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Abstract Urban environmental acupuncture (UEA) is a novel approach designed to engage with a variety of stakeholders to successfully implement nature-based solutions in dense urban areas. The Interreg Central Europe project SALUTE4CE piloted this concept through small-scale, low-budget interventions in four cities: Chorzow (Poland), Erfurt (Germany), Alessandria (Italy), and Liptovski Mikulas (Slovakia). The pilot projects were designed to be quickly implementable, utilizing abandoned or undesirable sites, with the potential to catalyze both physical and social transformation. Interviews with local actors in these cities after project implementation provided valuable feedback, which was used to develop principles of urban environmental acupuncture. While the limited number of interviews means these findings offer only initial insights, they are largely supported by existing research. Nevertheless, this perspective provides important lessons that can inform future transformation projects and help evaluate the success of the UEA approach. The key contributions of this work are the introduction of urban environmental acupuncture concept, deriving principles of UEA based on feedback from local stakeholders and offering insights in future design and evaluation of similar nature-based solution initiatives in dense urban environments. This perspective helps to establish the potential of UEA as a tool for engaging diverse stakeholders and catalyzing sustainable urban transformation (specifically expansion of nature-based solutions) through low-cost interventions.

Abstract The future coexistence of human and nonhuman nature on an urban planet is at risk. A crucial lever is the transformation of human-nature relationships in and through cities. Urban planning as a sustainability intervention has the potential to reconnect cities with nature. To shed light on transformative potentials of urban planning in the context of human-nature connections, we conducted a systematic literature review. We analysed 71 empirical studies from Europe published between 2016 and 2022. We characterised the research using qualitative analysis, and applied the leverage point perspective as the main focus to identify blind spots and future research needs. Our review reveals a highly interdisciplinary field with research focus on transformation through planning, while issues of transformation in planning tend to receive less attention. Furthermore, the studies rather deal with shallow leverage points for sustainability transformations both in terms of system levels and human-nature connections. In order to unlock the potential of urban planning, future research should pay more attention to the inner dimensions of planning and human-nature connections in cities. Furthermore, research should be more concerned with the visionary modes of urban planning, e.g. by discussing what is (not) desirable in the future.

Abstract Battambang has been identified as an exemplar for sustainability city development in Cambodia due to its success with the introduction of new programs and planning initiatives, which have led to recognition of its clean and green city status by the Cambodian Government and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Limited research has been done to date to investigate how Battambang has achieved these results, compared with other rapidly urbanising cities of Cambodia and Southeast Asia. Through the lens of urban sustainability transformations, our research identifies the capacity strengths and gaps of Battambang city in preparing for and initiating the city’s urban transformation of its waste sector, applying the transformative capacities framework of Wolfram (Cities 51:121-130, 2016). Through qualitative coding of semi-structured interviews and document analysis we found that (a) particular transformative capacities provided building blocks for the development of other capacities, (b) award and recognition processes can play a role in developing transformative capacities, and (c) that the city’s culture of innovation and relatively stable population and political-economy contributed to strengthening its capacities. This research contributes knowledge for policy and practice on urban transformative capacity strengthening, as it supports a phased ‘building blocks’ approach in resource-constrained contexts.

Abstract Municipalities employ pilot projects, tests, living labs and similar initiatives to explore novel sustainable solutions for urban development. Nevertheless, civil servants often encounter challenges when attempting to scale up tested solutions, both within their own city and to other cities. To address this and increase knowledge on how theory can be utilised by practitioners, this research project has created a supportive tool aimed at facilitating the upscaling process. The development took place in co-creation with civil servants from the three largest cities in Sweden. The paper confirms earlier research on the need of institutional capacity as well as appropriate navigation between institutional logics as pre-requisites for upscaling. More specifically, institutional capacity plays a vital role for securing sufficient resources and mandates for upscaling, extending beyond mere dissemination of results. The supportive tool aims at enhancing this institutional capacity and translating between institutional logics. In addition, the paper contributes to the scientific debate on civil servants’ understanding of different forms of upscaling and, consequently, the need to articulate these differences when facilitating upscaling. The paper emphasizes that upscaling should be conceptualised not as a discrete event but rather an ongoing process starting already when planning a pilot project.

In 1948, Norbert Wiener presented Cybernetics as a “word invented to define a new field of science”, which would strive to understand the functioning of “control and communication in machines and living organisms”. From a cybernetic perspective, the living body was conceived as a “cybernetic system” interacting with its environment through continuous feedback loops. Understanding how these information loops function has thus become the key to understand how living systems adapt and persist in global environments mutating ever more rapidly. For a growing number of biologists, the loop has emerged as a “universal symbol of how life works at all of its scales and levels”. The cybernetic loop, however, is not only an epistemological figure (through which life is being thought in striking new ways); it is also a technology of power, projecting new ways of governing and directing living process at multiple scales. Cybernetics has recently given rise to cybergenetics: a new area of research aimed at “synthetically regulating cellular processes at the gene level”. Focusing on the recent history of this emerging discipline, we consider how the confluence of cybernetic theories, genome sequencing machines, targeted mutagenic techniques, and artificial intelligence is informing new conceptions of molecular life and speculative futures of biopolitical control.

