Alfredo Agustoni

ABSTRACT In this paper we try to sketch a synthesis of the relations between energy transitions and social change (starting from biological evolution, with reference to fire domestication) in History, utilizing in an original way conspicuous contributions, such as Mumford’s, Cottrell’s, White’s, Adam’s, Elias’s, Innis’s and Schumpeter’s ones. We pay a particular attention to the use of more and more sophisticated forms of “energy converters”, also the organization of human labor (what Mumford calls a “megamachine”) being one of them. At the same time, we try to stress the links between energy transitions and communication, with a particular attention to the implications of those links for the relations of power within human societies

Globalisation is first of all a problem of languages (languages that meet and collide with each other), as we have realized at the age of the tower of Babel. Of course we are talking about languages in all the accepted meanings of the word, that is including any languages (art, music, space, etc.). In this age, where the world is said to be like a whole, useful reflections over this matter must take into account the globalisation of the economical processes, which are very important in the current political and ideological debate. Therefore the starting point for this essay is a number of interviews to art operators, carried out in a wider research about Lombardy in the global contexts, in order to make a critical excursus through some of the most important theories about the matter.

ABSTRACT In this paper we try to sketch a synthesis of the relations between energy transitions and social change (starting from biological evolution, with reference to fire domestication) in History, utilizing in an original way conspicuous contributions, such as Mumford’s, Cottrell’s, White’s, Adam’s, Elias’s, Innis’s and Schumpeter’s ones. We pay a particular attention to the use of more and more sophisticated forms of “energy converters”, also the organization of human labor (what Mumford calls a “megamachine”) being one of them. At the same time, we try to stress the links between energy transitions and communication, with a particular attention to the implications of those links for the relations of power within human societies

Il presente articolo propone una serie di preliminari riflessioni sul mix sociale quale introduzione alla successiva sezione tematica. La questione relativa agli esiti della prossimita sociale e spaziale tra le differenze non e certo estranea alla tradizione sociologica. Tuttavia, negli ultimi vent’anni la problematica del mix e tornata ad essere centrale come dispositivo di governo nelle aree metropolitane nordamericane ed europee. Nella attuale configurazione neoliberale del welfare state, e quello specificatamente abitativo, in termini territoriali tale aspetto ha assunto una preminenza nelle politiche urbane. La promozione a livello di quartiere del social mix attraverso la coabitazione con segmenti di popolazione caratterizzati da maggiori risorse sociali, economiche e culturali raffigura una strategia assai diffusa nel contrasto alla crescente marginalizzazione e segregazione dei gruppi sociali ed etnici piu vulnerabili. Gli effetti di questa impostazione risultano deboli rispetto agli obiettivi previsti. In tal senso, la logica del social mix appare viziata da una retorica dell’azione pubblica in cerca di legittimita che occulta i processi di disuguaglianza e da una visione deterministica sui rapporti tra spazio e societa. Da queste criticita e necessario partire per comprendere le effettive potenzialita del social mix quale vettore di mutamento.

Si tratta di un contributo di ricerca, nell'ambito del progetto Prin 2006 sui conflitti ambientali, relativo alla governance e ai conflitti che si sviluppano intorno all'installazione di impianti eolici sull'Appennino abruzzese. Particolare rilievo viene dato al ruolo delle expertise nei processi decisionali e nella depoliticizzazione delle issue. This paper exposes a qualitative investigation concerning governance and conflicts about wind energy plants realization on Abruzzo's (Italy) mountains. Particular attention is due to the role of the expertises in decisional processes and in depoliticizing energy issues

I saggi raccolti nel volume sono l'esito di ricerche empiriche e riflessioni teoriche sul tema della convivenza interetnica nei contesti urbani in Italia. Le articolate dinamiche di costruzione della cosiddetta società multiculturale passano attraverso il quotidiano confronto all'interno della prossimità socio-spaziale tra autoctoni e stranieri. Da tempo l'habitat delle città italiane è profondamente mutato, in particolare nelle zone popolari in cui si è radicata la maggior parte delle famiglie immigrate nel loro percorso di inserimento e d'integrazione. I diversi casi studio riguardano quartieri delle grandi aree urbane - Roma e Milano - e quartieri di città di media dimensione - Padova, Bologna, Pesaro, Bergamo e Palermo - nei quali da tempo si sono venute a strutturare le differenti modalità di convivenza interetnica. Convivenze in cui si esplicitano nei rapporti tra i diversi gruppi talune difficoltà, talvolta conflitti, sovente causate dalle condizioni di esclus...

