Territorial Projects Research Articles

Making All Deserts Bloom: The Racist Space/Time of UAE-Israel Collaboration

ABSTRACT Since the normalisation of political relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, the so-called ‘desert tech’ industry has emerged as a key area of economic collaboration. Desert tech combines technological innovation with speculation and entrepreneurialism, claiming to offer lucrative yet sustainable solutions to the specific dangers of climate change in arid environments. By weaving together their respective climate and security expertise and technologies, political visions, and investment capital, Israel and the UAE promise to save arid states the world over from ecological catastrophe – making themselves and their political and territorial projects indispensable in the process. In this paper, we unravel their promethean vision of making ‘all deserts bloom’. We first situate this vision in the desert’s tangible histories of colonial environmentalism, retracing the inextricable relationship of climate science to the violent expropriation, securitisation and transformation of Indigenous life and land by white, European settlers. We then follow contemporary UAE-Israel desert-tech collaboration across the geographically expansive and historically layered sites and forms of violence that facilitate, circulate, and secure this industry’s vision of the future. In so doing, we argue that normalisation is underwritten by a racialised temporality – one that constructs desert landscapes as eternally on the threshold of climate catastrophe, erasing the deep, historical relationships of Palestinians, Bedouin and other racialised subjects to arid environments.

Coastal Greenways in Italy: an Environmental Infrastructure Awaiting an Integrated Territorial Project

Greenways, territorial fragilities, and landscape are distinct themes. This is evident from the comparison of projects for the five coastal greenways already implemented in Italy on abandoned railway tracks. The aim is to overcome this separation by envisioning the greenway as an environmental infrastructure that serves as a catalyst for a broader territorial project, as achieved by San Rafael, Melbourne, and Enschede. The perspective is to utilise rain gardens, bioswales, and stormwater tree trenches to transform the greenway into a permeable body where existing and planned vegetation provides opportunities to rethink open space in terms of ecosystem services. This new design concept is also beneficial for the fourteen greenways scheduled for future implementation.

FOR THE CONTROL OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES IN THE COASTAL STRIP CASE OF THE FRINGE BETWEEN THE MENCHA AND NIL RIVERS (EAST OF THE WILAYA OF JIJEL-ALGERIA)

Environmental issues have constantly constituted the main focus of the Algerian authorities in the development of different sectors of activity. The challenge of reconciling economic growth with the protection of the environment and coastal areas dates back to the early 1980s. It is clearly expressed through a range of regulatory texts and anticipatory and restrictive territorial planning guidelines.The coastal strip between Mencha and Nil rivers to the east of the wilaya of Jijel has not been excluded from strategies for controlling natural resources and territorial projects (PAW, PDAU, and PAC). The anthropization of this small territory gives food for thought on the conditions for controlling the environmental impacts induced by overcrowding, rampant urbanization, landscape fragmentation, pollution and the reduction of natural spaces. Through this article, we aim to assess the socio-economic impacts on the study territory on the one hand and the factors and prospects of the possible divide between the state of affairs and the principles of good land and environmental governance.(The word Oued is a local name. It is used to mean river in this article).

Holy Infrastructures: Catholicism, Detroit Borderlands, and the Elements

AbstractThrough an ethnographic rendering of the Catholic Church at the Detroit-Windsor borderland, this article foregrounds the ways elemental forces, including water, earth/soil, and air, form an interconnected entity that constitutes part of the theopolitical and religious scaffolding of Holy Infrastructures. We argue that the repetitive inscription of social and affective flows within an urban terrain generates infrastructure projects that contract forces of variable intensity into alliance or disjuncture. The interrelation of these forces as Holy Infrastructure, offers vital information on (dis/en)abling racialized forms of hosting and being hosted by the divine within urban settings, specifically as it pertains to theological labor at multiple scales. Indeed, we understand holiness in Catholic Detroit as a performative sovereignty of partition that mediates a desire for unbrokenness and spatiotemporal rapture. The topologies of Holy Infrastructure thus give rise to overlapping but divergent “wholes” within the racialized urban terrain, offering insight into the Church as a loose network of horizontal alliances that may enforce or subvert hierarchy. Our focus on elemental forces allows us to move beyond abstractions and focus on how theological projects take shape in physical space within an urban ecology. Indeed, Holy Infrastructures come into focus most clearly in relation to the intersection of theology with environmental, climatic, and territorial projects. By approaching Church and State as co-constitutive, we show how Holy Infrastructures offer insight into the racialized and gendered terrain of contemporary Detroit.