The loop is a powerful form, both in symbolic an in functional terms, which is reflected into a myriad of different applications, from religious and mystic symbologies such as the ouroboros to corporate branding and design such as Apple’s Infinite loop. To respond to loSquaderno's invitation to write about the concept of loop, I chose to look at it from the perspective of participatory planning, which is currently the field where I have the opportunity to apply concretely most of the competences I aquired through my eclectic career. Tesserae is the organisation that I co-founded with Laura Colini in 2011 with the goal of combining the academic background and the capacity gained as experts for European policy programmes along with the experience as artists and activists investigating and questioning transforming cities. Within its general scope, a core ambition of the organisation has become the systematisation and integration of a large collection of tools and methods deriving from diverse approaches and needs into a comprehensive toolkit for participatory practice. This led to the elaboration of the wide purpose conceptual framework for analysing and designing transformative processes that we heve called “framework for change” (F4C). This model visualises the fields, variables and activities required to produce a desired change through a process of cocreation. The elements of the process can be seen as an array of discrete components, analysed independently, which are often assigned as specific responsibilties to different stakeholders in the process; nevertheless, what makes the quality and capacity of the process to achieve positive impacts is the relation among the parts, their correct consequentiality, complementarity and integration. In this article I want to argue that the loop shape is the essential pattern to arrange the elements of the process in an effective and functional relation, and provides, both for organisation and communication purposes, a key source of inspiration to enhance positive change throughout complex multistakeholder projects. In the following, using the loop as a guiding shape for my reasoning, I will firstly briefly introduce a theory of change and illustrate the terms of the process design that it calls for; secondly I will present the Frame4Change scheme created by Tesserae as a tool for visualising transformative process; third, I will develop some reflections on the establishment of recursive cycles (loops) as ideal arrangement of the different actions needed to achieve the desired change.

The article would like to sketch a cross-section of contemporary riots as a practice that can be analyzed through the category of destituent acting, intertwining this understanding with the concepts of loops and circularity. The parallelism between the two lines of analysis can be declined in several senses: cybernetic (Curcio) and algorithmic (McQuillan, Galloway, Rouvroy) capitalism is based on a performative and retroactive circularity-described since the dawn of cybernetics (Wiener)-that consolidates through its operation the identities and subjective embedding that data are supposed to describe; the circulation of commodities and subjects within preformed environments (Foucault) is one of the constitutive features of contemporary capitalism (Clover), which simultaneously produces spaces of surplus and surplus with respect to this circulation; sovereignty is based on an ontological-political structure based on the presupposing threshold (Agamben) that projects as the origin the result of power. Revolts, understood as destituent action, undermine the exercise of all three of these loop functions: opacity and devastation of control devices deactivate the performance of data or inflate it to dissipation; blockage, irruption on the public scene and habitable condensation of life forms jam the circularity of the biopolitical or imperial metropolis; the threshold that places anarchy and civil war at the mythical origin of the sovereign order is belied in the actual deposition of government, which does not resemble the presupposed mythical image.

Most social media platforms – including TikTok, Instagram and Facebook – have adopted video formats as their preferred way of engaging users and generating content. This contribution argues that not only social media video platforms create algorithmically determined feedback loops, but that these platforms conversely form a ‘loop of loops’. Each platformised loop connects to the others through processes of translation and transformation, where the infrastructural logic and the aesthetic grammar of the platform combines with the one of the video loops. The emergence of a ‘loop of loops’ breaks with the previous text- or image-centred approach to social media content. In order to understand its appearance and functioning, the ‘loop of loops’ must be contextualised in what Kornbluh (2024) has defined the style of Too Late Capitalism, that is immediacy. From this, it derives that the ‘loop of loops’ requires a constant overflow of media and production, which is functional to the compulsive, quick-paced, potentially infinite and extenuating doom scrolling. The contribution then concludes by reflecting on the frictions and leaking which enable micro-forms of resistance against the loop of loops.

This contribution asks whether it is possible to imagine a research project without falling back into the loop that seems to characterize it in essence. Firstly, I present an analysis of the concept of "project" and show why that profoundly marks the research in general. In particular, I refer to an essay by Cacciari (1981) and one by Heidegger (1966). Subsequently, I reveal how, during my PhD, I did direct experience of what the two authors discuss about. Therefore, a possible strategy is suggested for not being enslaved by the project's aporias at the scale of a doctoral research. Following the example of some feminist scholars, one can indeed resort to "figuring". Such a method consists of offering a vision starting from a becoming. Thus, it entails for the PhD project to be placed on the being-able-to-be ground. Namely, not to be structured as a hypothesis about an object. Rather, the research project should propose in itself and start from a hypothetical object to be continuously confronted with social practice.

The following article is the result of a research project that explores the experiences of individuals who fought on the front-lines of the George Floyd uprising. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews, this work analyzes why certain individuals developed strong attachments to the riots of the George Floyd uprising, even despite differences of strategy, ideology, and biography. Emphasizing the role of direct experience, I argue that a key appeal of participation in these events was the opportunity to engage in subjectively meaningful forms of collective action. This was especially important in the late spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the human population and transformed how we experience everyday life. In a context of widespread uncertainty and social paralysis, the George Floyd uprising gave people an opportunity to engage in group actions which they understood as valuable in themselves, creating an experiential loop through which they could enact principles of bravery, virtue, and dignity – in short, an ethics of revolt. Far from being a marginal aspect, I argue that this generative loop – and its ability to circulate within a crowd – was a crucial determinant for why riots and rebellions happened in some American cities in 2020 and not others, even when those cities had similar background factors.

How are we commanded and how does creativity arise if algorithmic and classification systems are pervasive in the world in which we live? I will try to answer this question by briefly tracing the history of formal calculus techniques in mathematics and the development of informatic machines. It is the very grammar of these machines that demands to represent their products as data that pre-existed their collection, obfuscating their constructed character of . I will try in this text to dispel the myth of a purely circular operation of algorithms by analyzing what remains outside the loop.

