Category Archives: territoriology

A New Index for Public Space
(with Tali Hatuka)
Out in April 2025 – Now announced at : https://www.routledge.com/A-New-Index-for-Public-Space-After-Distancing/Hatuka-Brighenti/p/book/9781032555836
With three generous endorsements from:
“This erudite and provocative book melds social and political theory with design thinking to produce a new set of terms to understand both the nature and the phenomenology of publicness. Inspired by the challenges of physical distancing that accompanied the global pandemic, the authors show the durability of the public realm while offering new ways to interpret and produce a range of disordered, agonistic, and spatially-situated interactions that will continue to make public spaces the lifeblood of cities.”
Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard Graduate School of Design
*
“How can we talk about public space and make sense of its continuous mutations in contemporary cities? As the authors suggest, we need to explore patterns of experience and affect along with efforts to conceptualize sociospatial crises. This book is an inventive and highly successful experiment in analyzing publicness that offers to city dwellers and planners alike an index of terms to be used in thinking about city life as a multifarious set of realities and possibilities.”
Stavros Stavrides, Professor of Architectural Design and Theory, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens
*
“Triggered by the contemporary challenges and appreciation of the post-pandemic future of urban space the authors continue the quest to understand and assess public space. Through a new index they introduce us to a series of fresh and inspiring methods and prompts that traverse disciplinary boundaries and help explore the experiential and phenomenological dimensions of public space. The book is a welcome addition that introduces researchers, teachers, and students in the built environment and social science disciplines to innovative ways of examining the future of public space and eventually to show new ways to “read” the city.”
Vikas Mehta, Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design, and Professor of Urban Design, University of Cincinnati
Station to Station – lo Squaderno 69 – out now
Co-edited with Alberto Brodesco & Carlo Brentari
Chek it out at : https://www.losquaderno.net/?p=2409
Territorio come bioabilità. Politica terrestre e vita dei territori
A Keynote Speech at Planning Studies Academic Year Opening, University of Florence, 23 September 2024
Euregio, as Seen through its Railway Stations
Terrestrial territories