Un’urbanistica relazionale

The failure of contemporary Urbanism to cope with Climate Collapse has to do with its own approach to reality, which moves between imagination and the materialisation of human landscapes. As an answer to this weakness, two major Urbanism trends are, on the one hand, the exasperation of a hyper-technological and geo-engineering attitude and, on the other, the reframing of the nature and city relation. A paradigm shift that confronts climate emergency on a both planetary and territorial level. The traces of nature-city paradigm shift are at least three, recounted in the essay through some cases and research: the end of production and the emergence of a pluriversal “industrial nature”; the ecological turn and the urgency of “greening” strategies for cities; the failure of the traditional idea of “nature” and the need to reformulate the territorial project. What emerges is the possibility of a Relational Urbanism, in which the focus is mainly on the ways in which human and non-human actors interact, and not only on the ancestral debate on human rights and social control. Far from being a green utopia, the relational dimension of the project imposes itself as a collective intellectual risk and a necessary ethical commitment.

Heritage Resilience and Identity: Lesson from Trabocchi Coast about Climate Change Adaptation Strategies

Climate change and land use are major drivers of environmental and socioeconomic transformations in landscapes and in coastal areas. The objective of this study was to present an interdisciplinary and participatory research methodology for analysing the evolutionary process of a coastal case study, the Trabocchi Coast in the Abruzzo Region (Italy), from multiple perspectives, including climate change, technological history, conservation protocols, and social function. The goal was to assess the resilience of these coastal structures, i.e., their ability to cope and adapt to changes while maintaining their identity and recognition. The adopted approach combined qualitative and quantitative data from the meteorological analyses, literature review, and field investigations involving a participatory workshop, from which a significant portion of the analysed results presented here emerged. The results indicate that the Trabocchi Coast has undergone significant changes in recent decades, posing a serious threat to cultural heritage due to climate change (sea-level rise, coastal erosion, storms, flooding and salinisation), changes in use and mass tourism. However, these changes have also presented challenges and opportunities for coastal development, stimulating diverse resilient responses from local communities, ranging from resistance to innovation. The paper discusses the factors that may make the Trabocchi Coast a model of resilience considering these changes. This is supported by the role of local institutions as guarantors of the cultural heritage value of the trabocchi in that specific landscape context, as evidenced by the approval of the “Costa dei Trabocchi Special Territorial Project” by the Abruzzo Region in 2023.

The Rurapolis Platforms:

A possible reimagining of the phenomenon of urban sprawl is presented here, with a view to exploring and projecting a model of territorial development adapted to present and future societal and climatic contingencies: this involves rethinking the urban landscape on the basis of fragmented and neglected rural typologies. The Rurapolis platforms are anchored in the cross-border territory of the Pyrenees – between Navarre in Spain and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in France. A collective process of rammed earth construction combined with contemporary dance, brought to the abandoned village of Egulbati for a few days, will be used to address the issue of rural depopulation in a region where there are more than a hundred abandoned villages. These ruins, which run like fissures through the landscape, are seen here as potential clusters to activate a Rurapolis adapted to the ecological transition. The aim here is to show how a small-scale cultural initiative such as the Rurapolis platforms would allow us to take action in the context of the climate and health crisis, assess the viability of a larger-scale, long-term territorial project, and ultimately give visibility to a possible renaissance of the rural environment and its ruins on the back of a collective experience that revives a forgotten place.

The Simultaneous Production of Leisure Peripheries and Cross-Border Spaces: A Study on Tourism Valorization in the Andean Puna (Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to examine the involvement of tourism valorization processes in the material and symbolic production of interstate borders in the Andean Puna (Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile). Through qualitative research based on fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, this study builds a processual multiscalar and geographical approach. It shows how tourism contributed to the construction of leisure peripheries by national states, the networking of the border by the tourist market, and cross-border integration projects by local actors. It is suggested that bordering and cross-bordering are overlapping and complementary processes, producing complex spaces traversed by conflicting territorial projects of different actors, for whom the border became a resource of identity-building and economic improvement.

