Urban Regionalisation Processes

This book explores the issues of transformation phenomena of the urban dimension (regionalization processes) that traditional scientific literature fails to describe appropriately. So far, scholars have adopted a widespread dominant perspective that proved unable to grasp the essence of post-modern complexities that urban spaces imply. The book provides a taxonomy, in order to describe the rules of these new and peculiar cities, by using the living dimension as a device for the epistemological breaking down of traditional socio-spatial analyses. After a thorough theoretical introduction, it describes two Sicilian case studies that prove particularly relevant to the construction of a new, alternative urban regionalization theory. These two areas, Palermo and South-Eastern Sicily, are described through several aspects, such as the role of migrants and migrations in defining urban regionalization, the power of fiction and the new urban forms that are slowly emerging in Sicily. Overall, this book provides a refreshing view of what Sicily has been and is becoming, by deconstructing most of its clichés and suggesting theoretical perspectives grounded in both quantitative and qualitative analyses.