkability as both a practical and symbolic component of inclusive urban futures.

This paper presents the Women’s Wise Walkshops (WWW) project, a participatory feminist methodology for urban co-design implemented in Ferrara, Italy. The research explores how women’s situated knowledge and lived experiences can inform inclusive urban planning through collaborative urban traversals and participatory design processes. Drawing on feminist epistemologies and combining elements of flâneuserie and Situationist dérive, the WWW methodology employs a seven-phase approach including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, urban walkshops, and collective mapping exercises. The study involved approximately 110 women across two distinct neighborhoods—Arianuova-Giardino and Krasnodar—representing diverse socio-demographic backgrounds. Through a thematic analysis of interviews, visual documentation, and post-walkshop discussions, six key thematic clusters emerged: safety, public space, mobility systems, community spaces and associations, public services for citizens, and participatory processes. The findings reveal that women’s perspectives from marginalized positions provide critical insights into urban inequalities and offer transformative visions for more inclusive cities. The research shows that structured participatory processes not only generate valuable urban policy recommendations but also foster community cohesion, democratic engagement, and spatial justice. The WWW methodology represents a significant contribution to feminist urban studies and participatory planning, offering a replicable framework for integrating women’s voices into urban governance and design processes.

The article explores the complex interplay between resentment and democratic society, and the material and visible forms that this emotion takes within the city. Ressentiment emerge as key explanatory categories, influencing individuals’ perceptions and actions within social processes. Resentment is portrayed as a deeply democratic sentiment, arising from the perceived betrayal of the promise of equality inherent in democratic ideals. The article examines how this perceived injustice fuels a pervasive sense of resentment, which can either fragment social bonds or, alternatively, serve as a catalyst for political and social change. Urban space, with its dense and heterogeneous environment, is identified as a critical site where these dynamics become particularly visible. Cities, as synecdoche of society, not only reflect but actively shape social processes and collective feelings. They are arenas where perceived inequalities can either lead to social envy and resentment or foster solidarity and transformative activism. The article argues that addressing the roots and manifestations of resentment through inclusive and participatory processes is crucial for mitigating its destructive potential and harnessing it for positive social change. This approach involves creating urban spaces that facilitate critical reflection, social interaction, and collective action, thereby strengthening social and political efficacy among individuals and communities.

The older citizens represent a portion of the population that is not only already high but is also expected to increase according to trend analyses from major national and international research reports. The pandemic experience has shown how they feel the scarcity of relationships and the loneliness of their homes as factors that significantly impact the quality of their daily lives. This challenging historical moment has provided an opportunity to implement a series of projects specifically dedicated to those over 65, aiming to ensure a full range of possibilities for them, starting from highly "enabling" processes. In this perspective, the theme of social senior housing and its various manifestations represents a key strategy to counteract relational poverty, toward intervening in the level of social sustainability through multi-actor network pathways that bring together institutions, private entities, third sector, and research centers. The article aims to analyze the potential that the senior cohousing model can offer, as well as the difficulties this type of shared living arrangement faces-moreover when designed specifically for older individuals and supported by public administrations-, and which still makes it an almost experimental experience in Italy.

The paper emphasizes the growing importance of public-private partnerships in fostering socio-territorial sustainability. It highlights a shift away from the traditional view of businesses as “irresponsible” and driven by predatory motives, toward seeing them as active partners in public policy and governance. Corporate social responsibility is positioned as a key driver of this change, with a focus on engaging businesses in collaborative efforts with public institutions. The study reviews international literature and conducts empirical research involving 100 small and medium-sized enterprises in Bari, examining their corporate welfare practices and engagement with local communities. The findings underscore the importance of business-public sector collaboration in promoting sustainability, revealing both the potential and limitations of corporate social sustainability as not only a cultural paradigm but also a practical tool for business decision-making and territorial governance. This approach aligns with the quintuple helix model, which integrates various sectors in addressing societal challenges.

