Genoa 2027 – Sessions – Macrosession 3

The dichotomy between public and private space constitutes one of the most fertile interpretive issues in medieval urban history. Far from being fixed and universal categories, the notions of res publica and private property were defined through a continuous process of political and social negotiation, which varied considerably from city to city and across the centuries.x000D The call aims to attract papers on research exploring these tensions in medieval European cities, addressing themes such as the evolution of conflicts between private interests and collective prerogatives; the different regimes of appropriation of urban goods and spaces; the development of conceptions of the inalienability of public assets – such as city walls – ; the interferences between public and sacred spaces; the forms through which urban decorum was asserted; the drafting of norms that define the public nature of space or that regulate what is permitted or forbidden within it; the identification of the boundaries separating the public from the private, and the ways in which such boundaries are transgressed or, conversely, defended and preserved; the legislation and administration governing the property of outlaws in Italian communes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with particular attention to the destruction of their urban houses and their conversion into public space, as well as the strategies through which outlaws and their families sought to contest the publicatio of confiscated assets and reintegrate them into the line of family transmission.

In contemporary capitalist societies, debt stands out as one of the most pervasive forces shaping the lives of states, institutions, and individuals alike. Architecture can be understood as a material apparatus of debt: it translates abstract obligations into spatial relations of power. Produced within – and actively productive of – regimes of indebtedness, the built environment mobilizes aesthetic and formal strategies that render specific configurations of capitalism both operational and legitimate. As a transcultural phenomenon, debt has never been historically confined to the economic sphere. Predating modern financial systems, it has long been embedded in religious, moral, and socio-political frameworks. From ancient societies to medieval theologies, debt operated as both an economic mechanism and as a symbolic construct, shaping hierarchies, social bonds, and collective imaginaries. Its ambivalence persists: morally, it signals gratitude (Benveniste, 2016) and obligation (Mauss, 1923); theologically, it affirms faith (2 Cor. 6:10) while masking exploitation (Matt. 18:25-35); debt is central to modern democracies (Ferguson, 2008) and foundational to global economic history (Stasavage, 2003). However, architectural history has rarely addressed debt as an analytical category beyond the buildings that house financial institutions. This session explores how the multifaceted phenomenon of debt shaped architectural and urban formations in the Early Modern period on the global scale (13th-19th centuries). How did systems of credit, obligation, and moral economy inform the design, construction, and maintenance of buildings? In what ways did religious conceptions of debt materialize in modes of urban governance? How did public and private debt regimes contribute to urban reinvestment, real estate practices, and spatial ordering? What spatial strategies or urban ceremonies were devised to redeem debt? We invite contributions that examine architecture as both a material and symbolic site of indebtedness, revealing how debt operated as a spatial force shaping urban imaginaries and architectural constructs across confessional and political divides.

Urban housing contains a history of tensions and conflicts that are fundamental to understanding family and neighbourhood relations, living conditions, social inequalities, the dynamics of enrichment and decline, the impact of economic circumstances, and the scope of political intervention. In this regard, inheritance disputes, disputes arising from construction work, eviction conflicts between tenants and property owners, and property confiscations, among others, allow these confrontations of urban life to be integrated into historical analysis – from the most everyday to the most exceptional – identifying their causes, consequences, and mechanisms of resolution. The towns and cities of early modern Europe offer a wide diversity of demographic, social, economic, political, and legal contexts. Consequently, the forms of use and occupation of residential space, as well as the conflicts they generated, display specific characteristics while also sharing common elements. Our interest therefore focuses on understanding conflicts related to property and housing from an international and comparative perspective, with the aim of identifying shared interests, circumstances, and solutions. Furthermore, this panel seeks to foster methodological and critical reflection on the sources available in each context and their analytical potential. The various judicial institutions produced a large body of documentation for the study of housing-related conflicts in urban early modern Europe. It is also worth considering the value of fiscal, notarial, private, and administrative sources, among others, which offer highly valuable evidence for the study of these issues. Accordingly, our proposal is open to the following thematic strands: Family conflicts Neighbourhood conflicts Conflicts with construction professionals Conflicts between urban property owners and tenants Conflicts over seizures and confiscations of property

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of research on the relationship between urban space and gender. The most innovative analyses, particularly within the fields of urban planning and sociology, have focused on the use and organisation of space (often imposed upon them) by women. In historical research, the space occupied by women has often been examined as an exclusively domestic and religious sphere. However, women are clearly visible in the sources and within the medieval European urban life, particularly those from the lower classes, engaged in daily labour: in production, trade and hospitality. Through the papers presented in this panel, we therefore aim to focus on the special (or otherwise) relationship that women developed, on the one hand, with the urban ‘property market’, and on the other, with the market understood both as a physical, regulated space where retail and wholesale trade took place, and as the meeting point of supply and demand within shops, squares and public streets, given the prevalence of street trading. Which were these spaces, and how were they occupied by women? Were there class-based differences in the ways in which women used space or managed (actively or passively) the family’s property assets? Can we identify distinctions in the approach to space between male and female workers? Is it possible to identify specific patterns of interaction between working and non-working women and the municipal institutions responsible for regulating community life? Contributors are invited to address these questions from a comparative perspective, across different geographical, cultural, political, and economic contexts.

