Structural Contexts of Opportunities, Public Space, and Collective Action

In this research program I want to link my research on how Italian civil society has changed in the last 25 years with the urban sociology I’m developing: so, in the last three years I’ve explored the relation between urban change and associative participation. I set up and five teams in Italian cities with the collaboration of the relevant state universities: in Milan (with Emanuele Polizzi’s Research Group), in Florence (Vittorio Mete), Naples (Jonathan Pratschke), Rome (Marco Accorinti), and Campobasso (Lucia Corazza) for collecting data on volunteers presents in CBOs evening meetings (N=1200), as well as nine qualitative case studies to explore urban basis of volunteering and civic action, with relevant results on the macro mechanisms influencing meso and micro levels of community-based action. I’ve also coordinated comparative qualitative research in the Milan metropolitan region to explore the urban structuring of local welfare governance, with a forthcoming paper on the limited capacity of associations, cooperatives and less structured citizens groups to steer policy change. Once again, the concept of Weberian community action has offered a main contribution to articulate data and build a diachronic reading of non-linear relations over twenty years. To explore more in-depth the relationship between new forms of collective action and governance, I’ve looked at two neighborhoods in Milan, and four mid-size cities in its metropolitan region: the socio-spatial Weberian approach helped me to show that the force of collaborative and cooperative ties at the micro and meso levels has been a source of innovation and deliberate change but limited and challenged by tensions coming from the macro level.