Alfredo Mela

• Philosophy
• Professor at Polytechnic University of Turin

1. Introduzione Questo articolo intende presentare alcuni temi e riflessioni emersi da un lavoro di collaborazione tra la nostra associazione, Psicologi nel Mondo-Torino, e un gruppo di mediatori interculturali che operano nell'area urbana di Torino (Italia) negli ultimi tre anni. La collaborazione con i mediatori nel sostegno ai migranti e ai rich...

This book deals with the relationship between society and space. It introduces the theoretical framework of a spatially-sensitive sociology into the Italian debate and examines its consistency with the disciplines of regional sciences, urban and regional planning and architecture in the light of some case studies. It considers recent philosophical...

This article introduces the monographic issue of the peer-reviewed journal Sociologia Urbana e Rurale dedicated to the KEY CONCEPTS AND THEORETICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE TERRITORY AFTER COVID-19, which I had the privilege of editing together with Alfredo Mela. Seventeen scholars, working in the field of sociology o...

According to various scholars, resilience (i.e., the capacity to adapt and evolve in unpredictable situations) implementation becomes most effective when it involves several civic institutions, agencies, and individual citizens working together toward common goals within a common strategy. Such networks can work together and weather unexpected cris...

Introduzione alla special issue di Sociologia Urbana e Rurale n. 127 (2022) sulle parole chiave e i le innovazioni teoriche della sociologia dell'ambiente e del territorio del dopo Covid 19. Temi: evento e situazione spaziale, metamorfosi urbane in epoca di pandemie, mobilità e identità multi-locali, monoscalarità et transcalarità nel progetto urba...

Research issue from "Psicologi per i Popoli Torino"

Poster présenté au 22e colloque de La revue transculturelle L’autre Ouvrir sa porte… migrations, exils, replis, accès aux soins. Nancy, 8-9 oct. 2020. Attribué comme meilleur poster présenté au colloque

Fiastra tra mare e monti. Un intervento di psicologia di comunità. 1. Introduzione Questo contributo si propone di illustrare un intervento svolto da due associazioni torinesi, Psicologi per i Popoli-Torino e Psicologi nel Mondo-Torino, nel piccolo centro marchigiano di Fiastra, nell'anno successivo al terremoto che ha colpito l'Italia centrale e i...

La ricostruzione della comunità. Un'esperienza in ambito marchigiano 1. Un intervento di comunità in situazione di post-emergenza Anche in Italia, come in altri paesi, si è assistito-specie a partire dal terremoto dell'Aquila del 2009-ad un'ampia mobilitazione di psicologi in occasione di eventi calamitosi; parallelamente si è venuto consolidando i...

Il Capitolo introduce alcuni cenni alla geografia ed alla storia di El Salvador e tratteggia sinteticamente alcuni caratteri sociali del paese.

Il capitolo descrive la storia del cantòn Santa Marta, nel municipio di Victoria: dalla distruzione subita nella prima fase della guerra civile, all'esilio nei campi profughi dell'Honduras, sino al ritorno e alla ricostruzione. Inoltre, analizza alcuni caratteri sociali della comunità: dalla demografia all'economia, dalle ineguaglianze sociali al s...

Il capitolo tratta i principi ispiratori e la metodologia dell'intervento di ricerca-azione svolto nella comunità di Santa Marta (EL Salvador), con particolare riferimento al tema del trauma della guerra civile.

“Cooperazione”, è la parola-chiave del presente capitolo; ad essa saranno dedicate alcune riflessioni, con lo scopo di mettere a fuoco il significato che oggi, nel contesto di un processo di globalizzazione sempre più pervasivo ma denso di contraddizioni, può essere attribuito ad un intervento cooperativo e, in particolare, il senso che noi stessi...

2. Resilienza, trauma e memoria 2.1 La resilienza comunitaria Un secondo concetto, utile per costruire l'apparato concettuale su cui si fonda la nostra interpretazione di un intervento comunitario, è quello di "resilienza". E' questo un termine che si riferisce alla capacità di un gruppo, o anche di un soggetto, di far fronte ad eventi potenzialmen...

(EN) Within wider criticalthoughts on and inside international cooperation, in this contribution some reflections are made about possible approaches to evaluate the effects of cooperation actions onto recipient populations. Starting from an experience of academically-led indepententcooperation in a rural internal area of El Salvador, Central Americ...

This third chapter is dedicated to understand the controversial theme of differences as a complex and contested term, through some different approaches. First, the chapter introduces the sociological approaches to differences, such as essentialism, social constructivism and psychoanalytic approach. Second, it introduces the concept of intersectiona...

This fourth chapter is dedicated to analyse the phenomenon of exclusion from a spatial perspective, in relation to some differences, understanding how they interact with space in the production of exclusionary phenomena. In particular, this chapter focuses on some specific social differences (such as class, gender, ‘race’ and disability). After dec...

The first chapter addresses the concept of social exclusion, focusing on the main definitions within the international debate and its central elements. This chapter refers to social inclusion as a goal, process and outcome and underlines its different dimensions, differentiating it from poverty. In fact, although we often use them as synonyms, the...

This second chapter analyses with a critical approach a set of key concepts for the study of social inequalities. In relation to each of them, some definitions will be compared, highlighting the theoretical differences underlying them and the possible consequences of their use in the construction of urban policies. At the same time, the similaritie...

This chapter focuses on the importance of the political dimension of urban exclusion dealing with two problems. On the one hand, the political dimension of exclusion is taken into consideration highlighting, in particular, the concept of revanchist city and the programmes of new populist and nationalist movements. To that end, we start with the con...

The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspec...