The paper is focused on Bastogi, a housing complex which started as temporary housing for university students and travellers but that become a permanent reality for many individuals experiencing severe housing deprivation. It is highlighted the looping effect, in referring to how classifications such as “squatter” and “people in housing emergency” shape individuals’ perceptions of themselves, or how they can also perpetuate the victim-blaming ideology. The temporary housing assistance policies in Rome have chronicled housing precariousness for a significant portion of the urban population, and a place like Bastogi is a product of these urban policies. Like a heterotopia of marginality, Bastogi is a ‘counter-space’, whose existence denounces the segregating logics that created it. The paper also describes the constant struggle of some people in housing crisis to distance themselves from the imposed labels, and how they navigate this social, moral, and political distance from institutions and the rest of the city.

The most widely promoted exemplars of the circular economy tend to reflect a neoliberal socio-climatic imaginary in which sustainability performance and financial performance go hand-in-hand. Reflecting on the case of Kalundborg Symbiosis in Denmark, this essay borrows Hofstadter’s notion of the ‘strange loop’ to think about the relationship between the radical potential of circularity vis-à-vis the conservative, business-friendly practices of the circular economy. It argues that corporations have a vested interested in maintaining the strange, appropriative loopiness of the circular economy and suggests that the way to break out of this loop is to attend explicitly to the social, political, and ecological contexts in which circularity is conceptualized and enacted, rather than the narrower, dominant focus on its technical and financial dimensions.

This article is part of a greater adventure in exploring and, especially, designing alternative ecologies of funding and other decentralized autonomous organizations (or DAOs). This speculative design work has led to the creation of The Sphere (www.thesphere.as), a regenerative commons for the live arts. Incidentally, when trying to visually represent some of the Sphere’s choreographies of value, the diagrams tend to take the shape of generative vortex, or, as we like to call them, synthetic swirls. In the context of this article, I propose to take this visual logic of the swirl a little further, and, keeping up with its economic incidences, spiral off on a tangent that eventually leads me into the idiotextual surrounds of Bernard Stiegler’s late work (and hopefully back).

Abstract The Leipzig Charter highlights the need for integrated, place-based participatory governance approaches to achieve more sustainable and just urban futures. In this article, we provide a synthesis of our transdisciplinary analysis of ten EU projects which were selected from over 100 EU-funded urban sustainability and justice projects. Through analysing these cases according to the question of ‘How can city makers design governance processes for just and sustainable outcomes?’, we identify six Enabling Governance Arrangements which are considered of high relevance to the integration of urban sustainability and justice through both municipality and community-led initiatives. Each Enabling Governance Arrangement was not only observed at play in multiple initiatives but was also further consolidated and confirmed in dedicated workshops with over 60 city makers of different backgrounds. This highlights their potential to stir place-specific debates around the governance of sustainable and just cities. Overall, we provide empirically grounded, actionable insights for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers on how to achieve integrated urban sustainability and justice through Enabling Governance Arrangements.

Portugal's early seaside holiday camps emerged prior to the Estado Novo era, serving as summer destinations for underprivileged children even before the implementation of national educational programs. Educational and charitable associations, supported by private philanthropy and the working class, played a pivotal role in the development of these facilities. Newspapers and cooperatives like Voz do Operário spearheaded social initiatives to address the challenges of the late nineteenth century, targeting workers and their families. These initiatives involved hundreds of children each summer, primarily between June and October, for the care of childhood tuberculosis and the recreation of young guests. These projects found space in existing buildings or gave rise to new buildings along a mostly pristine coastline, often at a considerable distance from urban centers. A significant example is the O Século seaside children's holiday camp, funded by private and public funds, operational since 1927 in S. Pedro do Estoril, between Lisbon and the renowned Cascais. The project went through at least three construction phases, influencing city public life and benefiting from the support of Lisbon’s famous Feira Popular, in operation until a few years ago. Archival documents, historical photographs, and blueprints testify to the evolution of these facilities over time. Transformations between 1944 and 1945 highlight the importance of this camp in the collectivity, its strategies of funding, and its needs, staff, and the children it hosted. Over the years, many of these facilities disappeared due to the tourism expansion in the area, unlike the case of O Século, which still partly continues programs dedicated to childhood.

The 1928 International Exhibition for the Fight against Tuberculosis, held in Rome in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale, and the 1937 Exhibition of Summer Camps and Childcare, also in Rome but in the Circus Maximus area, constitute two important chronological milestones of a research that connects architects and engineers on the theme of architecture for holiday camps for children. They are two stages of a ten-year journey that from an original purely sanitary-assistance purpose acquired that of nationalistic-ideological formation in which the Fascist regime transformed the buildings intended for tuberculosis treatment into actual gyms for the physical and spiritual training of young Italians, which can be considered as formidable propaganda machines. During the 1928 exhibition the role of the holiday camps for both the recovery and prevention of children from tuberculosis began to emerge and the commitment of the Roman engineer-architect Cesare Valle, who had been tackling the problem of the hospitalization of TBC patients in Rome since the 1920s, was underlined by the exhibition's wide resonance in newspapers and journals. Less than a decade later, in the exhibition dedicated to holiday camps, the technical-sanitary solutions had already taken on a supporting role, and in the designs of the citadel and the pavilions of the institutions for the care and education of children by various protagonists of the Italian architectural scene, it was above all architecture and propaganda that found an effective combination.

In Portugal, Salazar’s government, after the creation of the Estado Novo (1933–74), introduced a series of welfare policies following the example of what had been implemented in Italy. Although with different declinations, closely linked to the Lusitanian nationalist identity, Italy became a model for Salazarism. Various organizations such as the Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho (FNAT), the Organização Nacional Mocidade Portuguesa (ONMP) and the Obra das Mães pela Educação Nacional (OMEN) were involved in building holiday camps for children in the country: they were located on the seaside, on the hills, and in mountain valleys, with functional programs related to childcare and leisure. Numerous leading figures in Portuguese politics were sent by the government to study and visit fascist welfare organizations in Italy, while architects – engaged since the late 1930s in drawing up layouts for summer camps – were urged to use a traditional architectural language. Based on a research conducted in several Portuguese archives, the essay traces the relationship between the two regimes to highlight, through political ideology and built works, similarities, and differences in the relationship between the modernity of architecture and the needs to represent national identity.