О мерах экономического стимулирования инвесторов в комплексном развитии территории

Based on the results of the issue, the author concludes that benefits for integrated development territory projects are practically reduced to zero, and at the same time those government support measures that can be used by investors require serious legislative changes. However, to solve this problem, the author proposes to amend Art. 286.1 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, amend the Federal Law “On public-private partnerships, municipal-private partnerships in the Russian Federation and amendments to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation”, to the Federal Law of 04/01/2020 No. 69-FZ “On the protection and promotion investments in the Russian Federation” in terms of providing investors with the opportunity to enter into administrative agreements to co-finance the construction of social infrastructure, networks, roads, and also amend SanPiN 2.2.1/2.1.1.1200-03 in terms of providing investors with the opportunity to independently remove irrelevant sanitary protection zones, as well as the adoption at the level of regional regulations of provisions on reducing rent under a land lease agreement for the purpose of integrated territory.

Sexual invisibility in individual registrations: a study with Community Health Agents

The debate on gender and sexuality is crucial in Primary Health Care (PHC), given its influence on the health-disease process. Its initial approach occurs in the Individual Registration Form, a tool used by Community Health Agents (CHAs), through optional questions about the resident's gender identity (GI) and sexual orientation (SO). In this sense, the present study aims to investigate the factors related to the act of questioning or not questioning GI and SO in a sample of CHAs. It is a cross-sectional, quantitative, and descriptive study, using a structured questionnaire directed to CHAs affiliated with Family Health Units of the Integrated Health Care Territories project in the city of Campo Grande/MS. With 118 participants, 22.9% could not indicate their GI, and 80.5% rarely inquire about GI and SO. The majority (72.8% and 61%) has limited knowledge about GI and SO. The analysis revealed a positive association between the frequent discussion of the topic with CHAs and the frequent questioning of GI and SO (OR=6.45; 95% CI: 1.33-31.21), p<0.05. Therefore, the results highlight the importance of ongoing health education to promote equity in the care of LGBTQIAP+ individuals within the scope of PHC.

Territórios Integrados de Atenção à Saúde: potencialidades de inovações para a Qualificação da Atenção Primária à Saúde

Abstract This article aimed to analyze the results of implementing the Integrated Health Care Territories (TEIAS) project in a Brazilian capital. The quantitative study was based on secondary data from the e-Gestor AB, e-SUS, the Electronic Citizen Record, the Primary Care Health Information System, and the TEIAS project management reports from 2020 to August 2023. The results suggest the power of innovation strategies for strengthening Primary Health Care (PHC) through professional training aligned with the characteristics and demands of the territories, increasing PHC coverage, service provision, resolution, and service user evaluation. We concluded that innovations expanded and improved access to PHC, and the most significant advances were achieved in training professionals at the residency level (strictly oriented towards PHC attributes) and incorporating new practices not previously performed by PHC into the territory in question.

Reducing insecticide use in winter oilseed rape by in-field to landscape-scale agroecological pest management

Reducing insect pest damage in field crops while minimizing insecticide use poses a significant challenge for farmers in Europe. Initiated in 2019, the six-year territorial project R2D2 aimed to explore the effectiveness of an agroecological crop protection approach in the context of widespread resistance of winter oilseed rape (WOSR) autumn beetles to pyrethroid insecticides. Over an area of 1371 hectares, ten farmers collectively developed a generative experimentation based on modifying cultural practices and implementing conservation biological control to gradually phase out insecticide use. Two years later, these farmers had made significant shifts in their pest management strategies by implementing a coordinated array of pest control measures from the field to the landscape level. These changes led to a complete cessation of systematic insecticide applications on WOSR and a 37% reduction in the insecticide Treatment Frequency Index (TFI) for this crop. Despite these promising outcomes, the total TFI across all crops, as assessed at the territorial level, remained unchanged. One of the main reasons for this is the increase in aerial insecticide applications on winter barley following the ban on neonicotinoids, as well as on spring pea to combat rising pea beetle pressures across the territory. For these two crops, effective alternatives to insecticides must be identified. More time is needed to instigate fundamental changes in farming systems and to enhance natural pest regulation through conservation biological control. Farmers’ support strategy should focus on identifying and overcoming barriers to the implementation of transformative systems.