Aging is one of the most important challenges of our times. As stated by United Nations’ report on 1983, “Policies to meet the challenge of a growing, healthier and more active seniors population -based on the view of the ageing of society as an opportunity to be utilized -automatically benefit the individual ageing person, materially and otherwise. Similarly, any effort to ameliorate the quality of life for the seniors, and to meet their diverse social and cultural needs, enhances their capacity to continue interacting with society”. Aging society provides not only a new context, but a new opportunity to rethink our traditional views of age. The growing number of seniors people will soon make the majority of overall population. As noticed by reports of international organizations, cities will play a more important role in dealing with these quantitative and cultural changes, mostly because it is expected that a quarter of the population over 60 will be concentrating in the central areas of compact cities. In brief, cities are at once growing and aging at an incredible speed. Although aging process represents a fundamental and structural phenomenon with very deep consequences at economic, social and political level, and with an impact on the individual one as on the society as whole, our cities should deal with this process and respond, in terms of public health and social care, to needs of older people, also those that will experience a loss of autonomy. It is important to note that there are a greater heterogeneity within older population in terms of conditions and demands, which depend on their specific personal, social and familial context. Urban space - in its complex differentiation between public space, third space, and private space - represents both a tool and a strategic factor in pursuing the objective of ensuring high levels of widespread well-being and, from a political perspective, fully shaping the right to the city for seniors individuals.

In the city of the Nineteenth-century, transformed by the values of the French revolution and by the modernity, women did not have yet full citizenship. The public space was still strongly a male space and women, still with a weak public subjectivity, remained the object of the male gaze. Women have begun a process of conquering urban space by claiming their right to the city, through their physical presence in the city itself. Through physical space, women have claimed their full symbolic citizenship. The project of an inclusive city takes shape from the public demands of women who, as Annie Hockshild wrote, gave birth to the most important revolution of the 20th century. However it is a stalled revolution that still today requires a legislative protection for the project of the substantial equality, which is still not fully achieved. In addition to the various national legislations, international legislation also recognizes the central objective of guaranteeing women's right to full citizenship. In the second part of the article, the focus is precisely on the normative content of this legislation and in particular on the objectives of the UN Agenda 2030.

It is possible that our century and the one just past will be remembered in the future as the centuries of migration. Faced with the extent of migration today, social scientists have posed several questions, and in particular they have examined the causes of migration, the integration of immigrants into host countries, and the development of their cultural identity. The newcomers are almost always poorer than those who settled before them, and have different languages, physical appearance, customs, beliefs, and religious practices. The widespread perception is that of an upheaval of the social order. For some, it is the dawn of a new world, under the banner of métissage (or hybridization) and universal brotherhood; for most, it is the beginning of an invasion. Immigration is always a matter of borders: Who is "us"? Who is "them"? The host society has the power to define, classify, and construct the social category of immigrants. There are many differences within this category and obviously any strategic policy should be able to manage every specificity. Nevertheless, we need starting by focusing the more general ideal type of what is "otherness" and what it can be in the social representations in order to construct new conditions of encounter. In this scenario, urban spaces represent the stages on which the encounter with difference takes place. The space is never neutral and may affect, sometimes significantly, the conditions of that encounter. The physical form of the city is the result of widespread social representations of all phenomena, but it is also able to act on those same social representations by altering the processes that take shape within it. The urban dimension and the redesign of the urban space become increasingly key to shaping and managing social processes aimed at governing the transformation processes in a multi-ethnic sense of the European societies. Urban policy-makers can either wait for spontaneous processes of integration and virtuous composition of differences, or implement actions to manage differences, to prevent potential conflicts and start processes of active inclusion. In order to support the act of wandering within this second pattern of urban policies, moving from simple tolerance to a Habermasian process of dialogical exchange, at least two conditions are necessary: the existence of shared public spaces, and the quality of policies for regulating the use of urban public spaces.

Globalization and financial processes have progressively generated an intense and problematic phenomenon of disconnection between companies and their territories. Breaking of the spatial link has often led to the breaking of the social bond and the rupture of territorial cohesion. In order to counteract this process of progressive lack of solidarity and social trust between companies and territorial communities, a very important role can be played by Corporate Social Responsibility. From few decades the European and the national reflection was focused on “Corporate Social Responsibility” considered a fundament strategy able to activate the (re) construction of new forms of solidarity and to create favorable conditions for social and economic sustainable growth, restoring continuity between activities and long-term effects connected to them. In this perspective, the corporate territorial welfare is its empirical expression, and a strategic tool to achieve the goal of counteract social and geographical peripherality to guarantee a polycentric and sustainable development of territories and highest level of quality of life of local communities. To grasp this new type of relationship that companies can establish with “their” territories starting from their choices of welfare, different models of corporate welfare introduced in some companies in Puglia have been analyzed. A specific attention has been dedicated to the particular form of corporate welfare extended to the territory and therefore to territorial stakeholders. These actions, when present, go well beyond the most classic attention to employees, and can be considered opportunities to give shape or rebuild the most direct link with the territories. In order to investigate the corporates’ welfare choices, we have used a qualitative methodology interviewing the human resources managers of several Apulian companies and asking them about welfare choices. From the analysis carried out it has been possible to define a typology of enterprises in relation to the adopted model of welfare. The objective that we intend to pursue with this ongoing research is to define a kind of open catalogue of good practices that can facilitate the choices of companies to adhere to innovative forms of corporate and territorial welfare.