This paper aims to analyse the ambiguous relationship with modernity of the holiday spaces in the Third Reich. The Kraft durch Freude (KdF) and the Hitlerjugend, the two major Nazi organisations dedicated to normalising the leisure time of the Reich's subjects, were protagonists of architectural experiences characterised by opposing conceptions of modernity. Two radically opposed architectural models seem to emerge from the KdF Seebad Prora seaside resort and from the ideal layout of the camp recommended by the Hitlerjugend manuals: the machine and the camp. The analysis and comparison of these two models define an opportunity to investigate the complexity of the totalitarian spatial ecosystem by analysing its two-faced approach to modernity, its structural link with the regime and the contemporary perception of its difficult heritage, attempting to dispel certain prejudices and oversimplifications regarding Nazi Germany's planning.

Architecture held a central role in the child welfare programs developed in twentieth-century Greece. Τhis contribution discusses two key examples from the inter- and post-war periods: Panos-Nikolis Djelepy’s Children’s village in Voula, Athens (1933–34, 1936–39) and Emmanuel Vourekas’s Paidopoli in Agria, Volos (1955–58), both influenced by their respective political, social and cultural context. It explores how the projects have contributed to the establishment of a building typology centered around the imminent issue of the hospitality and care of the children and youth. A critical comparative analysis of the two projects is presented with a particular attention on the ways in which they addressed the relationship between building and context, inside and outside, nature and artifice, in line with the prevailing medical treatments in those days, casting a novel attention on issues of environmental performance.

In the Postwar years towards the pursuit of happiness and the construction of a new society, an unusual accommodation facility was built on a meadow just outside Cortina d'Ampezzo: the Albergo Meridiana. The originality of this building can be found in the female client, in its target– childhood, hosting boys and girls from 3 to 14 years old – and above all in the proposal of a house built according to the Montessori model, rather than a more traditional holiday camp. The design was entrusted to Edoardo Gellner and it represented not only one of the first mature works of the architect, but also a real design experimentation on Montessori’s theories of the environment. Also, the building was a testing ground on the interior design which will lead, in the following years, to the more corporate variation of the holiday for children: the Eni Village Summer Camp in Borca di Cadore. In smaller dimensions, the Meridiana anticipated architectural forms, interiors spaces and materials and construction methods, contributing to irreversibly modify the social and pedagogical approach of the architecture of holiday camps through Montessori’s words and theories.

The essay offers an introduction to the experience of holiday camps for children. Holiday camps were a form of social tourism which was typical of industrial societies and which affected the coasts, countryside, and mountains of Western countries for more than a century. After a brief presentation of the conditions that generated their emergence, the essay is organized according to three different dimensions, which are here called “promises:” the promises of salvation, preparation for life, and innovation.

This contribution aims to offer a reflection on the main pedagogical and organisational profiles of Italian climatic holiday camps at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on three Milanese experiences: two of them, the Cura Climatica Gratuita ai Fanciulli Gracili, alunni delle scuole elementari comunali di Milano (for the pupils of municipal elementary schools in Milan), and the Colonie climatiche autunnali per fanciulli e fanciulle (for boys and girls), have as an emblematic connecting element the figure of the doctor and philanthropist Malachia De Cristoforis (1832–1915), a protagonist of the lively international debate on holiday camps taking place in those years; the third experience, the cure climatiche organised for the young guests of the Martinitt Orphanage, although a somewhat peculiar initiative in terms of the type of beneficiaries, shares some important traits with the previous ones, including the philanthropic character and the centrality attributed to immersion in nature, an element that ideally places the camps in the track of a centuries-old pedagogical reflection.

Originally established as welfare institutions at the beginning of the 20th century, under Italian fascism the function of the holiday camp was transformed into an instrument of indoctrination and physical training. Built predominantly using the architectural language of the razionalismo, the summer camps of the 1920s and 30s were impressive in their design and spatial organisation. But even if their modernist architecture does not seem to have any political references, there are several enrichment codes and symbols that form the backdrop to exert an ideological influence on the young visitors. Lettering, political emblems and slogans, works of art, machine aesthetics and ultimately the floor plan organisation all had an effect on the guests. With the colonie, an entire generation was disciplined, manipulated, sworn to Mussolini and the fascist regime and ultimately prepared for war. After the war, the buildings were mainly taken over by state or church relief organisations. With increasing individual tourism, many facilities have stood empty since the 1970s. Their desirable restoration and conversion, however, should take account of the ominous purpose and orientation and make them visible. Artistic and architectural interventions can be a way to critically question these legacies of fascism for future generations.

In the French Haute-Savoie there is still today a building that is deeply linked to the history of the Italian Republic, which not only testifies to its roots and values, but also represents a paradigm of childhood tragedies in the twentieth century. It is a holiday camp in Saint-Cergues Les Voirons (now converted into private apartments) which was built by the Italian “fuorusciti” for the children of the emigrated compatriots. The creation of this holiday camp was considered one of the most successful undertakings of international anti-fascism. After its opening in 1933, the holiday home was used for a few years by Italian emigrants’ children as well as a refuge for well-known anti-fascists; then it was adapted to the new needs of assistance to the most fragile and difficult children imposed by international circumstances. Five years after its opening, the building was in fact used as a holiday camp for Spanish refugee children from the civil war and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, it became a place to welcome children of any nationality, victims of the conflict and finally a home-refuge for young Jews fleeing deportation. This building, built in a typical alpine style, was most dissimilar from the fascist monumental architectural models. Built just a few kilometres from Geneva, it was much more than just a building: it was a real challenge against an autarchic regime that was increasingly turned in on itself, even in its educational models.

