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In the last few decades, the remarkable increase in the number of people living in urban areas around the world has posed new challenges for urban planning. The environmental, economic, and social issues of urban sprawl are well-known also in several metropolitan areas of Italy. In this paper, we consider a southern city of Italy (Campania Region), Caserta and its surroundings. We use several satellite images with different spatial and spectral resolutions (Landsat, Sentinel, and KH-9 Hexagon) within the Google Earth Engine platform, to map the main land use changes of Caserta conurbation from the 1980s till 2021. The results highlight the great land consumption and, at the same time, the relevant urban infill that occurred in this area in this short period, both on topographic and local scale (referring, in this last case, only to the town of Caserta). While at an early stage, the increase in artificial areas responds to a specific demand related to the increase in the resident population, the urban growth of the last two decades has more complex answers. Systematic delays in land use planning and a biased perspective (usually focusing only on the municipal scale) to solve the problems of a significantly larger area means insufficient services to the citizens in their daily lives (mainly in relation to local public transport and the actual availability of urban green areas). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work critically explores a recently-emerged strategy of territorial regeneration for small towns at risk of depopulation in Italy, "One-euro houses". Situated at the intersection between rural gentrification and the researches on real estate capitalism, the analysis is based on a place-based case-study in Troina, Sicily, to understand if the initiative supports socio-economic regeneration in small villages and/or marginal areas or, on the contrary, it fosters commodification/financialization of the real estate market as well as extractive dynamics. So, the paper scrutinizes how the local coalition of public and private actors mobilizes the initiative to deal with the challenges of the local development, thus highlighting the mismatch between their perception and the critical views of the academic and cultural debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the economic-geography's category of Global Production Networks (GPNs), especially with reference to its ability to grasp the critical aspects of the relationship between multinational capital and regional development. After having briefly framed the GPNs in the literature on the global systems of production, we'll discuss some controversial aspects of this concept. Particular attention will be devoted to the capacity of GPNs category of dealing with the questions of the asymmetries of power and of the ecological relationships. To reiterate the urgency of reinforcing the study of these issues, we present a short analysis of the most relevant aspects of the environmental conflicts, as they appear in the international repository of the Atlas on Environmental Justice (Atlas EJ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a sense of belonging to a place has long been the subject of attention in geographical studies. Scholars have consistently highlighted the ability of literary works to convey a spatial sense of belonging on the part of protagonists and authors, as well as to foreground landscape elements that may reveal the characters' personalities. Within this framework of research, the paper calls attention to the specular concept of estrangement, or unbelonging: a literary geographical quality that characterizes certain novels. A comparative analysis is presented between two different cycles of detective novels set in the Italian alpine areas. Specific elements of the landscape, the social milieu, and the authors' psychology that might convey such a sense of belonging are identified and categorized. The analysis shows how the relationship between the protagonists and the space in a novel can be based on a sense of estrangement that plays a role in signifying the characters' psychology and personality. In conclusion, it is proposed to consider the absence of the sense of belonging to place as a literary quality and element of agency within an intra-textual analysis of literary geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]