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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]

Contemporary gentrification challenges long-entrenched conceptualizations. In particular, in 'peripheral' urban contexts of the Global North, the phenomenon is often interwoven with variegated processes stemming from the specific evolution of their historical centers. This paper scrutinizes the transformations of a marginal central district in a Southern Europe 'peripheral' city, Catania, named San Berillo. A series of postwar demolitions and reconstructions, followed by the local community's forced displacement, fueled socio-economic decline and growing rates of territorial stigmatization. Since the early 2000s, some transformations partially modified narratives about the district. By retracing the evolution of San Berillo I deconstructed the role of the 'blemish of the past' in (re)shaping old and current imaginaries upon which the district's identity is built. The aim is to understand, from an historical perspective, to what extent the Haussmann-like postwar demolition and eviction programme can be judged through the lens of gentrification and urban stigmatization, and if contemporary transformations have been shaping a context at risk of being gentrified (or re-gentrified). In so doing, the paper provides novel theoretical insights about gentrification in Southern Europe by mobilizing the concept of intersection to explain the phantom-like gentrification emerging as a (in)visible repertoire of past memories that loom over the district at different levels: as an operational framework for community-led and/or tourism-based initiatives, as a heterotopic discursive practice, as a buzzword for anti-gentrification counter-narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at exploring the relationship between commons, resistance strategies and cultural production in Catania through analysing different cases of occupation of spaces for (counter) cultural production and consumption, thus rejecting the commodification logics of the neoliberal "creative city". Resulting from fieldwork, in-depth interviews and document analysis, our research aims at evaluating the overlapping between artistic-cultural reasons and discursive practices inspired by the urban commons and participative democracy, as well as the relations with both institutional actors and the socio-economic and cultural milieu of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]