LIBRI DI MARCO CASTRIGNAN��

Il contributo presenta alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra il modello insediativo dello urban sprawl e il consumo di territorio in Italia. L’accrescimento di aree urbane a bassa densità nel nostro paese risulta sganciato dai trends demografici e viene letto come il principale responsabile del consumo della risorsa suolo. Dal punto di vista sociologico, il fenomeno della città diffusa sembra inoltre allontanarsi dai tratti peculiari della forma urbana che non può prescindere da un certo grado di densità e compattezza.

The concept of community: how to use it in urban sociology? - My article makes some questions about the heuristic actuality of community as a concept for the urban sociology. Two meanings of community will be considered, the socio-cultural and the socio-spatial one; however, the first one will be stressed, where community is a quality of social relations. So, my framework will be the Weber distinction between community and association; I think it can be used more than the Toennies one in the current context. In other words, it is a question to insert such concept of community in a reflection about urban sociology, trying to individuate the sociospatial implications of community as a quality of social relations. In this sense, the link between community and natural area is extremely important. So, the concept of natural area is the one to focus on; in particular, I will stress that it can be only partially overlapped to community as a quality of social relations, and such overlapping is more and more problematic today. However, despite the difficulty in speaking about natural areas, I think that community is still useful at a micro-level; in fact, the way in which affectional soSummaries cial actions chart the urban space is a very important field of study. So, a shift from an "area" to an "interstice" logic should be required.

Key words: community, natural area, urban interstices, affective action.

Sustainability, density and urban development - This article focuses on urban sustainability, presenting it as something consistent with urban growth. However, such a consistency is possible only if density and compact city are perceived as a priority, against any spread city trend. Moreover, the article stresses the importance of density to characterize urban mood; at the same time, the risks of urban sprawl on this mood are put into evidence.

Alcuni spaccati sulla realtà urbana statunitense, attraverso il contributo di alcuni suoi eminenti studiosi: da Gans a Molotch, da Brenner a Logan, da Alba a Horowitz. Emergono una serie di “punti caldi”, per la città americana e per gli studi urbani: dalla gentrification allo sprawl, dalla crisi dell’idea di crescita alla riqualificazione dei centri storici, dalla diffusione delle gated communities a quella degli shopping malls…

This paper proposes two possible ways of analysing the relationship between poverty and urban space; in particular, poverty is intended as deprivation in the sub-system of economic resources. The first approach consists in localising poverty in macro-areas: this paper puts into evidence the limits of the available statistics on a national basis; it also deals with the problems involved in the delimitation of areas on the basis of which poverty thresholds are defined. The second approach, more micro, takes into account the territorial distribution of poverty in urban areas. In this case, the risks of a new labelling on a territorial basis are stressed; this kind of labelling is founded on a presumed homogeneity of the areas considered, an assumption which often results from a lack of field research.

The paper is focused on the connection between general sociological theory and urban sociology. In the first part, a distinction between thick society and evanescent society is presented. In the second part, some topics of urban sociology are proposed in order to hypothesize that also in urban systems is possible to speak about thick city and evanescent city. The aim of these reflections is to stress how general and urban sociology can influence each other, and which heuristic implications can have this influence.

Hidden needs, i.e. those needs that though present in the territory are not per-ceived by the institutions, have become more and more a crucial issue in the pre-sent discussion going on in Italy on the aims and tasks of the social services, espe-cially after the passing of the Act 328/2000. Even if the social services addressing elderly people are in fact rather well structured if we compare them to other branches of the social services, still action here is often taken assuming that the expressed demand for services is equal to and the same as the potential demand for services. Several research works conducted in the past already proved that, in a variety of different territorial realities, this does not apply. Our essay presents the results of a research study carried out on this topic in the Municipality of Riccione. The idea upon which such work was based is that more relevance should be granted to the abstract needs of elderly people. According to this standpoint, the local gov-ernmental social services should therefore stop acting as an opposed agent with respect to the world of private associations and social cooperatives and set as a priority the following goals: first of all to reach out for those elderly citizens who do not go by themselves to the services to express their needs, and then next to figure out and link together all the resources present in the territory, giving special value to those persons who could help first read and then also answer the hidden needs of their territory, that is to say those needs for which the traditional welfare strategies of health and social assistance have proved to be no longer adequate or efficient.

In this essay we shall discuss the relationship between glocalism and city development, with special attention to the development of periurban areas. In order to do so, the difference between the concepts of social belonging and social inclusion is reinterpreted according to the "types of action" classification by Weber, as well as to the community/association distinction. Our aim is to identify new possible research patterns in the field of social bonds within urban settings.

This paper focuses on the significance of territory-making in studies on vulnerability, a concept that has emerged as one of the key elements in interpreting situations of extreme poverty. Two components of territory-making are dealt with: the concepts of privacy and of domesticity linked with housing, and that of social relations in the territory as a component of the context of where the housing is situated. It is underlined how these two areas potentially constitute different, but complementary, "circles of protection" that can slow down the processes involved in falling from vulnerability into forms of extreme poverty. Finally, the importance is stressed, on the one hand, of the environmental conditions the subject lives in, and on the other, the individual capacities to use available resources to understand the situations of vulnerability present in the territory.