Call for Paper CONTESTI 1 | 2027 RE-INHABITATION STRATEGIES FOR LEFT-BEHIND PLACES Policies, practices and trajectories of territorial regeneration Edited by Mauro Fontana, Sara Sánchez-Valverde Albarello, Loris A. Servillo DEADLINE October 15, 2026. Contemporary analyses of territorial marginality and fragility highlight a profound polarisation between attractive (albeit increasingly inaccessible) urban centres and inner and mountain areas experiencing demographic and economic decline. This gap drives the debate on left-behind places (Pike et al., 2023; Fiorentino, 2024; Rauhut et al., 2026), conceptualised as a spatial imaginary where territories affected by various marginalisation phenomena converge. Fuelling this fracture is the hegemonic narrative of metrophilia (Morgan, 2014; 2018), which celebrates cities as the sole engines of productive, political, and cultural development, relegating non-urban territories to a structurally subordinate and peripheral role. Socioeconomically, the affirmation of this paradigm translates into a progressive thinning out of services and a weakening of the labour supply in the so-called places that don't matter. The direct consequence is a growing “disenchantment” with institutions, perceived as responsible for the consolidation of territorial inequalities. This disillusionment has been intercepted by neo-populist political forces, capable of redrawing, at the electoral level, the new “geographies of discontent” (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). The objective of this Special Issue is to bring together the accounts of these experimentations to attempt a conceptual recomposition of territorial regeneration. While acknowledging it as a multidimensional quasi-concept (Barbera, in Lupatelli & De Rossi, 2025), the intent is to prevent its fluidity from turning into theoretical vagueness (Lanzani, 2024). We therefore invite reflections on a situated and contemporary definition of dwelling in inner and mountain areas. Concurrently, it is necessary to investigate which political, social, and infrastructural conditions can stimulate and safeguard the regenerative heritage potential and neo-population flows. Finally, it is crucial to understand its spatial and urban-territorial implications to concretely guarantee the habitability of these territories. Theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions may explore territorial regeneration experimentations through transdisciplinary lenses, preferably organised along the following axes: 1. New forms of community dwelling and typological-spatial innovation 2. Tangible and intangible infrastructure of habitability 3. New inhabitants: demographics and rooting practices 4. Local governance, commoning practices, cooperative economies, and tools beyond extemporaneity Download the CALL FOR PAPERS (ITA | ENG) ISSN: 2035-5300 More information about Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti Contesti has been evaluated as Class A-Journal in the latest 2023 official ranking of academic journals set up by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and its evaluation agency ANVUR. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Instituting Practices as an Interpretative Device for the Emancipation of Social Phenomenologies
This paper reflects on an attempt to spatialize the theoretical concept of instituting practices developed by philosopher Roberto Esposito. Grounded in an empirical investigation of welfare spaces and practices in Ponticelli, a peripheral and socially fragile district of Naples, the study examines how collective practices can generate durable spatial transformations. The analysis focuses on an urban health garden developed within a partially abandoned public park through long-term practices of care. The case highlights the role of time, spatial production, and collective agency in processes that compensate for institutional gaps without becoming institutionalized themselves. The recognition of an instituting process opens the possibility of an instituting project, understood not as a prescriptive design tool but as an open, experimental, and relational device capable of engaging with uncertainty, conflict, and diversity. The paper contributes to debates on urban regeneration and planning theory by proposing an operational translation of Esposito’s philosophical concept into an interpretive framework for urban analysis that provides the basis for an alternative design approach.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alessia Franzese https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
INNOIMMOI. Oltre la buona pratica, un processo del fare città tra conflitto e cooperazione
In recent decades, urban planning has increasingly been shaped by practices that challenge the traditional separation between institutional planning and civic initiative, opening up spaces of both cooperation and tension between public administrations and the third sector. This contribution situates itself within this debate by examining the experience of INNOIMMOI, developed in the municipality of Sinnai (CA), not as a paradigmatic best practice but as a situated, uneven, and non-linear process. Through a research-action approach, the authors conceived and accompanied the project by intertwining analysis, design, and interaction with local actors. Several years after the most intense phases of experimentation, the experience is reread ex post by combining an internal perspective on the process with an institutional retrospective, based on an interview with the deputy mayor of Sinnai. The article thus explores what remains when a project does not translate into structured policies: learnings, imaginaries, and latent project resources that, even in the absence of full institutionalization, continue to shape ways of thinking about and practicing city-making.