Experimenting a heritage approach to forest conservation and management: the Majella National Park Forest Portal

Forests, primary components of natural ecosystems, are an essential part of territorial heritage, a common good with an inalienable value of existence. Due to their multifunctional character and their ability to provide ecosystem and eco-territorial services, they are a key element in strategies to counter climate change. For this reason, it is necessary to systematise the knowledge about their features, potential and transformations. The experimentation performed in the Majella National Park with the creation of a forestry portal, the structure, functioning, contents and updating methods of which are described in this article, is an important step forward for the development of active protection policies according to an eco-territorial approach. The system created, replicable in other contexts, can represent a valid support for planning and the elaboration of territorial projects aimed at self-sustainability.

Mapeamento de atores para o ordenamento de interfaces urbano-rurais em terras secas

Stakeholder mapping is used as a tool to identify social relations and develop management strategies, but its inclusion in land-use planning has not yet acquired relevance. This article reflects on the usefulness of this technique to express the multi-actor nature that characterizes urban-rural interface territories and to elaborate linkage proposals that facilitate the implementation and sustainability of alternative territorial projects. It is argued that identifying the heterogeneity of actors is fundamental to think of strategies to mitigate the environmental impacts of urban encroachment on rural and natural areas, while an intermunicipal territory of urban-rural interface of the San Juan Metropolitan Area is presented as a case study. The results include the individualization of the general scheme of alliances and coalitions among actors, the clarification of the channels of influence among them and the visibility of the spaces of power in which they participate. The identification of the relational system of actors in interface territories through mapping is useful in the design of public policies aimed at mitigating urbanization processes in rural and natural areas.

Transformation of the institutional code of economic development of industrialized regions in the context of scientific and technological approach

Aim. To develop a methodological approach to the transformation of the institutional code of economic development of an industrial region, which consists in the introduction of a new institute to stimulate scientific and technological development.Objectives. To reveal the peculiarities of the economic development agency as a source of transformation of the region’s institutional code; to propose schemes of transformation of the institutional code of economic development of the industrial region taking into account the assessment of the level of consistency of the trajectories of its scientific-technological and socioeconomic development; to determine the functions of the economic development agency ensuring the transformation of the Sverdlovsk region’s institutional code.Methods. Modified Frobenius norms are applied, which allow to design trajectories of scientific-technological and socio-economic development, reflecting the dominant trends of changes in the regions, and to determine the degree of consistency of these trajectories.Results. The article reflects the approbation of the author’s methodological approach on the example of the Sverdlovsk Oblast. As a result, a partial consistency of the trajectories of scientific and technological and socio-economic development of the Sverdlovsk region in the time interval 2012–2018 is revealed. Recommendations on strengthening the functions of the Economic Development Agency in the context of its participation in the implementation of the territorial projects “Ural Technopolis” and “Ural Engineering School” have been developed.Conclusions. Transformation of the institutional code of industrial regions is possible in the context of creating economic development agencies that create conditions for the growth of scientific and technological initiatives of economic transformation on the ground, ensuring the growth of consistency of development trajectories of territories as a whole.

Indigenous mobilization and territorial ordering in the Amazon

The paper examines the creation of the district of Megantoni, home to vast reserves of natural gas currently exploited by the Camisea project, as an example of recent territorial ordering in Peru. We focus on the political conditions that enable communities to renegotiate potential advantages from existing extractive projects. We emphasize the politicization of collective identities as central for advancing the claims of diverse ethnic groups, while drawing attention to the conflation of contextual factors that made the mobilization of Indigenous communities for the creation of their own district more likely. These factors are related to Camisea's sustainable energy discourse, domestic security threats linked to political violence and drug-trafficking, and a political discourse based on social inclusion. The paper demonstrates the varied uses of territorial ordering outside resistance in the context of resource extraction. It also shows that Indigenous identity can be politicized for cooperation among diverse ethnic groups, and in this way, advance their territorial project and secure access to benefits from existing projects.

