VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities
Abstract
Catania represents an emblematic case of deep territorial fragmentation, characteristic of many Southern European cities. Alongside spatial peripheries, the city generates what may be defined as central peripheries — pockets of marginality and deprivation embedded within its innermost urban fabric, where physical space is not a neutral container but the reification of social space. The position of social groups reflects and reproduces the distribution of capital — economic, cultural, and social — structuring the social field. Such marginality is sustained by territory itself, through stigma, functional disconnection, and the erosion of collective social capital. Central peripheries — as applied to the Catania case — are precisely the sites where Bourdieu’s place effect and Wacquant’s territorial stigmatisation overlap with greatest intensity: physically central yet socially relegated areas, invisible to the administrative gaze. Moving beyond the homogenising perspective that flattens urban complexity, this study analyses diversity as a constitutive feature of the city, adopting the metaphor of biological tissue to describe its natural areas. The first objective is to construct homogeneous territorial clusters through PCA combined with hierarchical cluster analysis at the census tract level. Each cluster is characterised by a composite inequality index encompassing: educational attainment, housing conditions, proximity to services, environmental quality, public transport accessibility, youth unemployment, and civic participation. The second objective is to capture the dynamism of social space through a diachronic analysis comparing ISTAT census data from 2011 and 2023, tracing trajectories of disadvantage accumulation or emerging resilience across natural areas. The research proposes a replicable multi-indicator framework for reading urban inequality in medium-to-large Southern European cities, offering a map of Catania’s socio-spatial transformation.
Gabriele Pocina: First-year doctoral candidate at the University of Catania, my research investigates urban territorial inequalities through a mixed-methods approach integrating urban sociology, spatial statistics, and GIS analysis. The project compares dynamics of social marginality across three Mediterranean cities — Catania, Marseille, and Algiers — exploring central peripheries: physically central yet socially relegated areas. Grounded in Bourdieu’s concept of social suffering applied to urban space, the work combines composite inequality indices at sub-municipal scale, cluster analysis and mapping (Qgis).
Carlo Colloca – Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Sociology at the University of Catania, he serves as President of the Master’s Degree Programme in Social Policies and Services, Head of Third Mission and Public Engagement at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, and member of the Doctoral Faculty Board in Political Sciences. He is also a member of the National Scientific Council of Urban Sociologists and of the Scientific Boards of two university Master’s programmes in migration policies and cultural heritage management. He has served as sociological consultant for Renzo Piano’s G124 Team on urban periphery regeneration, with interventions in Turin, Rome, Syracuse, and Catania — winning the City Plan Award 2015 for the regeneration project of the Librino neighbourhood. He collaborated with the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the migrant reception system (Chamber of Deputies, XVII Legislature) and served as consultant to the team led by architect Mario Cucinella for the curation of the Italian Pavilion at the XVI International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Rosario D’Agata – Associate Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Catania, he serves as President of the Degree Programme in Administrative and Organisational Sciences (L16) and member of the Doctoral Faculty Board in Political and Social Sciences. He has served as a member of the Technical Committee of the SVIMEZ Observatory on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, within the framework of the agreement between SVIMEZ and the Department of Political and Social Sciences. He has been part of the Research Group on the use of Big Data in decision-making processes, funded by the University under Line 2 of the Research Plan 2016/2018.