Terrestrial territories: From the Globe to Gaia, a new ground for territory
by Alexis Gonin, Jeanne Etelain, Patrice Maniglier and Andrea Mubi Brighenti
OUT NOW in Dialogues in Human Geography – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20438206241240213
Zone
…
Tu es seul le matin va venir
Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues
La nuit s’eloigne ainsi qu’une belle Métive
C’est Ferdine la fausse ou Léa 1′attentive
Et tu bois cet alcool brulant comme ta vie
Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie
Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied
Dormir parmi tes fetiches d’Océanie et de Guinée
ils sont des Christ d’une autre forme et d’une autre croyance
Ce sont les Christ inférieurs des obscures ésperances
Adieu Adieu
Soleil cou coupé
Apollinaire, Alcools (1913)
Public Space and the Study of Urban Territories
An online seminar to be given on Thursday 07 December 2023 Time: 12:30-13:30 (UTC+00:00 – Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London.)
Abstract:
In this lecture, Professor Brighenti seeks to introduce territoriology as a research approach and a sensitivity that can be applied to the study of public space. He explores the intersection between social theory, ethnography, human geography and design as helpful to study territorial productions in the making. Each territory is shaped by imaginational and figurational forces of social life as they get incorporated into a set of materials. Starting from this assumption, he would like to illustrate a few cases and possible applications in the field of urban studies.
To get the Zoom link, pls contact ARCHI Research <ARCHI-research@cardiff.ac.uk>
Territoriology and the study of public place – a short intro (w/ Mattias)
…that we are alone
“It is at the frontiers that the companions desert us—that the girl returns to the old country
that we are alone.”
Archibald MacLeish, “Definition of the Frontiers”. From Collected Poems 1917-1982.
Silent Spring tribute
Paesi perduti? \ Paesaggi di Margine
Il 3 marzo 2023 h.18:30 a TN faremo una piccola discussione con Emanuela Schir, Roberta Re e Umberto Anesi intorno a margini urbani, aree interne, paesaggio & co.
https://www.tsm.tn.it/attivita/paesi-perduti-dai-territori-alla-mostra-e-viceversa
Presentiamo Terrae\X @ Perditempo
Visibilità e Governanza
“Animated Lands” reviewed
Thankful for Gordon Waitt’s review of Animated lands, recently published in Social & Cultural Geography, www.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2077571
La vita dei territori
Happy to be included witha short feature in Coabitare l’isola. Spazio pubblico e cura dei luoghi, Edited by Giorgio Azzoni and Pasquale Campanella (Mimesis, 2022).
IL FASCINO DISCRETO DELL’INTERSTIZIO URBANO – review essay
Territories collection
Presentiamo Terrae-X | 27-28 maggio 2022
« par accumulation de sédiments »
« La fulguration est le tremblement de qui désire ou rêve la totalité impossible, ou à venir ; la durée exhorte celui qui tâche à la vivre, quand les histoires conjointes des peuples en dessinent l’aube. »
Edouard Glissant
Arte e territorio
Space&Culture2022 class
This year’s edition is themed around nomads, neo-nomads, nomadizing etc.
Hosted exciting lectures by Les Roberts, Tali Hatuka, Alice Brombin and Andrea Pase.
Among other things, I’m still pondering about the work of the great land artist Robert Smithson – http://www.capacitedaffect.net/?p=1490
…
Animated Lands – Q&A
How did your book come together?
Animated Lands is a book that encompasses different case studies, but they are all strongly integrated into a single research programme. We got to know each other over a decade ago, and soon started collaborating around our shared interest for understanding social-spatial phenomena. We have since been organising seminars, attending conferences, lecturing together, and paying research visits to each other to bring the project to completion. We have not started from a single theory, a paradigm, or anything of that sort, but mostly from passion, as well as from an expanding curiosity for the topics we were stumbling upon along the way. A number of themes started resonating, took speed, and at some point we felt the book was just ripe.
What’s the central claim?
Over time, we increasingly realised that, in urban and architectural studies, territory – or if you want, more simply, land – was an underrated notion, yet one with a lot of potential. So we picked up an old word, ‘territoriology,’ and tried to use it in a new sense. Seeking to retrieve and revive a science that was born under positivistic auspices, and dealt with politically charged phenomena, we thought that we also needed to warn the reader against the possible regressive uses of these notions, and how easy it is to get trapped into a certain worldview. That’s why we have striven to promote a different take on the life of territories – what they are about, what they accomplish. To counter gloomy and regressive views, we sought to foreground aspects of vitality, spontaneity and unpredictability that are ever-present in territory-making.
What is your favorite book? Why?
We do not have a favourite book in the absolute sense, but there are some books to which it is always a pleasure to return to. One is, inevitably, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It’s a book that’s impossible to read from start to finish, simply because it is itself unfinished, and made only of fragments. Together with all the other urban essays by Benjamin (including masterpieces such as Berlin Childhood around 1900), returning to Arcades never fails to provide fresh inspiration, intuitions and emotions. It’s more than cultural theory and urban history – to our minds it is actually sustained, fully accomplished territoriology.
What book would you recommend right now?
The list could be quite long! We are constantly looking for inspiration across the domains of literature, philosophy, the humanities, as well as social and life sciences. But for one, Bruce Chatwin’s short-prose collections What Am I Doing Here? and Anatomy of Restlessness are colourful, charming explorations into how territorial life generates its own inherent deterritorialistions. Chatwin’s forays into what he called ‘the nomadic alternative’ encompass, stories, encounters, documentations, self-analyses… ‘Why – he famously asked – do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case.)’ Questions like this one are the sort of powerful, provocative questions we like to engage with.
What’s next?
…more territoriology! Animated Lands is, above all, an invitation. Rather than launches and presentations, we envisage to put the book directly to use in practical workshops, where participants could experiment their own way into inquiring territories. Most rewarding for us would be to learn that some other scholars and readers are similarly using our book this way, as a possible blueprint for carrying out further fresh research into the many facets of social-spatial life.
On Stranger Lands – playlist

Territories, Environments, Politics: Explorations in Territoriology
Our new Edited Collection now announced :