Frontier politics at the world's end

AbstractThe “world's end” or “el fin del mundo” is a very common representational figure used to describe the Fuegian Archipelago of South America. There are world's end hostels, coffee table books, and scientific expeditions, for example, and the phrase is widely used to describe the region's landscape and geography, Indigenous peoples, biota, and to signal precarity along several registers. In this article, I examine the world's end through the lens of the frontier, specifically focusing on how colonial imaginaries of Fuegian peoples as “lost” or lost to history are foundational to the region's territorial projects, including conservation efforts. Research for this paper stems from ethnographic fieldwork in the Fuegian Archipelago, between 2011 and 2018, as well as archival research on colonial settlement in the region.

Modern approaches and influence of digitalization in assessment of the benefits and efficiency of management in agriculture

The purpose of the work was to substantiate modern approaches and the influence of digitalization in assessing the benefits and efficiency of management in agriculture. The concepts of “benefit” and “efficiency” have been identified their features and differences have been defined in the article. The existing modern approaches in determining and evaluating the eff ectiveness of management decisions in various organizational structures of the agro-industrial complex from individual agricultural enterprises to executive authorities have been presented and analyzed in the article. The importance of one of the priority directions for today is the introduction of various digital technologies in the agricultural sector to improve the efficiency of management in the domestic agroindustrial complex at the level of state and sectoral state programs, as well as various special, sectoral territorial projects and developments. The extremely important issue of the need to improve existing and develop new methods for assessing the benefi ts and eff ectiveness of management decisions has been discussed in the paper, the creation of specialized modules of information and analytical systems and software products that simplify the acquisition of data for a multi-criteria assessment of the resulting and eff ectiveness of management decisions, which are being made and already made. The possibility of the subsequent widespread introduction of these innovations is being considered, which can dramatically increase the transparency of data and the awareness of stakeholders with the results of an objective assessment of the effects and effectiveness of management decisions.

Family farmers' strategies to develop autonomy through agroecological and solidarity economy practices: The case of BioVida in the Ecuadorian Andes

AbstractConsidering the global restructuring affecting agrarian landscapes, we build on the concept of autonomy proposed by van der Ploeg and colleagues (but extended and critically complemented) to analyse how family farmers can build this autonomy to face rural capitalist tendencies and maintain their activities and identity. We offer insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Andes, the BioVida organization that is linked to agroecological and social and solidarity economy movements. Our findings show that family farming autonomy is not being achieved homogeneously for the whole household but must be analysed through an intersectional approach. Furthermore, there are simultaneous processes to achieve different degrees of autonomy and (inter‐)dependency, which are co‐constitutive along gender and age lines and are conditioned by structural constraints. Therefore, for our case study area, agribusiness and family farming processes and spaces seem to operate co‐constitutively rather than antagonistically in practical terms. Agroecology‐based achievements so far act as a localized buffer against adversity rather than an emancipative territorial project of autonomy.

Assessment of the effects and effects of management in agriculture: modern approaches and the impact of digitalization

The article gives definitions of the concepts "effect" and "efficiency", their features and differences are indicated. Presented and analyzed are the existing modern approaches to determining and evaluating the effectiveness of managerial decisions in various organizational structures of the agro-industrial complex (from agricultural enterprises to executive authorities). The importance of one of the priority areas for today was noted — the introduction of various digital technologies in the agricultural sector to improve management efficiency in the domestic agro-industrial complex at the level of republican, sectoral state programs, as well as various special and sectoral and territorial projects, developments, etc. An extremely important question is raised about the need to improve existing and develop new methods for assessing the effects and effectiveness of management decisions, creating specialized modules of information and analytical systems and software products that simplify data acquisition for multi-criteria assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of existing and already adopted management decisions with the possibility of subsequent wide implementation of these innovations that can dramatically increase the transparency and awareness of stakeholders about the results of an objective assessment of the effects and effectiveness of management decisions.