ICS

"La ricerca Fearscapes affronta l'analisi delle relazioni tra sentimenti di paura – connessi con il pericolo di essere vittime di crimine nello spazio urbano –, discorsi di paura – testi diretti alla generazione di sentimenti di paura –, politiche e pratiche urbane, forme spaziali della città contemporanea.
A partire dagli anni '90, nelle città occidentali, ad una diminuzione dei volumi di criminalità corrispondono accresciute sensazioni di insicurezza. Nella convinzione che esista un uso strumentale dei discorsi di paura per giustificare politiche e pratiche, Fearscapes analizza, dal punto di vista della pianificazione urbana, questioni come le politiche urbane di sicurezza, processi di fortificazione, privatizzazione e militarizzazione dello spazio urbano."

In the last decade, video-surveillance systems became a common presence in the urban public spaces. Many studies have described such processes and their relationships with global concerns on security but not very much has been said about the role of spatial planning and of local micro-politics of urban space. In this paper, the author builds on Foucault's reading of Bentham's panopticon to debate the consistence of surveillance systems in two southern European cities, Lisbon and Palermo, in order to debate the role of urban planning in the ongoing processes.

"Debates around evaluation of research quality and research outputs access policy are assuming a growing space in the academic debate. Tools and concepts like “peer-review”, “metrics”, “impact factor”, until some years ago assumed as unquestionable for addressing university policies are, nowadays, questioned for their effective capacity to ensure “better” and “independent” research.
In this communication, I would like to share with the ICS community three ongoing processes and as many ideas that might be able to restructure the academic way of thinking in the forthcoming years. I will conclude by sketching some preliminary thoughts on how these ideas might be better incorporated by the ICS community.

1. University of California Open Access Policy

2. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

3. ALTMETRICS"

The role of information has assumed, in the last few decades, a central place in planning theory and research, especially around the capacity of misinformation to shape power relationships in the political arenas. The theme of counter-information, with its capacity to contrast the institutionalized information, has contextually emerged in the public debate. The authors suggest a parallel to the duality misinformation/counter-information, building on the representations of urban spaces and processes: “mis-representation” versus “counter-representation”. A reading of the flux of representations about Martim Moniz square in Lisbon is given and the swift transformations in the representations of this place are highlighted. Therefore, the relationships between institutional policies and local practices, between spaces for conflict/dialogue and their representations are debated as crucial for the capacity (or not) of grass-root requests to soar at the role of organized action.

The paper engages with theory about the processes of spatialization of fear in contemporary Western urban space (fortification, privatization, exclusion/seclusion, fragmentation, polarization) and their relationships with feelings of fear of crime and violence. A threefold taxonomy is outlined (Enclosure; Post-Public Space, Barrier) and “spaces of fear” in the city of Palermo are mapped with the aim of exploring the cumulative large-scale effects of the spatialization of fear on a concrete urban territory. Building on empirical evidence, the author suggests that mainstream theories be re-framed as part of a less hegemonic and more discursive approach, and that theories mainly based on the analyses of global cities be de-provincialized. The author, hereby argues for the deconstruction of the concept of “spaces of fear” in favour of a more discursive concept of “fearscapes”, as the growing landscapes of fear in contemporary Western cities.