Ricerc@Sapienza

The overall aim of project "Cities in transition" is to investigate the recent transformations of cities in the framework of a more general, long-term view, on the evolution of urban contexts.
The research follows an interdisciplinary approach that intends to integrate legal, sociological, political and economic competences to assess, through the analysis of specific case studies at a local level (specifically, in the urban context of the municipality of Rome), whether a new design culture, based on the involvement of different actors and the implementation of small-scale interventions, can be successful in transforming public spaces as the catalysts of new processes of urban regeneration, characterized by new political, economic and social relationships, new democratic rules, etc.
More specifically, the project will investigate the "informal aspects" of these social actions aimed at using and reusing urban spaces and will provide a comparative analysis with other local social experiences in Italy and abroad. In short, the project aims to: i) define a shared glossary between the different disciplines, as a basis for an integrated research work; ii) develop a juridical analysis of the actors, activities and tools involved in regeneration; ii) evaluate the costs and benefits, other than the risk factors, of the different available options; iii) analyze the individual and collective actors involved, values and types of relationships; iv) verify the broad impacts of these processes on a number of possible outcomes (economic, social, political, etc.), included the relationship between citizens and institutions and the consequent innovations in the political debate and theory. Additional spill-overs of the research activities are the creation of a set of practices able to mitigate frictions among local stakeholders and rising awareness among local authorities and citizens.