The Other Perspective. City Networks and Territorial Justice towards a Landscape Ethics

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid post-industrial socio-economic development fuelled by the progressive and extensive colonisation of the territory has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from inland or marginal areas to metropolitan and/or coastal areas. Conflicts and contradictions between landscape and environment—the former as the shape of the territory, and the latter as an accumulation of conditions of eco-socio-systemic degradation that are a source of risks—reflect more general issues of spatial justice.

The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers (original research articles and review papers) promoting in-depth reflections by researchers and converging disciplines at different levels (theoretical, methodological and applicative), on the origins, current panorama and future prospects of the relationship between the social system and environment, with a view to constructing a landscape ethics as a political–decisional background to support a just ecological transition:

• The abstraction of labour and its separation from secular skills, from local resources and products, and from the sustainability of supply chains. The result is the rarefaction of worker identities and imbalances between fixed and variable capital, between servile and creative labour, and between workers and entrepreneurs.
• The imbalance between private and public capital as for the management of private real estate capital in view of reforming the land registry. The management of state property with regard to the regulation of concessions.
• The imbalance between natural and artificial (renewable and non-renewable) material (infrastructure, construction and real estate) and intangible (human, cultural, financial, and economic) capital.
• Accessibility considering both the specialisation of rare services and digitisation, in the prospect of revitalisation of smaller historic centres (hamlets) and the protection of built heritage from the effects of entire urban tissues exiting the real estate market (one-euro houses).
• The fragilisation of urban capital and the impairment of artificial landscapes as an effect of the abandonment and ruining of historic centres, as well as the artificialisation of natural landscapes due to infrastructures aimed at forcibly increasing internal and external accessibility.
• The defence of public spending on repairing damage from natural disasters through the implementation of proactive policies.
• Finance as a condition for limiting new forms of environmental, energy and cultural Poverty.
• New models for territorial development in the prospect of the circularity, complementarity and networking of resources and values.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• The real estate-scape, urban-scape, human-scape and territorial justice;
• Land registry reform and urban justice;
• A new landscape economy: an ecological, circular, and civil economy;
• Environmental risk and the landscape;
• Environmental justice and the landscape;
• Economy and territorial/landscape planning;
• Internal areas: abandonment and repopulation;
• State property management and the landscape;
• Natural infrastructures and the landscape;
• Energy-large infrastructures and the landscape.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Maria Rosa Trovato
Dr. Salvatore Giuffrida
Guest Editors

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