This open access book explores the complexity of socio-environmental extreme events and the possible ways to cope with them by mobilising critical and spatial thinking. Being set in “critical disaster studies”, it proposes a critique of dominant intellectual traditions and practices. However, unlike other works based exclusively on critical deconstruction, the book stirs an anticipatory, prefigurative and generative research sensibility for hope and new preparedness. Therefore, the volume ...

COVID-19 has stressed the condition of radical uncertainty that increasingly characterises our times and compels cities to learn new ways to cope with unexpected global urban challenges. The volume proposes preparedness as a key concept in urban geography, planning, and policy, inviting international scholars to discuss its pros and cons.Firstly, it builds a critical theoretical framework around the concept of preparedness in relation to the COVID-19 effects and other interconnecte...

The temporal and spatial intersection of information and telecommunication technologies, creative and knowledge economies, and related new manufacturing systems, has been leading to significant effects on urban socioeconomic and spatial configurations and public policies. Specifically, the post-crisis emergence of innovative workplaces to accommodate these changes, is creating socioeconomic and spatial features that are only recently beginning to be explored in the scholarly literature.

As a main urban centre of one of the most dynamic European regions, Milan is a key location from which to study narratives of innovations and contemporary productions – old and new manufacturing, tertiary and consumptive sectors, creative and cultural economy – and investigate their influence both on spatial patterns and urban policy agenda.Accordingly, this book explores the contentious geographies of innovation, productions and working spaces, both empirically and theoretically i...

This book highlights the discontinuities and the ongoing development of the urban question in policy-making in the context of the controversial current issues of global reversal and regional revival. It critically examines contemporary public policies and practices at the urban, regional and national scales in order to offer a timely contribution to the debate on the significance of the urban dimension and interpretation in terms of the theory, policy and practice of social-spatial researc...