Spaces of/in Transition: Epistemic Chances and Methodological Challenges

Urbanization entails several material and immaterial changes and triggers multiple transitions. These might conflict with each other and lead to consequences stretching this immanent process of becoming over time and space, and dramatically challenging the ontology and epistemology of flows.

Which dynamics are (re)producing natural and built environment? How people make sense of changes and emergent properties of these complex living systems? And what methodologies can we develop to conduct research on them?

The presentation will address the above issues, considering in particular the notions of boundaries and fringes, since they are constitutive of urbanization process and of the ripple effects it encompasses – such as the dramatic transformation occurring on rural areas and natural ecosystems located on the urban fringe, or rural-urban migrations and the shaping of urban fantasies and aspirations - which, at the same time, continuously challenge the positionality of the researcher. For The paper will raise questions and advance proposals to fuel sociological imagination and build more “live methods” - that encompass the visual and the sensory – and that can both expand our capacity to address these complex issues and engage multiple publics, in multiple ways.

Examples of uncertainties produced by the urbanization pathways of China and Europe together with the perceptions, knowledges and actions – individual and collective – that they (can) generate, will enrich the discussion.