Holiday camps represent a significant example of the architecture for mass tourism in Sardinia after the Second world war, and a concrete example of the health and recreational function of local welfare state policies and religious pedagogical activities. Although marked by simple and sometimes questionable formal solutions – often far from relevant architectural experimentation – holiday camps are now characteristic elements of many Sardinian coastal landscapes, as well as examples of architectural and building articulations which were functional to the pedagogical conceptions of the time. Prominent among these cases are a seaside colony and an accommodation facility for social tourism in the picturesque bay of Solanas (hamlet of Sinnai) in southern Sardinia, both run by religious organizations and located just two hundred meters apart from each other. The first is the “Colonia Salesiana Don Bosco,” built between 1956–58, the second is the “Casa La Scogliera,” completed in 1971. The reconstruction of the design and construction history of the “Casa La Scogliera,” through unpublished original plans, documents, and memories, allows this article to assess the relationship that this building had both with the specific pedagogy developed in the context of religious organizations and with the tumultuous tourist development of Sardinia during the 1960s. This paper aims at revealing the history, values and critical issues of this architecture and the cultural context in which it is embedded, thus contributing to the current debate on the conservation and transformation of holiday camps.

In the fall of 1945, the former mountain holiday camp of the Milan-based Fascist Sciesa Group in Selvino (Bergamo) was transformed into a sanctuary for young Jewish refugees who had escaped persecution, ghettos, and extermination. The immediate perception that this served as a form of reparation was destined to fade over the following decades as this function was succeeded by others. The architectural and social history of Sciesopoli is marked by a long, unbroken concatenation of uses – some antithetical, others in continuity – unfolding from the early 1930s until the late 1980s. As the model of large buildings for mass vacations and therapies faced a crisis, Sciesopoli shared the fate of similar structures: abandonment due to the difficult, perhaps impossible, reutilization in the present. Today, the current needs no longer align with the dimensions and forms of this historical structure. For over fifty years, Sciesopoli has provided thousands of children and young people with the benefits of mountain air, outdoor activities, a heated swimming pool, anti-tuberculosis therapies, and refugee shelter. Presently, only the latter function may continue to exist as a social necessity. However, a refugee shelter is hardly an object of investment in the restoration of a deteriorated structure in need of adjustments, which have indeed occurred during Sciesopoli's seven lives.

Although the history of vacation camps is well documented, their future is yet to be explored. Looking back on the results of a research project that mobilized a multidisciplinary research team from the Nantes School of Architecture, this paper focuses on the future of a former vacation camp called in French “Palais des enfants” (“Children’s Palace”). The camp is located in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, a seaside town in Vendée, on the French Atlantic coastline. The specific case of the “Palais des enfants” in Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez offers an ideal case study for the many issues that affect the future of these heritages: who are the stakeholders playing extended roles in managing the future of this camp? What are the legal, social and environmental constraints affecting these heritages? Which economic strategies should be implemented to develop new attractions in a coastal town marked by social tourism? This site, as well as its future, have led us to ground our analysis in a set of spatial, political and social perspectives. They have above all opened up new horizons for joint research initiatives informed by design and by art.

Il Lido di Venezia, lembo di terra emersa tra mare e laguna, è da più di un secolo luogo di villeggiatura privilegiato dei veneziani. A partire dalla nascita del primo stabilimento balneare (1857), le spiagge del Lido sono divenute meta turistica nel Novecento con l’edificazione di importanti hotel di lusso e ville in stile liberty. È in questo clima di fermento che sorge, tra il 1936 e il 1937, la colonia marina “Principi di Piemonte,” su progetto di Daniele Calabi, commissionato dal Comune di Padova, che era interessato ad avere una meta turistica in terra veneziana. Inserita in un lotto di oltre 14.000 metri quadri, la colonia si compone di volumi organizzati attorno a una grande corte ritagliata in una rigida griglia geometrica, originariamente aperta verso il mare. Tuttavia, sono significativi i processi trasformativi che nel tempo hanno modificato l’impianto, arrivando in qualche caso a tradire l’idea del progettista. A partire dall’analisi della documentazione conservata nell’Archivio Progetti dell’Università Iuav di Venezia, l’articolo propone una rilettura dell’iter progettuale e del cantiere, inserendo la colonia nel contesto di sperimentazione e di innovazione di materiali e tecniche costruttive connesso alla stagione dell’autarchia. Lo studio considera infine i meccanismi in atto nel processo di riattivazione del sito che coinvolge stakeholder pubblici e privati, portando a evidenziare quanto le colonie per l’infanzia rappresentino una lente attraverso cui indagare le questioni culturali, tecniche ed economiche della conservazione e della valorizzazione del patrimonio moderno.

The foundation of Ostia Lido, which took place between 1909 and 1915 on the initiative of Paolo Orlando with the collaboration of the Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura headed by Gustavo Giovannoni, represented a central episode not only in the expansion of the Third Rome towards the sea, but also of the Italian colonial culture. The construction of the Marine Hospice by Marcello Piacentini provided the first piece of the new settlement, addressed towards a language suspended between classicism and vernacular which was further developed by Vincenzo Fasolo in the nearby monumental Vittorio Emanuele III seaside holiday camp. Through the reading of the documents and the buildings’ locations, this article retraces the main design and construction processes of the two buildings, intimately linked to each other. It also traces the phases of abandonment and degradation, occupation and partial reuse that marked them in the postwar period, providing a picture of their current conditions and the opportunities that an systematic redevelopment could offer, inspired by the historical model of the “Albergo dei Poveri” and other spontaneous bottom-up activities.

