Futuribili. Rivista di studi sul futuro e di previsione sociale. 2022, n. 1/2, Vol. XXVII

L’articolo tratta della simbolica degli spazi, a due livelli: micro e macro. Il livello della micro simbolica passa dai significati delle specifiche e piccole realtà degli spazi vissuti dall’individuo e dal gruppo nella città e nel paese di piccole urbanità, di paesi rurali e dei paesi di montagna. Il vivere tali spazi li trasforma in simbolica per l’integrazione sociale e culturale delle persone nella comunità. La natura di tale simbolica è ricondotta ad almeno tre fonti. La prima fonte fa riferimento ai significati profondi (gli archetipi). La seconda fonte deriva dall’esperienza delle relazioni sociali e interpersonali nella comunità. La terza fonte è individuata nella storia della comunità, del gruppo sociale, dell’individuo, e quindi nella sedimentazione di fatti culturalmente interpretati ed emozionalmente vissuti. Tali fonti della simbolica sono interpretate attraverso, e supportate da, una serie di ricerche sociologiche svolte in città straniere, ma soprattutto in Italia, con alcuni luoghi di città medio-grandi, ma in particolare nelle città medio-piccole localizzate nella parte del nord-est italiano. Il livello della macro simbolica è espresso da una “cosmosemica” (cosmosemic), e quindi dall’immagine del mondo (o singole parti capaci di essere globali e organiche) come il fiume che attraversa il villaggio lo fa immaginare in forma di “struttura tubolare”, e il deserto, la pianura, il mare, la città, in aree altrettanto immaginate come modi specifici. Tale cosmosenica indica i contenuti globali dell’axis mundi e dell’espansione nella sua area verso l’esterno. Ma essa è poi prodotta dalle singole anime, e al tempo stesso si modificano per le combinazioni dinamiche di tecnologie sedimentate nel tempo e di tecnologie innovative, che vengono lette come anime simboliche in processo di nuove cosmosemiche. L’autore mette in risalto almeno due anime: la prima è l’anima “della specificità della città”, e la seconda è l’anima” della società promessa dalle nuove tecnologie (l’utopia)”.

Le società urbane mostrano una crescente complessità che per essere interpretata necessita il ricorso a nuovi strumenti e metodi di analisi sociologica. In particolare si avverte oggi la necessità di contestualizzare l’agire umano rispetto a scenari urbani che presentano caratteri materiali e simbolici in continuo mutamento. Nell’articolo si presentano alcune iniziative e riflessioni finalizzate a tale scopo quali l’Enciclopedia Sociologica dei Luoghi e l’approccio della flânerie per lo studio degli interstizi urbani. L’intento finale è quello di aprire nuovi ambiti e metodologie di ricerca nella sociologia urbana capaci di coniugare in una prospettiva multidisciplinare una sociologia spazialista con una interpretazione più letteraria e filosofica dei luoghi.

This article examines the participatory-democratic dimensions of community media in relationship with conflict transformation, building on the theory of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe, 2000; 2005). Focusing on the ethno-politically divided island of Cyprus, this inquiry is made through a research intervention that locates community media content production as a participatory contact zone (Torre, 2010) to explore how these potentially maximalist-participatory processes support transformations of antagonism into agonism, with an ethnographic study of a series of community media workshops that brought together Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot teenagers to collectively produce multimedia content. Findings, based on qualitative content analysis (Silverman, 2011) of the collected data, indicate that the teenagers’ participation in this contact zone generated different forms and degrees of conflict transformation at personal, interpersonal and intergroup levels, distinguished with an awareness of difference, pluralist self-identifications, and confrontation against a homogeneous view of the self, while interactions with the “other” were characterized by non-violence, dialogue and teamwork, translating into new collective identifications and alliances based on, and advocating, respect for difference. The participatory-democratic dimensions of community media production, along with the embodied knowledges, supported these transformations by fostering critical thinking, free self-expression and collaborative action on shared grounds, while giving space to conflicts, which were handled by means of self-introduced decision-making tools.

Over the past 15 years, sustainability has become mainstream in the corporate and financial sectors. But environmental and social conditions are declining rapidly in many regions. Nearly all corporate and financial sector sustainability strategies are focused on company- level activities, such as unilaterally mitigating negative environmental and social impacts. But flawed economic and political systems make it impossible for businesses to mitigate about 80 percent of negative impacts. These impacts often return to harm companies, for example, in the form of market rejection, lawsuits and reputation damage. System change is the most important sustainability issue. Protecting business and society requires substantially shifting the focus of corporate sustainability strategies from company change to system change. A growing number of collaborative system change efforts are being implemented. Most focus on specific issues, sectors or system flaws. They frequently are ineffective because they do not use a whole system approach. All major aspects of human society are connected. Root causes, key leverage points and most effective solutions often lie outside of issue-specific areas. Climate change, economic reform and other complex issues can only be effectively addressed through a whole system approach. This paper summarizes important economic and political system flaws and describes a collaborative, whole system approach for engaging the corporate and financial sectors in system change.

The “doctrine of creative modernity” in the model of “responsible and progressive capitalism” is based on the “attractiveness” of the achieved technological and economic development and the transparency of the political system of a democratic state. This power manifests itself as the attraction of the achieved degree of technological development and the state of the economy and financial market, the realized degree of ecological preservation of the environment, social security of the population, protection of the rights and freedoms of people, and minority groups, and the attained degree of protection of intellectual property, which grows into the central determinant of the “new culture of the global structure of power” in the 21st century. The attractiveness of the “new culture of the global structure of power” in the concept of “responsible and progressive capitalism” stems from the complementarity of the state’s national security, the public interest of citizens, and the beneficial interest of capital (markets). The internal complementarity between the interests of the state, society, and market constitutes the determining cohesive force of “global cooperative culture” as a new global agenda of “public politics”. The “doctrine of creative modernity” with the strategy of “creative attraction” in the model of “progressive and responsible capitalism” is not a scenario for hypothetical and unrealistic cooperation and romantic friendships between states. This doctrine leads society to a new internal dynamism that opens a new space for global creative cooperation between the public and private sectors and creative internal cooperation between the state and society, where there is not enough space for authoritarian geopolitics of rivalry and conflict in the 21st century.