... lare ha lungamente studiato gli spazi di interazione micro-sociale propri della vita quotidiana5, mentre in Italia Antonio Mutti e poi lo stesso Agu-stoni hanno attualizzato le classiche ... Gimenez ME, Does Ecology Need Marx?, in Organization & Environment, XIII, 3, 2000, pp. ...

La crescente attenzione, da parte delle politiche pubbliche, alla dimensione locale spinge in direzione di una sua rinnovata considerazione. Negli ultimi decenni, alcune tra le più significative analisi sociologiche sembrano rivalutare la centralità di questa dimensione come ambito di ricostruzione della socialità e della fiducia in relazione con i fenomeni di globalizzazione. Il volume si concentra poi sugli strumenti e sui metodi per la consultazione e la delibaerazione pubblica, prendendo in esame il rapporto tra cittadini, territorio e pubblica amministrazione, nonché i metodi e le tecniche di ricerca a sostegno dei processi decisionali partecipati.

This contribution aspires to explain the work of the Chieti-Pescara local unit of a national research project concerned with the role of expertises in environmental disputes (Pelliz-zoni 2011). The common premise of the various research units is that different expertises, because of the reliability they carry, give top-level legitimacy within the dynamics of con-flict, playing at once a political role (although in a rather wide meaning of the concept) and a more precise technical role. The attention of our local unit was focused particularly on the dispute connected with the installation of wind farms in some places located in Abruzzo, a region of southeastern Italy on the Adriatic Sea but also characterized by a wild mountain environment, with a strong cattle-raising tradition and a high concentration of ecologically frail natural parks (among them, the Abruzzo National Park) and areas of natural interest. We conducted a multiple-case-study analysis concerning several localities af...

ABSTRACT Starting from a general discourse about the ambiguous relations between neoliberal pol- icies, housing issues and urban segregation in Europe, we consider the Italian case. Firstly, we consider the characteristics of its housing policies, in order to show the most relevant variables in explaining migrants’ segregation. Secondly, we consider the case of Milan, with an analysis of segregation processes and of the ambiguity of public interventions, once more considering the mainstream neoliberal discourse on urban and dwelling policies.

Il presente intervento riprende il lavoro dell'unita locale di Chieti del Prin 2006 ("Expertise, cittadinanza e istituzioni nel conflitto ambientale", capofila Univ. di Trieste). In particolare, l'unita di Chieti si e concentrata sulla realizzazione di centrali per la produzione di energia eolica in Abruzzo. La presente relazione pone soprattutto l'accento sui rapporti (spesso conflittuali) tra le differenti forme di sapere esperto, nonche tra le expertise tecnico-scientifiche e i saperi locali, "radicati" nel territorio, nelle dinamiche del conflitto e nei processi della governance della questione. Al centro del discorso si colloca la capacita dei soggetti economici, dell'amministrazione e delle expertise di valorizzare il proprio "capitale simbolico" di fiducia attraverso un'immagine di imparzialita e competenza. Le imprese, generalmente portatrici di un'immagine di competenza, necessitano spesso l'"ecolabeling" d...

is book deals with a pivotal issue often marginalized by sociological analysis: the relationship between energy and society, with different contributions from several European scholars. e articles cover a series of topics concerning energy policies, risk communication, and sustainable development. e increasingly complex social organization emerging from the energy shifts of the last two centuries, incorporates an increasing quantity of expert knowledge. Quite paradoxically, when the expert systems seem to be realizing the dream of total control on the uncertainty of the events, any occasional accident reveals to be a check for them contributes to undermining their credibility. Following the idea of a post-democratic turn, this kind of mistrust can be considered a different face of political elites and politics in general, in the frame of a radical change concerning political culture in the last several decades. is change is clear in areas such as risk communication, governance, and energy policies.

At the beginning of the 1990s, after more than a century-long history of emigration abroad, Italy suddenly found that it had become a country of immigration. In this period daily newspaper and television reports of the illegal occupation by immigrants of abandoned and deteriorated buildings in three large metropolitan areas of Milan, Turin and Rome brought to the public’s attention a presence which had hitherto remained hidden. The disorderly settlement of immigrants was concurrent and concomitant with the profound forms of deterioration in some sectors that affected major Italian cities from the last years of the 1970s, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of deindustrialisation that was abruptly changing the face of the old ‘Fordist’ industrial cities into the much more fluid and ambiguous face that characterises the ‘global’ city. (Harvey, 1989a; Marcuse & Van Kempen, 2000, 2002; Sassen, 1999, 2007).

