SITUAZIONI DI COSMOPOLITISMO URBANO. CAGLIARI TRA IL QUI E L'ALTROVE

This work wants to be a reflection on space and its qualities, on places and their meanings, on territories and on the relations between them and the people who produce, live and inhabit them. Trying to relate urban studies and migration studies, we’ll try to shed light on some aspects related to urban transformations processes due to the increasing presence of “cultural communities”. The city at the core of our investigation, Cagliari, re-discovers itself as a Cosmopolitan City, by virtue of the presence of “new”, individuals, groups or communities which settle down in relation to the recent human mobility fluxes. The attention has been directed to observe and analyze those “situations of urban cosmopolitanism” that both phisically and symbolically transform and mould urban spaces. The thesis is divided into two main parts. In the first section some theoretical-methodological aspects are presented and analyzed. This will help to frame and contextualize the urban and the migratory phenomena, focusing on some crucial concepts as those of “cosmopolitan city” “transnationalism”, “place identity” or “mobile territory”. In chapter two, the focus is on methodology. The "method issue" has progressively gone with the development of field analysis, gradually building a methodological framework that can be said interdisciplinary and that relies on the employment of different methodological instruments. From urban inspections to the use of photography and audio recordings, as well as interviews or database consultation, from participant observation to video recordings, the multiplicity of approaches and tools, on the one hand, has been fundamental in the construction of the methodological apparatus and, on the other hand, has been useful for a first dissemination of the results from a public, didactical and educational perspective. In the second part, after having numerically framed the area of our interest, the metropolitan city of Cagliari, we tried to re-produce a “map of cosmopolitanism” of Cagliari, re-scaling the city into a reticular system, peculiar of the fluidity of contemporary migrations. If in the third chapter the attention was mainly directed towards public space and its qualities, in the fourth chapter we tried to observe and analyze those sacred spaces that “speak the language of cosmopolitanism”, believing that those represent, in mobility contexts, a preferred channel for the transmission and re-production of cultural and spatial traits. For this reason, the analysis moved into a variety of “situations of urban cosmopolitanism” which regulate times and rhythms of the city, underlining some dynamics of spatial settlement, dialogue, concurrence and conflict between social actors, due sometimes to their presence (or absence) in the public sphere. Finally, a fifth and last chapter drove the investigation to a “parallel field”, identified in the web and some of its social uses, observing how some communities try to appropriate of some “virtual spaces”, giving some interesting elements for analyzing some mechanisms in the production of space and of social, spatial and political “self-representation”. The choice of using “spaces and places” as a key to re-interpret the city, together with the choice of using different research tools also helped us to think about a further dissemination of the results. The way chosen, in addition to the written text, is that of the webdoc, in order to better show those spaces at the core of the investigation (visually, sonorously, and emotionally) as well as to hypothetically reach a wider public with non-specific skills. One of the aims of this work, was to give a non-linear narration of Cagliari, increasingly involved in global processes which invite us to re-think and re-draw its maps and geographies.