Between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, European cities underwent profound political, economic and social transformation. Trade, manufacturing and banking allowed new groups to rise rapidly on the social ladder, claiming a visible and recognisable position in urban space. Elites of old and new formation – merchant patriciates, noble lineages, guilds, ecclesiastical institutions – consolidated their presence through strategies of appropriation, both material and symbolic: domus located in the vicinity of strategically and symbolically significant places; family altars, chapels and tombs in major religious buildings; coats of arms and inscriptions displayed in the built environment and in the urban fabric. This generated frequent conflicts with civic and ecclesiastical authorities and with other users of the city and its spaces – conflicts that surface in archival sources as well as in street layouts, building development, furnishings and architectural decoration. The session aims to explore, from a comparative perspective, how struggles among urban elites for control and visibility in city space contributed – between the 13th and 16th centuries – to shaping the city itself, both materially and symbolically, and the interpretations that have been given of it. We are interested in cases drawn from diverse geographical contexts across medieval and early modern Europe, approached through sources of an archival, literary, material and iconographic nature. Contributions may address the following themes:
• Residential space and neighbourhood conflicts: how the construction and positioning of the domus generated tensions with authorities and other inhabitants, and how such tensions shaped urban morphology.
• Ecclesiastical patronage and control of sacred space: disputes over chapels, altars and burial sites as a driver of transformation in religious buildings.
• Funerary space and contested memory: how conflicts over the control of sites of memory shaped the forms of funerary representation and their legibility.
• Heraldic visibility and public regulation: the tensions between family self-assertion and sumptuary legislation as a field of negotiation between private and public.
• Social mobility and urban reconfiguration: the relationship between the rise of new elites, struggles for recognition and the transformation of the urban landscape.

The sociocultural transformations that took place throughout Europe during the seventeenth century had a decisive influence on the reconfiguration of practices and spaces, gradually assigning greater value to the public sphere in relation to the private sphere. Addressing public space therefore implies analysing territory, landscape, urban planning, and architectural design, as well as the social and economic settings interwoven within them. These distinctive features had long been readily recognisable within the territories defined by cities, from which the very notion of the public sphere emerged. With this session, we aim to promote discussion on everyday life in Iberian cities between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. To guide the debate, the following key questions are proposed: How were the different social profiles and relationships within this urban setting characterised and articulated? In what ways did mobility, conflict, poverty, and the outbreak of diseases shape daily life and the survival strategies of urban populations? How were professional and economic connections and networks structured during this period? And what was the role and agency of women in the reconfiguration of this public space? Based on these issues, we invite paper proposals that explore the social, institutional, and economic dimensions of cities across the Iberian Peninsula between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and that contribute to enriching this debate.

Devotional confraternities have played a significant role in shaping and defining European urban settings. Their presence was evident in their management of spaces within religious buildings, such as chapels and altars, as well as in the construction of new buildings. Confraternal spaces were places of devotion, ritual, and social interaction, but also contexts in which collective identities, social hierarchies, and power relations were defined and negotiated. The material and visual culture of the confraternities – from architecture to devotional objects, from works of art to processional paraphernalia – further helped shape the urban experience and provided tools through which groups and communities represented themselves and asserted their presence in public space. Confraternities provide a privileged vantage point for investigating the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that characterised early modern societies. While some associations restricted access based on gender, social group, profession, or economic means, others offered opportunities for participation and representation to often marginalised groups, such as women, people with disabilities, migrants, or religious minorities. In this sense, the spaces of the confraternities could serve as both instruments of social control and places for the expression of identity. Coexistence within the same urban contexts required forms of negotiation, but it could also give rise to conflicts over the management of spaces, devotional practices, and access to resources. On other occasions, however, the presence of close collaborations attests to the existence of networks built around shared interests. This session invites contributions that explore confraternities as spaces of interaction, representation, conflict, and negotiation. Studies focusing on the social uses of space, the construction of collective identities, expressions of female agency, material and visual culture, ritual and processional practices, as well as the relationships between confraternities, religious institutions, and civic authorities are particularly welcome. Through these perspectives, the session aims to foster reflection on the role of confraternities in community-building and in defining the social, cultural, religious and gendered spaces in early modern Europe.

