Speakers
Description
The paper proposes to explore the issue of spatial justice through the concept of the eco-public network, conceived as the intersection of spaces that integrate ecological and social values.
North-East Italy, the object of this analysis, is characterised by a recurrent tendency towards disconnection, with a growth model that has produced fragmentation and territorial, economic and environmental fragility. However, the wide meshes of this territory suggest new opportunities for enhancement, focusing on open space as a de-polarised ecological framework of variable intensity, which is activated and reorganised on the basis of multiple factors and conditions. This network involves on the one hand physical and spatial elements (urban and rural open spaces, open porosities in the urbanised area, slow mobility routes, collective infrastructures, community spaces), and on the other hand expectations and imaginaries that over time have defined ecological roles and values in relation to uses and practices.
Observing the eco-public network, with its uneven and plural movements, allows us to reflect on the very essence of the project and the need to recognise spaces, subjects and collaborations of potential transformation, as in the proposed case of the renaturation of the Stella River. Among the actors of change are human and non-human subjects that make it necessary to explore the topic of cohabitation, of new possible alliances and conflicts, including spatial ones. In this context, there emerges the need to promote what we might call ‘weak projects’: minor, open and processual projects that rely on a constantly changing framework, and that reflect the action of non-hierarchical and secondary subjects.
The spatial achievements that characterise these projects are often fragile, charged with emancipatory tensions, and subject to external pressures. However, recognising their potential allows us to test the circularity between prefiguration and exploration: past the time of the ‘grand urban project’, we are called upon to experiment with an open, possibilist and pragmatic attitude, where even different, secondary or vulnerable subjects are recognised as having the capacity for change and spatial rights at multiple scales.
| Keywords | eco-public network; weak projects; emancipation |
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