Copyright (c) 2026 Valentina Rossella Zucca, Davide Simoni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
How civic claims become planning problems: civil society, institutions, and urban governance
This paper examines how civic claims acquire institutional relevance in urban planning beyond the dichotomy of conflict versus collaboration. It proposes an interpretive framework combining civic translation capacity, institutional learning capacity, and a public problems perspective to analyse how urban issues become legible within planning systems. The framework is applied to three civic initiatives in Bulgaria (Stara Zagora, Varna, and Sofia) through process tracing, document analysis, and media sources. The comparison shows that planning outcomes depend less on the confrontational or cooperative character of civic action than on the interaction between the capacity to translate spatial concerns into institutionally recognisable claims and the ability of institutions to learn from and act upon them. The paper offers a transferable analytical matrix for studying civil society–institution relations in urban governance.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zornitza Draganova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An action-research experience in participatory planning and sustainable mobility offers an opportunity to reflect on the evolving relationships between civic initiatives and public institutions in urban contexts. Developed in the north-western area of Milan, the study builds on a long-term engagement with local actors and institutions that led to the establishment of the IFe civic lab in 2023. The laboratory brings together associations, residents, researchers and local organisations to experiment with new forms of civic engagement and institutional interaction around public space and mobility issues. Drawing on the experience of the Space and Change initiative in Municipality 9, the paper examines how fragmented civic demands can be translated into collective learning processes and how local institutions can engage with them. The case highlights both the opportunities and tensions emerging when civic experimentation intersects with planning practices, raising broader questions about institutional learning, intermediary infrastructures and the potential instituting role of civic action in urban governance.
Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Moro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Processes of Institutionalisation of Critical Spatial Practices
This paper proposes to look at ‘critical spatial practices’ in relation to institutions. It understands the institutional process as dynamic, vital, and always in motion, nurtured by what are defined as praxis instituens, which, through their enactment of dissenting stances, manage to challenge and deform what they encounter, transforming also themselves in a mutual relationship. Two practices, Stalker and Torinostratosferica, have been observed using ethnographic methods of inquiry. The contribution is constructed with a twofold objective: on the one hand, by positioning itself in the middle of things, it adopts a pragmatic approach to examine spatial practices and civic demands, since these do not exceed institutional logics but are rather embedded within them. On the other hand, looking at the processes of institutionalisation of their dissent and quest, it focused on the effects of their actions and projects, thus stressing what institutions could learn from the cases.
Copyright (c) 2026 Saskia Gribling https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Istituzioni della memoria e memorie insorgenti. Prospettive transdisciplinari di ricerca
Within a longstanding debate on the relationships between institutions and civil society, museums and other memory‑oriented practices remain underexamined, despite persistent calls in planning theory to address how history is publicly discussed, heritage constructed, and stories narrated. This article examines memory‑building processes not as nostalgic remembrance or reinforcement of the status quo, but as emancipatory opportunities—especially for marginalized groups—and as pathways for orienting transformative actions grounded in an awareness of the past. After briefly tracing the roots and evolution of social museology and its intersections with urban planning, critical heritage studies, and environmental humanities, the article introduces key analytical categories that illuminate the nuances of insurgent memory practices inside and outside the museum, drawing on exemplary cases. It concludes by outlining transdisciplinary research trajectories that may strengthen the overall health of democratic institutions at large.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giusy Pappalardo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Breaking the chains of agro-mafia exploitation: a collaborative approach to support migrant workers in Paternò, Sicily
This paper examines labour exploitation in agriculture (caporalato) as a structural feature of contemporary agri-food systems, sustained by migrant labour, housing precarity and unequal power relations along food supply chains. Focusing on Paternò (Sicily)—a context characterised by long-standing exploitation and institutional fragility—the study analyses the Break Free! project as a policy-oriented experiment aimed at reconfiguring public action beyond emergency and enforcement-based responses. Adopting a practice-based approach, the paper conceptualises the project as part of a longer trajectory of civic institution-building led by the Participatory Presidium of the Simeto River Agreement. Through the analysis of proximity help desks, multi-actor coordination and institutional mediation practices, the paper shows how organised civil society can operate as an intermediary policy actor, translating lived experiences of exploitation into policy-relevant knowledge and fostering collaborative policymaking. The findings highlight both the potential of civic coalitions to stimulate public innovation in weak governance contexts and the limits of project-based interventions in the absence of stable, integrated policy frameworks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Venera Pavone, Medea Ferrigno, David Mascali https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Trading Zones. Negoziazione tra Società Vivile e Istituzioni per il Riuso del Patrimonio Abbandonato. Il Caso della Rocca di Ripafratta, Pisa
