Simonetta Armondi

Simonetta Armondi is Associate Professor in Economic and Political Geography at Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU). She is currently the Scientific Coordinator of the RIBA Project (funded by DAStU): Operational Geographies in Northern Italy (2021-2023). She is the grant holder of the Regional Studies Association membership Grant 2023-2024 for the research “Logistics city-regions in transition. New spatial imaginary?”

The project

Titre: Logistics as a Laboratory for Paris City-Region Policies in the Face of Social, Economic, and Environmental Inequalities. Spatialities, Discourses, Strategies.

The turbulent processes of urbanization of capital (Brenner, Katsikis, 2020) seem to be grounded in friction between “parasitic” central cities and hinterlands, among production settlements, logistics platforms, and technological infrastructures that mobilize a multiplicity of neo-extractive operations of exploitation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019), still largely to be studied. The proposal analyses the policy, planning, and governance dimension of logistics territories and freight distribution related to public actors, private investors, new real estate logistic projects, and land use, exploring the way in which logistics are discursively framed at different scales. Indeed, the logistics processes of deterritorialization and re-territorialization are not neutral, consequently, the proposal, with a critical geographical approach, wants to grasp how contested and contradictory such issues are. Moved by these concerns, this proposal explores the multi-scalar logistics projects, policies, and plans in the Paris city-region addressing three main questions: 1) How does logistics produce new spatialities beyond node-network-style transportation studies? 2) How are logistics impacting Paris city-region policies and planning and its sustainability and green transition discourses at the urban, metropolitan and regional scale? 3) After the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, how to observe these “marginal” spaces from the point of view of strategies of re-signification and exploitation and of the unexpected co-productions and relational entanglements that emerge from the friction between planetary flows, urban metabolism, and the local scale?
 

Hosting institution: Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme - Programme (DEA)

Selective Bibliography

Books

•  (2011) Disabitare. Storie di spazi separati, Maggioli, Santarcangelo di Romagna.
•  (2009) Biografie dello sviluppo territoriale, Franco Angeli, Milano, ISBN 9788846499141.
• Edited Books
• (2023) Cities Learning from a Pandemic: Towards Preparedness, Routledge, London and New York (coedited with Balducci A., Bovo M., Galimberti B.)
•  (2020) Foregrounding Urban Agendas: The New Urban Issue in European Experiences of Policy Making, Springer Nature, Cham, Switzerland (coedited with De Gregorio Hurtado S.)
•  (2018) Milan. Productions, Spatial Patterns and Urban Change, Routledge, London and NY (coedited with Di Vita S.)

Articles

•  (2021) “Ripensare le politiche energetiche tra emergenze e transizioni. Una prospettiva geografica”, Semestrale di Studi e Ricerche di Geografia, Vol. 33, 2, pp. 7-19.
•  (2020) “Towards Geopolitical Reading of ‘Periphery’ in State Spatial Strategies: Concepts and Controversies”. Geopolitics, Vol. 27, 2, pp. 526-545.
•  (2019), “Geografia macchina ‘non banale’”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, CXXVI, Fasc. 2, June, pp. 147-150, Franco Angeli, Milano. (with Bolocan Goldstein M.)
•  (2017) “State rescaling and new metropolitan space in the age of austerity. Evidence from Italy”, Geoforum, 81, May, pp. 174–179.