CCRI Seminar Presentation – Thursday, 16th March

Luca Lazzarini

The CCRI is currently hosting Luca Lazzarini, a PhD student in Urban and Regional Development at the Inter-university Department of Urban and Regional Studies and Planning (DIST) at Politecnico di Torino, Italy.

This Thursday, 16th March, Luca is giving a presentation as part of the CCRI Seminar Series “For rural space. A scenario-based approach for re-addressing planning practice”.

Luca is visiting the CCRI from February to the end of  July, 2017. His main research interest relates to inter-institutional cooperation and governance processes at the local level in the field of urban and peri-urban agriculture development.

The seminar will take place at the University of Gloucestershire Oxstalls Campus in Room TC119 between 12.15 and 13.15 hrs.

CCRI seminars are free to attend, but if you intend to come along it would be useful if you could let us know by sending an email. This will also enable us to inform you of any changes to the programme, which can happen from time to time.

Overview of the presentation:

In her outstanding work “For Space”, Doreen Massey reminds us that many current discourses around globalisation evade the full challenge of space: «what is always at issue is the content, not the spatial form, of the relations through which space is constructed».

In the last decade the relational understanding of space brought by the post-structuralist perspective of geographers such as Massey, has began to influence planning theory and practice. Planners have started to interpret space as a socially dynamic and experienced entity, transferring this new knowledge to their way of building urban and territorial projects.

While planning was opening up to the «sphere of multiplicity», new ways of representing the future have traced alternative trajectories of change for contemporary cities. From the mid-Nineties on, many plans have employed the scenario-making approach to replace the former static visions of the future or even to force the glance towards a utopian (but needed) change.

Unfortunately, within this process of change, most of the planning policies have been focused on urban areas, with the resulting lack of attention by planners to demands and issues rising from rural areas. These were rarely considered as a ground for innovating planning tools and methods or for testing their potential contribution to rural development.

The seminar aims to respond to this gap by presenting two case studies that differently depict the rural as a relational space in which planning practices can meaningfully affect agricultural policies and practices. The first case is a planning project taking place in Bologna north fringe areas and the second is a recent research made in Aso Valley, in the centre of Italy, which analysed current forms of local cooperation and their ways of shaping governance processes and deeply affecting rural development policies and practices.