This paper examines Reuse Italy as a methodological model for regenerating abandoned architectural heritage in marginal territories. Founded in 2019 as a Benefit Corporation, Reuse Italy combines applied research, architectural design and civic activation, mediating among administrations, communities, universities, professionals and third-sector actors. Its contribution lies in turning fragmented civic demands into shared fields of negotiation, where expectations, technical knowledge, administrative constraints and political choices become mutually intelligible. The paper discusses this approach through the case of the Rocca di Ripafratta, near Pisa. Public assemblies, historical and architectural research, an international call for projects, exhibitions and cultural events helped translate a local demand for recovery into a broader institutional process, supporting public acquisition, new partnerships, funding for safety and accessibility works, and social effects in the village.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Crudeli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Welfare State withdrawal and depoliticisation of society coexist with a proliferation of grassroots initiatives and civic activation in marginalised urban contexts. This paper investigates this social ‘dark matter’: civic participation organised relationally, yet largely invisible to registers. Across four large Italian cities, we relate Third Sector Entity (ETS) density to ISTAT’s composite distress index (IDISE): in Milan and Turin, density falls sharply as distress rises; the association is weaker in Naples, and almost flat in Rome. This deviant signal is consistent with a hypothesised formal-to-informal translation of participation. To test this, we turn to Rome and develop ‘new maps’ of civic participation, mapping grassroots initiatives and the inter-organisational networks connecting them. These relational maps reveal a markedly different configuration from that of registered organisations: civic infrastructures emerge, concentrated in marginal areas, combining formality with informality and conflict with collaboration. This hybridity is politically significant only insofar as it resists reduction to mere subsidiarity or destitute informality; whether it amounts to a self-produced territorial democracy remains an open, analytically demanding question. We therefore propose a replicable protocol to evaluate these civic infrastructures’ inclusiveness and transformative capacity, and discuss implications for planning policies capable of supporting them without absorbing or standardising their forms of action.
Copyright (c) 2026 Luca Brignone, Carlo Cellamare, Stefano Simoncini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Dalla governance ecclesiale alla civic institution: Ricerca-Azione Partecipata, insurgent planning e riterritorializzazione nelle Collaborazioni Pastorali
The article analyzes a Participatory Action Research (PAR) process developed within the Pastoral Collaboration of Mogliano Veneto, interpreting it as a device for the territorial translation of transformations in local welfare systems and in the socio-political role of the Catholic Church. Starting from the dynamics of restructuring and privatization of welfare systems, the paper highlights how these processes generate fragmentation and a reconfiguration of governance arrangements, opening up spaces for non-institutional planning practices. In this framework, the Pastoral Collaboration is reinterpreted as a distributed territorial infrastructure capable of activating processes of spatial co-production and mediation among ecclesial, civic, and academic actors. Through the analytical lenses of insurgent planning and the instituting process, the case study shows how actors not formally recognized as planners effectively assume roles as planners. The findings indicate that PAR fosters collective learning and the re-territorialization of ecclesial spaces, framing the Pastoral Collaboration as a potential civic institution.
Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Manea https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Istituzioni e società civile nello spazio urbano.
This contribution examines how the relationship between public institutions and civil society has been conceptualized and operationalized in planning, outlining research directions that can advance the debate beyond the dichotomy between collaborative and conflictual approaches. On the one hand, it reviews dialogic-communicative and co-productive perspectives, which emphasize the role of civil society in governance processes and the co-production of urban commons. On the other hand, it discusses approaches that identify conflict as a constitutive dimension of democratic and transformative processes. The paper argues for moving beyond this dichotomy by recognizing that the relationship between the state and civil society is dynamic, context-dependent, and continuously reconfigured. From this perspective, the concept of institutional learning is reinterpreted by conceiving institutions as social practices that are continuously constructed and reconstructed through interactions between public and civic actors. This interpretation makes it possible to understand planning as a process of institutional transformation grounded in the shared production of rules, meanings, and collective practices.