This essay contributes to the discussion around the following question: what happens after a children’s holiday camp ceases its activities? Are abandonment and ruin an inevitable fate? The former mountain holiday camp “Rinaldo Piaggio” is the case study around which this reflection unfolds. The holiday camp was built by the Genoese architect Luigi Carlo Daneri in 1939 in Santo Stefano d'Aveto, Liguria, where it housed the children of employees of the Pontedera company until 1983. Later, it was sold and affected by an unsuccessful project to convert it into a healthcare residence, and as of today, it is painfully encumbered by a judicial sale procedure, and is in short “a masterpiece at auction.” The holiday camp is mentioned in many publications on modern architecture and was declared of cultural interest in 1996. This vast historical-critical consensus, however, was never followed by a monographic study aimed at understanding the problems of the building’s conservation, its functional recovery, and the preservation of its modernist qualities. After an introduction on the building, the text reconstructs the attempts to transform and update its use, focusing on what has happened in the last two years, between the start of bankruptcy proceedings and an unexpected opportunity to protect the architectural qualities of this masterpiece and promote the revival of its accommodation function.

In Italy alone, dozens of abandoned holiday camps for children are scattered throughout the landscape. The size and diffusion of this heritage calls for a scientific debate on the history and future of these buildings, which are often in a state of serious decay. From Alpine valleys to coastlines, former holiday camps for children tell a long story of educational, architectural, health and social experimentation, which has influenced generations of Europeans in the last 150 years. Holiday camps were hosted in traditional or modern structures, built from long-lasting materials such as reinforced concrete or temporary camping tents. Whatever their nature, holiday camps have left both physical and intangible traces on the European landscape and society. With this issue, in_bo engages in a debate on the history of holiday camps in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular consideration of contemporary reuse and restoration strategies of this architectural heritage.

Educated at the crossroads of various influences – Japanese architecture, vernacular European architecture, and the Modern Movement – Roland Schweitzer (1925–2018) traced a distinctive path in the French architectural scene. He is considered today as a precursor for a form of sensitive contemporary architecture that remains connected with the environment. Schweitzer sought to achieve a certain syncretism between contemporary and traditional form. Throughout his professional life, the humanist dimension of his approach founded its full expression in buildings with a social vocation. From the beginning of his career in 1954, the architect established fruitful relationships with popular education organizations. This proximity led to numerous projects and achievements – youth hostels, summer camps, family holiday centers – as well as long-term architectural research on these specific types of social tourism infrastructures. This paper focuses on the summer camps built in France by Schweitzer between 1958 and 1974. The analysis of the emblematic projects – especially the Cieux and Ballan-Miré holiday camps – allows us to understand how, thanks to a dialogue with the project sponsors and potential users of the site, the architect developed typologies and, more generally, an architectural language that was as close as possible to the uses and the users, educators and children, and enables to evaluate how architecture participated in the popular education projects linked to the New Education movement.

This paper discusses the role of ONMI in the management, coordination and construction of buildings for the protection of childhood, particularly the colonie (holiday camps) and the “Case della madre e del bambino,” built in Italy during the fascist regime. This article is based on research that is partly still in progress and partly already published. The considerations that arose around the role of commissioning also make it possible to highlight certain aspects related to the concept of rationalist architecture as a representation of the racist health instances of fascist ideologies. These aspects can be made explicit through the search for a correlation between original designs, buildings and functional and symbolic programmes. After the Second World War, most ONMI buildings survived (unlike the Case del Fascio and Case del Balilla), continuing to exercise to some extent the functions for which they were born, albeit with new meanings. These buildings were, in fact, the object of an absolutely necessary re-signification since they had in their genesis an ideological component, in the specific case racist, which was no longer acceptable in the changed historical-political context.

Brittany, a maritime territory, became at the end of the nineteenth century a territory of health and social experiences driven by a medical discourse that emphasised both the therapeutic virtues of seawater and the prophylactic qualities of sea air. Through regional examples, this study evokes the installation on the Breton coast of the first holiday camps for children, whose beneficiaries came from many French industrial towns, and benefited from the salubriousness of this marine climate. This study emphasizes the variety of the specialized establishments created in Brittany: from simple open-air schools to sanatoria and marine hospitals, which are then responsible for the fight against tuberculosis. These examples demonstrate how some municipalities specialized in hosting holiday camps for children, and how sometimes the proximity of these establishments to a more traditional resort led to conflicts on the use of the beach. The study highlights that after 1945 the social works of large French public companies multiplied the holiday camps for children on the Breton coast. Finally, the conclusion evokes the current situation, where this type of collective holiday is in crisis, and how the municipalities and institutions in charge of these establishments try to resist a very significant real estate pressure on the much-coveted Breton coast.

Existing literature on the first four decades of children’s holiday camps in the Netherlands (1880–1920) emphasizes that organizations had a dual goal with the care in the buildings; they focused on improving the physical health of children as well as child rearing. This article shows that the architecture of a holiday camp from the early years also focused on both goals. Both strengthening health and imparting upbringing played a role in the design of holiday camps of the Centraal genootschap voor Kinderherstellings- en vakantiekolonies that took a coordinating role for this new form of care for children. The Society divided the children into relatively small groups and implemented a group-system in the activities during the day. Both the social and medical goals were also implemented into the design of the building by architects. The first building in which this was given explicit effect was the Kerdijk holiday camp, which opened in 1907 in Egmond aan Zee. In this article, the author will analyze for the first time from an architectural-historical perspective holiday camp Kerdijk from the underlying ideas about the dual purpose of upbringing and health care. This purpose characterized the main organization for children’s holiday houses of the Central Society in the Netherlands between 1907–1920. From around 1920, the situation changed and the emphasis of life in the camps would increasingly be on health improvement.

