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Mentre il pregiudizio linguistico è inteso comunemente come una questione che riguarda individui o gruppi sociali e il loro modo di parlare, possiamo anche vederlo come un linguaggio dannoso usato riguardo alcuni individui o gruppi sociali. In questo articolo, dopo una breve panoramica sociolinguistica sul pregiudizio linguistico, si passa poi ad analizzare in modo più ampio varie forme di linguaggio pregiudizievole/sessista riguardo le donne. Nel fare ciò, vengono identificate varie asimmetrie lessicali e le relative "lacune lessicali". Verrà preso in esame un caso emblematico: tre esempi di linguaggio pregiudizievole e sessista usati di recente dal primo ministro britannico Boris Johnson. Tutti e tre gli esempi attingono a quello che potremmo chiamare un discorso di "Donne viste come persone inadeguate". Concludo con una discussione sull'intenzionalità per quanto riguarda questo tipo di uso pregiudizievole del linguaggio, cosa si intende ottenere e si può contrastare.

The promotion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a major China-led development and cooperation project launched in 2013, features among the centrepieces of China’s current political discourse and is one of the most closely-followed topics by both China’s and international audiences. The organization of the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) held in Beijing on May 14-15 2017 generated a considerable mediatic echo in which Xinhua News Agency played a relevant role. This paper focuses on the website “Yi Dai Yi Lu” pindao (“一带一路”频道), the online space dedicated to the BRI by the state-subordinated agency. The examination offers a comparative analysis of a selection of news titles published over the period of the BRF in the Chinese and English editions of this website. The aim is to examine the narrative constructed therein by offering a two-fold examination of how and to what extent: (1) Xinhua’s institutional and entrepreneurial identity influences its news production; and (2) the nature of different audiences affects the representations of the BRI and BRF in discourses targeted by the same producer to a Chinese-speaking or English-speaking audience.

This introduction first justifies the approach of this focus on the political thought of Foucault. Therefore it highlights the conditions that determine the appearance and the operation of the political discourse, then it clarifies because, according to Foucault, political discourse should not be analyzed in a format which opposes science to ideology, but as an act of discourse located in a strategic field and fighting with other discursive formations. It concludes with a look at the difference and interweaving that for Foucault stand and connect political discourse and philosophy.

The article analyses the role of the leader's voice in contemporary politics. Emphasis is given to the relational nature and ability to create a process of empathy that are crucial for building leadership and consensus. Vocal properties, i.e. those that belong to the voice regardless of the language, are at the root of identification processes by which the leader becomes subject of the personal impressions that other individuals have of him, and that therefore determine his chances of success. If, in a pre-media context, the voice is an accessory element that disappears behind the representative role reminiscent of Kantorowicz, with the advent and spread of electronic media it becomes an index of the leader's corporality and uniqueness able to re-enact his story upon each verbal utterance.

The Author asks himself if the peculiar mode of application of the nexus doctrine/discipline represented by ideology constitutes the only possibility for reproducing and maintaining consensus in a political community. The constitutionalism’s curve shows the contrary: in the beginning constitutionalism developed as a common field between different ideologies, still it survived their crisis, and has opened a new mode of social and political collective behaviour, defined by the author as «political discourse». In order to overcome the risk of political neutralization produced by the growing importance of technique in the contemporary governance processes, political discourse – considered in its function of language mediator and translator –, might work as an instrument able to link the broken threads of obligation. In order not to reproduce a straight and unilateral political discourse, a radical revision of the concept of measure would be necessary. Measure should be taken as an instrument for the allocation/distribution of differences and, therefore, as a useful element for the creation of consensus in a mass society.

The aim of this article is to reflect on the political control of urban space and population mobility, particularly in relation to government measures and regulations governing the management of the hosting camps of the Rom and Sinti within the Municipality of Rome (the so-called "solidarity villages"). To this end, the article develops as a discourse analysis of the number of documents and regulations passed by the Berlusconi government, part of which wasrejected by the Italian Council of State (November 2011). The thesis of the article is that the new regulations of Rom camps are designed to control the movement of Rom and Sinti, who live in them, however, with the explicit aim of preventing permanent accommodation to people housed in them. From this point of view, the article argues that the measures analyzed create nomadism who declare to be reason to their own needs. The conclusions of the work finally supports the actuality of the reflections on security proposed by Michel Foucault (2004), showing how they can be applied to new fields of research interacting with the concepts and methods of semiotic analysis.