Assistential institutions were one of the great nodes within the urban sphere, and cannot be understood as closed places disconnected from it, but rather as living organisms that interact in multiple ways with their most immediate environment. Regardless of whether their funding was municipal or not, they constituted a point of reference both for the popular classes, who benefited from their assistance, and for the elites, who used them to project their power. Control over charitable resources reinforced their position as leaders of the community, placing them at the top of networks of dependence – an aspect that found its most visible expression in the processions associated with these establishments, as was the case with the Portuguese misericórdias. These centres were by no means innocuous, and many of them aspired to promote elite values by imposing specific standards of behaviour. This was the case with the Spanish hospicios, which, following models previously developed in other contexts across the European geography, made relief conditional on the performance of certain tasks, in an attempt to promote new industrial hubs and expand the availability of labour for manufacturing. Despite this, more recent research increasingly highlights the important welfare function performed by these foundations: providing temporary care for the sick, facilitating the support of children during non-productive phases and easing their entry into the labour market, accompanying the elderly in the final stage of their life cycle, or assisting the families of precarious workers through aid in kind or in cash. The various models, the available funding, and historical circumstances shaped the relationships between institutions and those they assisted, and it was common for a given centre to alter its initial objectives and end up specialising in a particular profile of the needy. This proposal aims to explore and deepen our understanding of how different Portuguese and Spanish assistential establishments interacted with the social agents of urban spaces, assessing the impact they had on family economies, the labour market, and the strategies of projection employed by municipal elites.

This session aims to bring together scholars to analyse how regulations, institutions, social networks and conflicts developed within urban contexts among the guilds responsible for the distribution of goods within city centres or in port communities. Of particular interest is understanding how these groups interacted within contexts linked to inland waterway networks and the relationship between these and the interconnected maritime trading systems. More generally, it would be interesting to understand how the various guilds (in northern Italy, for example, those from Bergamo, Valtellina – and thus Graubünden – and Ticino) divided up the work and whether and how they competed with one another for activities such as the loading and unloading of goods in port areas. The city itself, at least until the first half of the twentieth century, contained identity-defining spaces in which these networks wove both horizontal and hierarchical relationships. These interdependencies could be explored through the organisation of work and everyday life, shared intangible spaces, and the relationship between places of origin and processes of integration (for example, the camalli in Genoa, Livorno and Naples in 1944-46). This final aspect is particularly relevant to inland waterways. What links existed between maritime and inland ports? How were urban ports connected to inland waterways organised? Who worked there? Which institutions were involved? Which social, corporate and religious networks operated within them? What goods were transported, and how were they distributed? Were there links or conflicts between different urban networks? Were there forms of discrimination based on religion, gender or social background? How significant was the presence of women, and what roles did they play, if any?

The aim of this session is to examine European port cities between 1450 and 1815, analysing the interdependence between the urban environment, maritime communities and port activity. Through the lens of the ‘wounded city’, we will discuss how these elements interacted not only to generate wealth, but also as sources of tensions, conflicts and inequalities, profoundly transforming the urban fabric of port cities during the Modern Age and the Enlightenment. The European port network was instrumental in the continent’s economic progress, but conflict across all spheres and the struggle over hierarchies and spaces shaped that rise. Despite the Atlantic Arc’s leading role in the process of global integration, its growth was closely linked to other regions – from the Mediterranean to the Baltic – which were often the scene of profound conflicts, rivalries and exclusions, beyond their socio-economic role; how did the various ports adapt to the changes that redefined their trade routes? How did the appropriation of space by market interests affect the social reality of the city? How was this conflict reflected in the unequal use of space? The social fabric of these cities cannot be understood without taking into account the interplay between the authorities, dockworkers, traders and financiers. Organised into networks, these groups built communities with their own distinct identities, yet at the same time generated profound imbalances and tensions. It is essential to recognise the role of women, whose contribution was vital to the urban port economy and to the dynamics of the conflicts themselves. Given this reality, one might ask: how did commercial pressure groups influence the drafting of regulations that often marginalised other urban actors? How did merchants interact with the other actors who made business possible in a context of unequal access to resources? This session aims to explore in greater depth how ports have shaped urban life. We invite you to reflect on the city as a space of conflict; to this end, we are seeking papers that analyse both the social dimension – maritime workers and communities – and the economic dimension – traders, bankers and institutions – , integrating approaches from archaeology, infrastructure and social dynamics that shed new light on this reality.