James O’Connor is better known for developing an “Eco-Marxist” approach (O’Connor 1990, 1998) than for his analysis of the fiscal crisis of the state (O’Connor 1979). What makes him still a cutting-edge author is his attempt to examine—from a “critical”Marxist perspective—problems that were “emergent” back in the 1970s, and that have bynow turned into fully-fledged emergencies. In both cases, then and now, O’Connor notes how capital externalises its own contradictions to spheres outside the restricted realms of production, only to have to confront such contradictions as its own environmental problems. In a way, capitalist productionworks like Carnot’s heat engine, incapable of generating movement without exporting disorder outside its own boundaries. However, unlike Carnot’s engine, which reproduces the same movements, we findourselves beforehistorical processeswhere capitalismexpandsby colonising ever newer ambits and lands, while at each turn finding itself in the same contradictions. In actuality, this sort of argument is traceable to a series of reflections on imperialism, starting with Hobson, Lenin, and Luxemburg. In any case, there is a direct line connecting O’Connor’s work in the early 1970s, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, with that which emerges a quarter century later in Natural Causes. The link can be identified in his analysis of the relationships between capitalism, the state, and social movements (from the protest movements of the 1960s to the environmentalist movements of later decades). The starting point, as O’Connor himself describes it through an autobiographical lens, can be found in the interests that animate his work as a young scholar of public finance during the 1960s—a leftist scholar who catches the promising potentials of attending to class conflict. In this regard, the state and public finance, erroneously assumed to be neutral, can tell us a lot more than we imagine as human beings. The capitalism of the “gilded age” had shifted its intrinsically conflictual dynamics to the state, public spending, welfare, and warfare.

ABSTRACT The presented research, characterized as a case study, was conducted in the months of April and May 2018 in the Matam Region, north of Senegal, conducted by Centro Ricerche IDOS within the framework of a project of economic development and business creation, realized by the Italian branch of the Green Cross NGO and funded by the Italian Ministry of the Interior. The research activity envisaged by the project was focused, first of all, on the knowledge level of the risks associated with migration among the rural population of the region, but many of the hypotheses concerned the relations that had never been sufficiently thematized between migratory waves and climate changes that have affected the area in the last 50 years.

ABSTRACT Nel presente saggio, la nostra attenzione si concentra soprattutto sulle dinamiche insediative a livello locale, attraverso l’analisi di un caso particolare, quello di Zingonia, in Provincia di Bergamo. Si tratta di un caso individuato da peculiarità che lo differenziano rispetto a quelli più avvezzi alla ribalta mediatica (via Padova a Milano, il quartiere Pigneto a Roma, via Anelli a Padova): questi ultimi, caratterizzati in generale dall’ubicazione relativamente centrale in significativi contesti urbani, hanno contribuito in maggiore misura alle rappresentazioni dell’insediamento immigrato a livello nazionale e all’immaginario correlato. Naturalmente, la ribalta mediatica non è democratica: un morto nel centro di Roma pesa più di un morto in un piccolo capoluogo di provincia. Similmente, il disagio e l’attrito legato all’insediamento di nuove popolazioni a poche fermate di metropolitana da piazza del Duomo a Milano, lungo arterie urbane come via Padova o viale Monza, quotidianamente percorse dai milanesi, ricevono un trattamento completamente differente rispetto ad analoghi fenomeni che hanno luogo su territori che chi attraversa l’autostrada Milano-Venezia neppure intravede quando, non lontano da Bergamo, gli impianti industriali di Dalmine gli vengono incontro e poi scompaiono. Il caso preso in esame, dicevamo, si caratterizza per la propria individualità, strettamente legata alle caratteristiche del contesto e ai processi che lo hanno interessato.

Globalisation is first of all a problem of languages (languages that meet and collide with each other), as we have realized at the age of the tower of Babel. Of course we are talking about languages in all the accepted meanings of the word, that is including any languages (art, music, space, etc.). In this age, where the world is said to be like a whole, useful reflections over this matter must take into account the globalisation of the economical processes, which are very important in the current political and ideological debate. Therefore the starting point for this essay is a number of interviews to art operators, carried out in a wider research about Lombardy in the global contexts, in order to make a critical excursus through some of the most important theories about the matter.