Copyright (c) 2026 Nadia Caruso, Elena Ostanel, Giulia Li Destri Nicosia, Laura Saija https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Crisi e condizioni di ricostruzione della sfera pubblica tra anti-istituzionalismo e neutralizzazione amministrativa
This article interprets the contemporary crisis of the urban public sphere in advanced capitalist societies as a crisis of institutional capacity and, simultaneously, as a crisis in the production of public space. From this perspective, it argues that reconstructing the public sphere requires institutions to be conceived as commons: not merely as administrative apparatuses or objects of management, but as enduring infrastructures that make rights, cooperation, and democratic conflict practically possible. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the effectiveness of rights depends upon institutional devices capable of materialising them in goods, rules, and places; from this standpoint, rights create commons, and institutional design becomes a question of translating fundamental rights into operational arrangements. Second, the empowerment of public space depends on a policy mix composed of legal-institutional, organisational, spatial, and cognitive devices capable of generating access, inclusion, and thirdness. Third, such a reconstruction must avoid two symmetrical failures: anti-institutionalism, which conflates institutions with bureaucratic apparatuses and thereby abandons the guarantees of durability, and administrative neutralisation, which absorbs social practices and political conflict into depoliticising procedures. The Naples case is presented as a policy laboratory: civic and collective use rights, through administrative recognition and forms of regulatory autonomy, demonstrate that the object of public policy is not merely the management of commons but the production of public space, the institutionalisation of thirdness, and the generative capacity of rights. The article concludes by identifying principles of institutional design and future research and policy directions centred on durability, contestability, and institutional learning.
Copyright (c) 2026 Nicola Capone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Riabitare il mondo in comune: rigenerazione urbana tra corpo, cura e istituzione
This paper explores the role of urban regeneration as a generative process that intertwines space, subjectivity, and institutions. Focusing on two experiences in Rome—Corviale and Vigne Nuove—the study provides a critical interpretation of urban transformation, using co-production, conflict, and care as operative categories. Through an action-research methodology—based on territorial immersion, co-design, and narrative devices (documentary films, mapping, storytelling)—these case studies highlight the relevance of the relationship between body and public space, mental health and urban belonging. In particular, the We-Z project introduces the concept of the Healing Community as a light institutional and social infrastructure capable of fostering recognition, collective learning, and transformation. The analysis is grounded in a theoretical framework that brings together the thought of Roberto Esposito (Esposito, R. 2021), Nancy Fraser (Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. 2003; Frase, N. 2009) and Arendt (Arendt, H. 2006) and Pulcini’s reflections on the “common world” (Pulcini, E. 2009). These practices demonstrate how urban regeneration can become a tool for spatial justice and the production of meaning, provided it is based on situated, relational, and reflexive processes.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giovanni Caudo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Co-produrre una politica pubblica: uno sguardo etnografico a partire dalle istituzioni
This article offers a critical perspective on co-production literature, drawing on empirical research using an institutional ethnography approach. Much of the literature examines co-production through partial perspectives, focusing on either institutional action or civic agency, leaving the relationship between the two in the background. The article argues that understanding co-production in public policy requires a distinctive lens, able to move across institutional and non-institutional levels, inside and outside organizations, grasping co-production as a situated, dynamic relational process. Through an ‘inside’ analysis of the Apulian policy Luoghi Comuni, on regenerating public spaces for cultural and social purposes, the article examines co-productive processes between institutions and civic organizations, treating this relationship as the central analytical object. The analysis identifies enabling and disabling dimensions structuring these processes, offering a mapping to guide future research and framing co-production as a field where heterogeneous elements intertwine in action.
Copyright (c) 2026 Naomi Pedri Stocco, Elena Ostanel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Beyond Collaboration and Conflict: A Toolkit for Understanding Temporariness Urbanism in Southern Countries
This paper addresses the limitations of the collaboration–conflict binary in analysing civil society–institution relationships within contexts of temporary urbanism, particularly in informal and logistics-driven environments in the Global South, capturing the complexity of these “grey zones”, focusing on temporary urbanism, as not merely a tactical design approach, but as a governance interface between communities and authorities. This study develops a two-layer analytical framework combining a typology of interaction regimes with a value-cycle lens to systematically analyse relational configurations and value dynamics in temporary urban practices. Through comparative vignettes spanning (i) circular reuse of vacant/underused urban spaces and (ii) residual logistics landscapes (backlands, corridors, informal clusters) under polycrisis and techno-logistical transitions. The paper contributes both conceptually and practically by offering an interpretive and planning-oriented toolkit intended to support comparative analysis with particular relevance for diverse urban contexts in Southern Countries.
Copyright (c) 2026 Irina Di Ruocco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Social Capital and Institutional Success. Robert Putnam con Robert Leonardi e Raffaella Y. Nanetti
Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Ostanel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0