Simonetta ARMONDI, Politecnico di Milano - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Italy
Stefano DI VITA, Politecnico di Milano - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Italy
Beatrice GALIMBERTI, Politecnico di Milano - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Italy
With global value chains, the dynamics of manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure networks, and energy and water cycles give us profiles of the complexity of flows and spatialities of phenomena and policies that studies and plans confined to the municipal, metropolitan and regional scale, on the one hand, or extended to the national and global scale, on the other, cannot fully comprehend. The metabolism of turbulent processes of urbanisation seems to be sustained by operational landscapes, a vast assemblage of production settlements, logistics platforms, and technological infrastructures that articulates the new ‘planetary’ condition of the urbanisation of capital (Brenner, Katsikis, 2020) and mobilises a multiplicity of neo-extractive, logistical and financial operations (Mezzadra, Neilson, 2019) still largely to be studied. This proliferation of platforms, settlements, and infrastructures fuels a plurality of spatial contentions and conflicts, negotiations and exclusions, but also planning tools and spatial strategies, within which such variety takes on political value, as a set of materials and as a discursive object in urban and regional governance (McFarlane, Rutherford, 2008). Starting from the first results of ongoing research (Operational landscapes in Northern Italy. Mobile geographies, spatial strategies, and dynamic mapping of regional urbanisation. RIBA 2021 grant: Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano), this contribution focuses on Northern Italy probing mainly on the contradictory dialectic of spatial fungibility, geographic specificity of the intertwined manufacturing, extractive, and logistics industry and spatial strategies deployed by private actors and institutions (Danyluk, 2019, 2021).
Mots clés : Spatial strategies|Northern Italy|Operational landscapes|Global consumption network|Global production network
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