Le radici rappresentano la metafora di un senso di appartenenza che va oltre la presenza fisica nel paese di origine. La crescente attenzione al turismo delle radici testimonia lo spazio riconosciuto a un bisogno di identità e di radicamento avverti-to in misura crescente in un mondo altamente mobile e interconnesso. La ricerca dal titolo "Tornare a casa. I viaggi di ritorno degli albanesi residenti in Puglia", è un'indagine esplorativa centrata sul turismo delle radici di questi soggetti provenienti da un Paese che ha una storia di emigrazione del tutto peculiare. Attraverso la realizzazione di interviste semistrutturate sono state indagate le motivazioni dell'esperienza migratoria, il loro senso di appartenenza, la frequenza e le rappre-sentazioni che i soggetti ascoltati hanno del viaggio di ritorno. L'analisi dei protocolli di intervista ha reso possibile individuare una tipologia a tre voci: i nostalgici, i doppi cittadini, i malinconici, i solo italiani.

Epidemics have always had a very close link with cities, represented as the place characterized by differences, exchanges and contaminations. The cause of this urban connotation of epidemics, however, is the result not only of physical and urban features of the cities but also of their cultural traits and of their symbolic representation, their being always imagined as the place of licentious mores, of perdition and sin. Today, in the years of the pandemic by Covid-19, again, the precautions suggested by science are accompanied by those related to the need to keep a respectful behaviour of religious dictates to be able to rely on divine benevolence. Within the process of pluralization which characterizes postmodernity, alongside heuristic models based on models of scientific rationality, others attributable to criteria and categories linked to religion have found some space. Sometimes attributable to a specific religious belief, others to a more general religiosity that often disregards a more structured feeling of belonging towards a subjective spirituality. Also the research whose results are being discussed, has revealed a profound religiosity differentiated in form and intensity, and has showed how much the process of rationalization is related to the one of `re-enchantment' of the world.

The pandemic experience from Covid-19 has heightened the awareness of the impact that relational poverty has on the quality of life, especially of older people’s lives. The obligation to stay inside their homes to protect them from the risk of infection has had the indirect effect of precipitating many elderly people into a state of solitude from which, at least in part, the city had been protecting them until then. The pandemic has shown how older citizens live the shortage of relationships and the solitude of housing as factors that can heavily affect the quality of their lives. But this difficult historical moment has been an opportunity to implement a series of projects dedicated to over 65 people so that they could be guaranteed a fullness of possibilities. Within them there is “CondiViviamo” activated in Bari (Italy) and focused on the possibility of realizing an experience of cohousing as an instrument to contrast the economic uneasiness and, above all, the relational poverty. The starting assumption is both to guarantee older people a better existential condition, and to make them protagonists of this process. The project, carried out in a multifactorial perspective, is initially aimed at a limited number of elderly subjects, but it has the secondary purpose of defining a model exportable to other cities in the same territory of Apulian region and even at national level. The analysis of the outcomes of the project will also be functional to the definition of future operational guidelines for public social policies. Received: 22 August 2022 / Accepted: 20 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022

Il dibattitto italiano sui centri storici, caratterizzato per lungo tempo da un andamento carsico, è stato spesso carente sia sul piano del riconoscimento della loro specificità, sia su quello di un'analisi processuale delle loro caratteristiche. Il punto di partenza è riconoscerli come parte integrante della città ma, allo stesso tempo, come parti caratterizzate da tratti specifici. Alcune volte i centri storici sono considerati come una risorsa per la città in termini di sviluppo sociale ed economico; altre volte come un problema che richiede strategie di intervento. L'autore propone una riflessione che muove dalle peculiarità di ciascuna realtà, per connettersi a una proposta tipologica centrata sui processi di cambiamento che caratterizzano i centri storici. Questa prospettiva di analisi rappresenta anche la possibilità di orientare interventi progettuali in vista di politiche di rigenerazione urbana.