CoMMa neighbourhood atlas

Tesserae Urban Social Research develops tools to understand local territories and engage local communities in their transformation. Two main considerations are at the base of this effort: first, a deep, shared and multifaceted understanding of a territory and the complexity of factors that influence its identity is essential to succeed in any sort of transformative project, either of social, spatial or economic nature. Second, with the increasingly mediated nature of contemporary networked society, spatial representations are not simply replications of the territories inhabited by people: they are extensions, they augment and become part of the territory itself. In this perspective, the construction of complex, participated and transparent representations in the form of local atlases is part of a necessary democratisation of spatial practice. In the network society, concepts such as neighbourhood, territory and community are in fact deeply challenged by the fast transformation induced by information communication technologies and globalization dynamics. Spatial contiguity, traditional citizenship and political representation are not sufficient to understand the complexity of factors that shape local identities and affect policy, governance and development at neighbourhood scale.