Abstract
Abstract This research aims at exploring Urban Fragments (UF) in five Italian cities – Bologna, Cagliari, Milano, Napoli, Palermo. Starting from the PNRR framework – where Italian urban issues are mainly considered in terms of urban renewal following a mainstream approach based on some keywords (such as smartness, resilience, sustainability, and creativity), our purpose is to define a scattered understanding of those cities, overcoming the idea (and the desire) of the urban as an “integral whole”. Today urban issues, as climate change and socio-economic inequalities, ask for a methodological innovation as well a new stance in order to shed light upon the fragmented and conflictual nature of the urban realm, reinforcing “the idea of the urban world as incomplete, multiple, and always in the process” (McFarlane, 2022, p. XIX). To approach the UF beyond a any technocentric perspective, and to examine their affective, emotional, sensorial, more-than-human dimensions (Lorimer, 2010), the project adopt qualitative, multi-scalar and multi-layered research methodologies. In particular, the project will set and tune with direct observation, interviews, focus-groups, creative and audio-visual methods, auto-ethnography, immersive bodily approaches. By using partecipative and creative methodologies, the research proposal aims to share the PNRR principles of social empowerment and moving beyond the purely academic research to reach wider social need. The results we expect to achieve are the following. First, to build a critical analysis of policies and practices of urban renewal, urban regeneration and recovery of the 5 Italian cities, focusing on multispecies ecosystem processes; second, to define a multi-actor methodological path building an alternative reading of spatial fragility, which defines/redefines the liminal spaces of contact and exchange (of lives, actors, economies, etc.); third, to enter into the folds of the PNRR and understand the relationships between the dominant narratives it produces and the counter-narratives coming from UFs. In line with the third strategic axis of the PNRR, i.e. social inclusion, and with the plan’s mission linked to the green revolution and ecological transition, the project also aims to highlight territorial gaps and inequalities accentuated by the pandemic, helping to identify new ways of bridging them through action-research practices. The final outputs (an online platform to spread knowledge outside the academy, a book, scientific papers) will gather the variety of approaches and the diversity of the UFs, as they will emerge from the work of each RU and from RUs’ joint discussions.
Results achieved
The research unit collected and systematised the available documentation with the aim of assembling the so-called grey literature concerning the legal, technical, and planning dimensions of the Knowledge Axis (Via della Conoscenza), while identifying the most significant issues and critical aspects in relation to the project's objectives. Particular attention was devoted to the formal documents and publications relating to the project, “La via della conoscenza come infrastruttura portante della Città della conoscenza” together with the reconstruction of the regulatory, legal, and urban planning framework underpinning both the Bologna città della conoscenza e via della Conoscenza initiatives. This documentary corpus enabled the research team to mobilise a series of concepts, keywords, and theoretical references through which Bologna's urban regeneration process could be critically reinterpreted, while simultaneously re-signifying some of the key categories of contemporary urban geography. In particular, the research developed three interconnected conceptual perspectives. First, speculative fabulation (Young 2021; Haraway 2019) was employed to reconstruct the relationships between narratives, memories, and spaces that reconnect voids, debris, residues, and fragments of former productive urban infrastructures. Second, the notion of the fragment (McFarlane 2021) was used to interrogate the complex assemblages (Dovey 2012) through which different structures of authority and power are articulated, making it possible to observe cities from the ground (Amin & Lancione 2022) and to understand them as amalgams (De Boeck 2015). Third, the research focused on the concepts of infrastructure and algorithmic suture. From this perspective, the project mapped the new form of Bologna's urban territoriality—"territoriality+" (Cuppini 2023)—which adopts the language of AI and what has been defined as AIdeology as strategic drivers of platform urbanism and of its operation as an ecosystem, understood as a political, social, and material assemblage that the speculative fabulation alone had not fully illuminated. The knowledge infrastructure therefore emerged both as a material trajectory (the "real history") and as a symbolic one (the "speculative fabulation"), capable of connecting National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) investments with participation in international architectural projects. It does so through a distinctly new semiotic-material