Today, the relationship between social, cultural, political transformations and spatial processes can be critically re-thought as the increasing articulation of spaces of places and spaces of flows. This article argues that the relationship between architecture and politics emerges through the intertwining of issues present in the discourses and the practices of both, which entails a prospective of action and transformation of the city that necessarily expresses an assumption of responsibility. These issues link the city's historical, cultural and material-functional dimensions and originate from memories and the possibility of their future destination. They refer also to the ability to perceive, experience, and enact alternatives to the present: they concern the imaginative ability to think otherwise. In this regard, the multidimensional notion of "public space" is crucial, because it involves the articulation of spaces as well as the function and significance of buildings, but also the quality of relationships, experiences and urban life that happen in them. The weaving of flows, networks, places, and bodies in the urban fabric promises new forms of being-in-common that invite architecture, urban planning, and politics to be interpreters of this "desire for connection", the peculiar aspect that defines spatial and symbolical forms, but also relational modalities.

The subject of the relationship between architecture and politics is "limitless yet to the point", as rightly underscored in one of the articles in this issue. However, it is because the subject is so vast that we feel it can serve as a link and encouragement towards further exploration and avenues to investigate, also thanks to the choices made by the authors who responded to the call. Architecture or urban planning may evidently be described as languages that are not only spatial but that also express crossing and settling: operations that not only require a finding of one's way, but also an arrangement of space itself, its interpretation. In practical terms, even in the architectural and urban context power is therefore an "able to do" on the one hand (able to freely go, travel, cross) and on the other, a form of "able to be" able, however, to deny space to others: "I am..., and so I'm stopping you from going there, or I'm forcing you to look or pass that way". This issue of Ocula considers these two different dimensions, all within the space of the city.

In analysing the relationship between architecture and urban planning, this paper starts from Leonardo Benevolo's declaration (in 1963) that defines the latter as "a part of politics required to concretize each operational program". So, while waiting for the long expected reform, urban planning - once as well as today - needs a complete overhaul to get a better understanding of its role and relationship with politics. The other reference is to one of the founders of this field of research, Patrick Geddes, and his definition of "civic science" (1915). This allows us to stress how modern Geddes' urban and social planning was. The subject is analysed at its various historical stages, and the main concept of this paper concerns the link between efficiency and effectiveness in urban planning and democracy, and participation in political work.

In this article I analyze the founding of the city of Marghera and the industrial zone of Porto Marghera. I practice an "urban geology" to research the stratification of power relations, constitutive of their realization and dynamics. The first part is on the founding of Marghera: considering Foucault's studies on the governance practices of the space and Deleuze's book of Foucault, I study the project of founding of Marghera, as "garden city" and worikng-class town, to demonstrate the failure of this and describe how the power relations determine the development of residential areas. In the second part I consider Hirschman's studies on developing economies to study the dynamics of power relations in the industial zone, especially in the ages of workers' struggles.

Is the architecture of sport specific, or does it reflect the city, the society, the politics? This article analyzes numerous sports facilities of various types, in France and in Europe, since the beginning of the XXth century until today. It shows a double evolution of the meaning of the sports architecture: on one hand, from the sport to the show and, on the other hand, from the political power and the culture of the city to the economic power.

"Tout est politique" and architecture is no exception. Even though it cannot be seen, politics is in the shape of the pyramids, in Roman basilicas and Renaissance temples, as it is in the ephemeral architecture of huge international exhibitions or the inventions of contemporary archistars. Because it is very clear that even the denial of politics in the construction of an architectural style implies its presence, since it is precisely when architecture denies its function within a community or area that politics (of architecture) expands and takes over. In this respect, by working on the tangible device of urban (or non-urban) space on the one hand, and on the 'order of flow phenomena' on the other, semiotics becomes the principal actor in a political project for architecture. That which lies in the liminal possibility of not reducing space and its representation to the aspect of design or to sociological analysis, but of appreciating the overall 'articulated' sense in which historic and subjective instances as well as complex and multiple narrative paths coexist.