The paper scrutinizes the evolution of the uses and functions entrusted to the Gustavo Fara holiday camp in the Italian municipality of Chiavari (Genoa) from the 1930s until today. The work analyzes the historical evolution of the building from its construction to the recent revitalization, including the tourism-oriented urban transformation of the western sector of the city’s waterfront, i.e. Preli. In particular, the essay questions the re-signification of the building in relation to its complex history (Fascism, refugee center, and elementary school) and interprets the more recent events that led to the recovery and conversion into apartments and a luxury hotel. The inquiry leads to answering the following research questions: How does the building dialogue with its surroundings? Is the former holiday camp seen as a difficult heritage of the Fascist regime or only as a representative building of twentieth-century rationalist architecture? How did the recovery process take (or fail to take) into consideration the needs of the community?

The Basso Ferrarese area in the Po Delta is an undecided place, suspended between land and sea, in search of its future. Its current conformation derives from a history linked first to a large marshy basin, then to centuries of reclamation. Although the reclamations have helped the agricultural use of the land, at the same time they have caused the disentanglement between population and site. At the same time, the threat of rising sea levels is looming. Through a series of journeys, the current landscapes of that sea of land that today forms the Basso Ferrarese have been recorded. A sea made up of many levels that limit and direct the reclamation channels. In a strong state of abandonment, what can be the future of the area? Through the creation of an imaginary for the water space and the study of the needs of a case study, 5 design actions have been identified to decolonize the delta from the land and regain contact with the water, at the same time preparing for the rise of the sea.

Although for millennia the Mediterranean has facilitated the exchange of goods and people, in recent decades, it has been treated as a border between continents, nations and supranational institutions, with the European Union on one side and MENA region on the other. Yet pressing issues related to migration, climate change and pollution reveal problems with the border approach. In 1995, the Barcelona Process culminated in the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and the UfM Urban Agenda in an attempt to better connect countries around the Mediterranean. To concretise this agenda, TU Delft and the authors of this text were invited to work with DG-Regio, UNESCO, the EIB (European Investment Bank), and the ministries in charge of spatial planning in Member States, to draft the UfM Strategic Action Plan for Sustainable Urban Development. The goal of the Action Plan is to enhance the strategic and integrative value of spatial planning interventions in each country. Based on the personal reflections of the authors and the detailed communication with the institutions involved in the making of the plan, the article presents the history and the conceptual framework of the making of the UfM Strategic Action Plan. It concludes by highlighting the hurdles that the UfM Strategic Action Plan faces as a new transnational policy framework for the transfer of policy from the European Union to the MENA region (Middle East and the North of Africa). Such challenges are not only based on content, but they are also related to the frames and structures within which policy is developed and exchanged.

İzmir occupies a prominent place among the Mediterranean port cities of the 19th century. The city is quite similar to other port cities in terms of trade dynamics but differs from them in the diversity of actors who had a say in trade. It can easily be said that İzmir was one of the plateaus of 19th century capital competition. Especially in the 19th century, the city was considered the second capital of the Ottoman Empire after Istanbul and continued to be one of its most important ports. In this period, the architectural and urban arrangements made by the Ottoman government on a local scale, as well as the urban transportation interventions made with the initiatives of western countries, significantly affected the morphology of the city. In this context, the morphological transformation of İzmir in the 19th century, its position within local, regional, and global networks, and its relationship with urban interventions will be evaluated through maps, drawings and documents related to railways and transportation.

Looking for new visions and tools for land-sea integrated planning, the article aims to reason on a reconceptualization of the contemporary Mediterranean through exceptional cases of design and representation. Whether they are utopian projects from the early twentieth century, such as Atlantropa (1928), or up-to-date critical mappings, such as Migrating Mediterranean (2022), they are works aimed at capturing the heterogeneity and at the same time compactness of this millennial water basin. If the utopian project of Atlantropa took the coastal edge of the Mediterranean as its main area of action, irreversibly modifying its morphology through new infrastructures, the critical map Migrating Mediterranean reverses the interpretation by focusing on the aquatic surface and, actually, on the multiple ways of settlement and circulation on and across the sea. Through these interpretations, the Mediterranean is seen time to time as an edge, a continent and a cluster. In the latter meaning – the Mediterranean as a cluster – its relational potential emerges proposing it as a key area for experimentation in the field of infrastructure and osmotic land-sea circulation. The perspective offered by the cluster regime turns the Mare Nostrum into a quintessential workspace for testing the new tactics offered by spatial clustering.

This article proposes to contribute towards this aims by analysing through a borderscaping approach the remote micro-islands and enclaves which constitute the EUro-mediterranean Southern border, namely Ceuta, Melilla, the Canary Islands, Gibraltar and the Pelagie islands. The article examines these territories as precursors and testing grounds in the implementation of ‘Fortress EUrope’; before focusing on their historical role as core of highly-integrated cross-border regions. It concludes on the potential of these territories as testing grounds of novel trans-Mediterranean narratives and political practices.

As a result of doing the Contemporary Projects Design Critique workshop at the Master of Landscape Architecture (UPC), we explore and define a new strategy to analyze and interact with the site of study, which we call Site Vibration Tool. In continuation, we tested the tool through the seaUbarcelona performance at the Port Vell of Barcelona waterfront. We came into a double conclusion. The first one, derivate from the site. Having as a start point, the Barcelona’s 92 strategy of opening the city to the sea, we think over how that strategy has respond those 92 expectations in today’s reality and will transcend in the future of the city’s waterfront, considering the climate change. And in second place, an invitation to enter into our mind. The experience using Site Vibration Tool, we perceive and add tangible and intangible aspects of the place in a landscape proposal, encouraging our colleagues to incorporate it to their practice.