configuration, one that evokes a tentacular and rhizomatic logic of networks, systems, and nodes traversing a peculiar hybrid formation—digital, multiscalar, and more-than-human—which sutures not only marginal spaces but also the most advanced frontiers of capital. The notion of algorithmic suture was adopted and tested throughout the research because it condenses two crucial concepts. Within the platform economy, it refers to the so-called last mile, namely the site where optimisation and speculation stitch together "dispersed and fluctuating elements of the possible." It denotes a process of re-stitching capable, precisely like the Knowledge Axis itself, of "suturing the (W)hole" (Pollio, Cirolia & Odedo 2023). Accordingly, the research unit developed the concept of algorithmic suture as the outcome of the overlap between the hybrid nature of knowledge infrastructuring, the Digital Twin project, and the political masterplan articulated through the language of digital algorithms and platform urbanism, which simultaneously connects and disconnects urban space. If Bologna is being regenerated as a platform, the algorithm constitutes its pivotal infrastructural logic. From a theoretical perspective, the Via della conoscenza represents a clear manifestation of Bologna's full material, theoretical, and agential incorporation into the epoch of planetary urbanisation (Brenner 2014; Brenner & Schmid 2017; Cuppini 2023). Within this framework, knowledge emerges for the first time not simply as a symbolic resource but as the concrete engine of urban transformation. As already anticipated in the Second Working Paper and confirmed through interviews and meetings with the key actors involved in the implementation of the project, "the material dimension of the Knowledge Axis will ultimately be of limited significance compared with the broader strategic vision contained in the Municipality's mandate plan. Its real interest therefore lies not so much in its physical materiality as in its function as an infrastructure—variously described as a backbone, a stitching device, or a connective framework capable of regenerating urban space." This research perspective was further corroborated through discussions with the Communication and Media Office of CINECA, which described the project as follows: "The objective of the Technopole project is to bring together technology, expertise, and education within a common framework. In the future, it will evolve into a hub composed of multiple organisations sharing a single physical space, including research institutions, public bodies, universities, laboratories, and private companies. Each organisation will retain its own institutional identity and legal status while collaborating with the others on technological innovation projects. Within this emerging ecosystem, CINECA's role is that of a high-performance computing infrastructure and a key actor supporting technological knowledge transfer. In this perspective, data themselves become the project's fundamental immaterial infrastructure. The analysis therefore revealed a significant gap between the project's original ambitions and its actual implementation. When examined in relation to the transformation of urban space, the project becomes less a material intervention than an analytical lens through which to investigate the functioning of large-scale urban projects and, above all, the performative role of narrative in shaping material spatial transformation. It is precisely this capacity that reconfigures the possible forms of stitching together the material, symbolic, and political dimensions of urban transformation, thereby contributing not only to the regeneration of urban space but also to the redefinition of the city's identity itself. The discrepancies identified between the planned project and its concrete implementation led the research to formulate the concept of speculative infrastructures. These are urban projects in which the narrative and imaginative dimensions are not secondary or merely communicative but constitute structural components capable of producing tangible political and spatial effects even before—and independently of—the full material realisation of the infrastructure itself. From this perspective, the Digital Twin project also acquires a meaning that extends well beyond its technical function. Rather than being understood solely as a technological device, it represents an additional layer of the broader process of algorithmic suture through which the Knowledge Axis seeks to reorganise the contemporary urban fabric. Beyond the publication of the White Paper (For Whom Is the City of the Future? https://prin.unica.it/nextcities/blog/2026/02/26/libro-bianco-per-chi-e-la-citta-del-futuro/) and the research outputs already disseminatedDettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Alessandra Bonazzi
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento delle Arti
Coordinatore:
Università degli Studi di CAGLIARI(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 37.222,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
30/11/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
