BOOKS BY ALFREDO MELA

Questa nota parte da una illustrazione e da un commento al libro di G. Avallone “La sociologia urbana e rurale. Origini e sviluppi in Italia”, per proporre una riflessione sulle prospettive future della sociologia del territorio. Riflettendo sulla evoluzione della disciplina nell’arco di oltre un secolo, che il libro ricostruisce, si indicano alcuni sfide fondamentali che essa ha di fronte a sé nell’immediato futuro, tanto dal punto di vista teorico, quanto da quello della sua rilevanza sociale.

Strategic Planning and participation -This work proposes some critical considerations about the effective participation level in Italian Strategic Planning. It focuses on participation and governance models in the actual Italian experiences, stressing their problems and their possible alternative and outlining some possible future results for Italian Strategic Planning, with a particular widespread outlook to other processes now developing in some Italian Regions territorial planning experience. Keywords: Urban governance. Public deliberation and participation, empowerment, inclusive design, neo-corporativism. Italian Metropolitan Cities and Areas: Turin case, by Giorgia Bella This work concerns the Italian discussion about metropolitan cities and areas, with a particular attention to Turin. The author focuses on the state of art of the formal constitution of Turin Metropolitan Area (AMT) borders, with particular respect to the strategic lines given by the First and the Second Strategic Plan and considering the internal political debate about possible overlaps between different institutional levels (for example metropolitan government and Provincial government) generated by the creation of the AMT, that could perhaps engender a reorganization of the regional territorial system in the end.

Social sustainability and its evaluation. Some notes starting from the European Program Surprise - This article focuses on the problem of measuring the four fundamental dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, social, institutional), with reference to urban regeneration programs. A specific case, linked to the European project Surprise (Sustainable Urban Regeneration Programs In Southern Europe) is analysed; such project concerns the evaluation of a checklist of actions carried out in three neighbourhoods of Turin where urban regeneration projects are going on over the last ten years. A multidisciplinary benchmark has been defined to measure different aspects of sustainability and the empirical feedback of some operators and practitioners involved in those programs has been reported. They evaluated the importance to each feature. Starting from the results of these interviews, the article develops some more general considerations on the use of quantitative and qualitative indicators to evaluate the social dimension of a sustainable regeneration at a neighbourhood level

The City as a non-Obvious Object of Sociology. The paper discusses some basic issues concerning the conceptualisation of the contemporary city, doing so from a sociological point of view. The author proposes an analytical perspective based on Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘production of space’ and on the study of urban territorialisation cycles. Following Harvey, three dimensions of space are considered: absolute, relative and relational. Starting from these dimensions, three different features of territorial capital are analysed: fixed, reticular and relative. However, the simple presence of these forms of territorial capital is not sufficient to define a city as a specific spatial object: in fact, it is also necessary that these resources become part of a project, shared by a large number of urban actors, to exploit this capital in order to pursue not only individual but also collective aims.