Port cities are places at the edge of sea and land, where flows of goods and people create unique spaces, institutions and cultures, often over long periods of time. History matters when it comes to understanding and designing the future of port cities such as the two ancient Mediterranean cities of Beirut and Naples, where institutions and spaces are the result of longue durée histories. Long-standing spatial and institutional frameworks in these cities have influenced recent plans. In the Italian city of Naples, historic spaces and practices have impeded transformation, because port and city authorities are pursuing divergent and historically established goals while many industrial sites, including areas used by oil industry, await redevelopment. In Beirut, reconstruction following the tragic explosion of 2020, which significantly damaged both port and city, shaping and perhaps limiting the present and future of the city. This article analyses the historic development and the opportunities for future planning of Naples and Beirut through the lens of the Adaptive Strategies course, a master-level course coordinated by Carola Hein and co-taught with Paolo De Martino and John Hanna at TU Delft in 2022. Students, through imaginative methods, rethought the relationship between land and water, port and city, questioning current planning models and imagining new resilient and adaptive processes.

Located 30 km inland from Lebanon’s coast, The Beqaa Valley (or Beqaa Plains) is considered the agricultural backbone of the country. The Beqaa’s built geographies were shaped by the political and economic hierarchies established by the Roman and Ottoman Empires and revised by the French Mandate. Local and regional economic hardships in the last six decades have led the Beqaa to cycle through periods of decline and recovery, with quick introductions of infrastructural technologies, spurts of loosely regulated building development, and hasty innovations in industrial activity. In this vein, ‘reflexive realism’ concepts of risk regime, logic of production, topographical fragmentation, and internal connectivity, are useful to examine how towns and cities in the Beqaa developed, deteriorated, and adjusted. However, spatial evidence that would inform such inquiries in Rayak, Beqaa, is far from similar to evidence observed in Beirut. Urban morphology research techniques combined with the concept of vernacular architecture can help decode the layers and uses of the built environment. This article introduces a mapping workflow that typologizes built fabrics using five morphological criteria (streets, density, open space, architectural character, and land use) to construct a spatial narrative that can begin characterizing the nature of the Beqaa’s cities and towns.

The focus of the research carried out by Zones Portuaires and Corpi Idirici for the digital map of Genoa is water. The map is broken down into the theme of the "immersed" with a dual meaning of "invisible underground or underwater'' due to it being submerged or forced, and of "invisible - unknown or hidden" as a result of it being abandoned or unused. The map tells the stories of a select number of noteworthy places along fresh and saltwater routes, land and maritime passages, stories made invisible by anthropogenic hyper-infrastructures and immersed in physical conditions that lack knowledge and accessibility. The phenomenon has been studied from a point of view that moves from the sea to the hinterland and vice versa using a transdisciplinary approach method of investigation and restitution that makes use of the hybridization between artistic practice and scientific research.

The history of the Mediterranean region and its port cities is crucial in understanding the origin and development of many modern societies. These cities have always been characterized by their interdependent relationships, forming an essential part of a system of crucial regional and international routes, made possible and enriched by the sea. Simultaneously, these cities have been able to preserve their urban values while continuously adapting to new requirements and circumstances, making them ideal case studies of urban resilience. Despite their decisive role in the emergence of the global economic system, these cities have received little attention from the humanities and social sciences. This article aims to consider the Mediterranean port cities in relation to their historical context, their urban model, and their intrinsic and shared conditions. For this purpose, a narrative literature review is developed, with reference authors on this topic. Additionally, fiction resources are explored as a complementary research method based on the intersections between description and invention in three projects focused on the Mediterranean region and its port cities.

Abstract How can cities be more sustainable and just? This question has guided a process of synthesizing insights from previously funded research and innovation projects that deal with approaches tackling urban sustainability and justice. As part of this process, a database in the form of a knowledge commons was developed to gather 40+ approaches: sets of interventions, actions, strategies, solutions or policies that address urban sustainability and justice. This paper reflects on what we can learn from this database of approaches from an urban transitions perspective, both by sharing the method we used to develop the database and by analysing the content of those approaches and what research has revealed in relation to them. Not only do we introduce our methodology of co-creating the database (Section 2) we also present its outcomes in terms of the interlinkages between sustainable and just cities in the identified approaches (Section 3), their transformative potential (Section 4) and which institutional logics are involved (Section 5). We conclude that in addressing sustainability challenges in cities, tensions and contradictions emerge between ecological sustainability on the one hand and inclusivity, recognition and equity on the other (Section 6). Based on the identified approaches, we find that issues linked to justice are frequently glossed over, implicitly addressed, and instrumentalized in favour of ecological improvements or profitability which causes serious implications for future urban research and innovation. In order to address this gap, we present four recommendations for city-makers and city-thinkers across the globe to integrate sustainability and justice at the urban level.

Este artículo recoge las principales reflexiones teóricas sobre las escuelas del desarrollo en el contexto latinoamericano y, a partir de ellas, analiza la evolución de las políticas habitacionales en Colombia y el actuar planificador urbano en Bogotá. En este sentido, se identifican las relaciones entre las políticas socioeconómicas en el contexto nacional y las posturas teóricas sobre el desarrollo; y se resaltan las decisiones gubernamentales y los intereses políticos que han influenciado las decisiones planificadoras de los municipios para la solución del problema habitacional en los sectores de bajos ingresos económicos. Finalmente, se exponen las evidencias de la producción habitacional en Bogotá, influenciada por los paradigmas del desarrollo en la segunda mitad del siglo xx, agrupando por décadas los impactos generados. El propósito de este trabajo es aportar a la discusión sobre la articulación entre la planificación y la calidad del hábitat, y sobre las políticas públicas y sus efectos en el desarrollo urbano de la ciudad.