The book explores social inclusion/exclusion from a socio-spatial perspective, highlighting the active role that space assumes in shaping social phenomena. Unlike similar books, it does not discuss exclusion and inclusion in particular geographical contexts, but instead explains these phenomena starting from the dense and complex set of relationshi...

The purpose of this article is to highlight the relationship among food, city and space by adopting a social sciences viewpoint. Since the 1990s, not only in sociology but in the social sciences in general, the level of attention given to the role played by space in the production of social phenomena has increased. To describe this trend, certain a...

preprint del capitolo 2 del libro "Comunità e cooperazione. Un intervento sul benessere psicologico nel Salvador", Angeli, Milano, 2018

The purpose of the article is to illustrate some aspects of the evolution of urban sociology in Italy, highlighting the contribution that it has been offered by the Journal Urban and Rural Sociology along the 40 years of its history. The analysis takes into consideration above all three periods: the first is the initial one, between the end of the'...

The main aim of this paper is to discuss on an issue that is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars from various disciplines, i.e. the relationships between food and city. In particular the paper aims to highlight the reason why such relationships may be analysed with the lens of spatial sociology, or rather it aims to clarify how and wh...

The growing presence in Italy of refugees and asylum seekers has increased the need for appropriate policies aimed not only to migrants’ first aid, but also to their integration into our society. In this context, in many Italian cities experiences of psychological support to refugees have arisen through projects that are part of the System of Prote...

The article is an introduction to a special issue of "Sociologia Urbana e Rurale" whose aim is to present a significant overview of Italian sociology of disaster. In order to better frame the contents of the issue, the article starts with a short reconstruction of the sociological reflection on the topic, putting it in relation to the changes that...

The article is focused on the different tendencies affecting urban public space in contemporary cities. It is based on a reflexion on some emerging themes in the recent debate in urban studies, paying particular attention to the approaches that emphasize the fragmentation of public space and the presence of control strategies, highlighting the func...

The paper addresses the problem of cooperation in the field of community psychology, focusing especially on the intervention in communities affected by the consequences of traumatic events. It starts from some reflections on the meaning of community intervention, focusing on critical approaches and in particular on Latin American contributions, whi...

Our initial perspective is that the dynamics of territories and cities/towns that are tourist resorts (or aspire to being one) can be analysed from the point of view of the ‘population’ concept, dear to a certain trend in socio-spatial analysis. Our chapter concentrates particularly on those who, by need or will, pass through places without their o...

Exactly 50 years after Cortina d’Ampezzo (1956), the Winter Olympic Games returned to Italy in 2006, in Turin, and for the tenth time to the Alpine environment, where they were met with a totally changed context. While in the first, Italy had been a country heading towards Fordist industrialisation and Cortina an élite tourist resort; 50 years late...

Olympic rhetoric usually presents the Games as an opportunity for peace, as demonstrated by the so-called Olympic Truce, inspired by ancient Greek tradition and re-established by the IOC in 1992, with the aim of reducing conflict in sports competition. But conflict doesn’t only exist at the international level. In addition to conflicts of interest...

In these early years of the 21st century metropolitan areas are the protagonists of radical transformation processes, both from the economic and social point of view and as regards the changes in their urbanistic and architectural organisation.

When we speak in everyday language of “population” of an area we use the term in the singular: the living conditions of the population, the welfare of the population and so on. But in the “ecological” vein of urban sociology − which originated in the Chicago School of the twenties − the term is often used in the plural, based on a transposition to...

Mega-events, as the Olympic Games, receive an increasing attention in the debate about urban transformations. They have multiple dimensions but surely one of the most important impacts are the spatial ones. They are an occasion of extraordinary urban transformation, in its inside structure, in its image and in its external competitiveness. Moving f...

Mega-events, as the Olympic Games, receive an increasing attention in the debate about urban transformations. They have multiple dimensions but surely one of the most important impacts are the spatial ones. They are an occasion of extraordinary urban transformation, in its inside structure, in its image and in its external competitiveness. Moving f...

Mega-events, as the Olympic Games, receive an increasing attention in the debate about urban transformations. They have multiple dimensions but surely one of the most important impacts are the spatial ones. They are an occasion of extraordinary urban transformation, in its inside structure, in its image and in its external competitiveness. Moving f...

La città, oggetto non ovvio della sociologia (di Alfredo Mela) - ABSTRACT: The City as a non-Obvious Object of Sociology. The paper discusses some basic issues concerning the conceptualisation of the contemporary city, doing so from a sociological point of view. The author proposes an analytical perspective based on Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘producti...

SOMMARIO Negli anni più recenti, si sono moltiplicati gli studi dedicati all'analisi economica e degli effetti sociali e territoriali dei grandi eventi (in particolar modo le Olimpiadi). All'abbondanza della letteratura dedicata a studi di caso, o a comparazioni, fa riscontro una certa debolezza nella costruzione di teoria. Nel presente lavoro, si...

The question we explore in this essay is one which has been in the background of the discussion of this whole book: to what extent can we justifiably speak of ‘city sciences’? Though expressed here in simple form, this question in reality raises two fundamental problems, as well as the relationship between the two.KeywordsIntegration ProcessUrban S...

Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the "sciences of the city" of the complexity concept. Of particul...

The vast majority of the more recent analyses of innovation processes have recognised the importance of social factors in both the creation and spatial diffusion of innovation. In most cases however, this recognition does not significantly affect the nature of the analysis itself. At most, the social variables are treated as generic elements of the...

Alfredo MELA, The sociology of territory: alternatives to postmodernism. The development of microelectronics and the globalization of the world economy during the 1980's have encouraged a process of reorganization of economic and social space. It is to their credit that sociology, geography and the other territorial sciences have been searching for...