This session aims to gather contributions on the relationship between port and city in the contemporary era. The radical innovations in maritime transport – from the first increasingly large steamships to the container revolution – together with the changing importance of the types of goods handled – from spices and colonial products to mass commodities and energy products – have profoundly transformed port spaces, leading to their gradual expansion and/or spatial relocation. The balance – or the disruption of balances – between urban and port spaces is a central theme in the history of port cities, which have often become, to use the effective definition coined by maritime historian Frank Broeze, “cities with a port,” highlighting the fracture that has occurred between port and city. Historically, the relationship between port and city has always been close, dialectical, and at times conflictual, while constantly evolving. Topics (among those that may be explored):
• The scale of port infrastructures, their expansion over time, and their (re)location along coastal spaces
• The relationship between port areas, the sea, and urban spaces (residential areas, etc.)
• Externalities generated by port activities in terms of transport infrastructure networks, traffic, and pollution: their impact on the city
• The city of dockworkers, sailors, and cruise passengers.

The cultural and geographic contours of liveable space are oftentimes invisible and deserve closer examination. Theories of individuation or culturalization abound, splitting communities across migrant or non-migrant backgrounds. This is true for deep historic cities or neighbourhoods as well as communities in newer cities. In the culturalization hypothesis, for example, people without a migration history tend to perceive distinctions of urban settings based on socially constructed entities. Diversity, a perhaps flawed and complex term, continues to shape spatial environments, nonetheless. This session proposes to examine the role of spaces primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, but can reference earlier chronological periods, that set in motion (symbolic) boundaries to include, exclude, neglect, welcome or categorically expunge individuals from, or include communities in, liveable sites. What sites are no longer liveable due to discrimination or conversely, what sites open doors, in an architectural metaphor, to melting or dissolving boundary perceptions?

The modern city was built, in no small part, on the bodies of nonhuman animals. Its streets were paved and goods transported through the labour of horses and other draught and pack animals; its expanding populations were fed by the hidden machinery of the industrial slaughterhouse; its parks enclosed exotic creatures behind iron bars for the edification and amusement of its citizenry; its sewers and back alleys were colonized by rats and pigeons whose presence was managed, moralized, and even racialized. Yet the history of urban modernity has largely been written as though the nonhuman animals who inhabited, powered, and were consumed by the modern city were incidental to its story, or no part of it at all. This panel takes as its point of departure the transformation of European and global cities from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with particular attention to the ways in which processes of urban modernization reorganized, displaced, concealed, and reimagined the nonhuman animal lives that had long been woven into the fabric of urban existence. But one example is how the banishment of slaughterhouses and related trades to the margins rendered animal death invisible in the name of hygiene and the so-called “civilizing process,” producing an organized forgetting of the lives and deaths that powered the modern city. This panel invites papers that take seriously the nonhuman animal as a subject of urban history, attending to the full range of creatures whose presence in and relationship to the modern city has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the processes of urban transformation. Who, and what, has been allowed to inhabit urban space, on what terms, and at what cost? It examines how animal bodies and lives have been managed, exploited, displaced, aestheticized, exterminated, and mourned, and what has been suppressed or rendered invisible in these processes. Particular attention is given to the racialized and discriminatory dimensions of urban animal management, including the association of “vermin” with marginalized, racialized, and immigrant communities. The reorganization of urban space in relation to nonhuman animals was a global process shaped by colonial encounters, imperial networks, and local and Indigenous histories. We therefore welcome contributions addressing cities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond, and engaging critically with colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Topics may include the history of the slaughterhouse and other animal industries; the displacement of working animals by technological change (for instance, the replacement of horses by automobiles); the zoo as a site of imperial knowledge production; urban hygiene and the extermination of “pest” species; and representations of urban animal life. Methodologically, the panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches spanning history, art history, urban studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial critique.

Colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary cities through visible and invisible traces embedded in urban space. Beyond monuments, landscapes, infrastructures, street names and symbolic places, colonial histories persist as overlooked urban traces. These traces reveal unresolved relationships between memory, identity and belonging, while exposing urban spaces as sites of vulnerability, conflict, and negotiation, as well as spaces for re-appropriation and re-signification. This session investigates how colonial legacies are inscribed, contested and reinterpreted within contemporary spaces. Particular attention focuses on urban transformations following political ruptures, social conflicts, environmental crises, and demands for historical and systemic justice. Colonial traces may emerge as urban wounds, revealing exclusion, accountability, and spatial inequality, while creating opportunities for prioritizing vernacular knowledge (e.g. lived experiences and local practices) as sources of reinterpretation The session explores how local actors and heritage initiatives engage with contested spaces through re-storying and community-based initiatives, exploring the role of the city both as a material archive of suppressed memories and as a field of political and cultural experimentation. Such practices reveal overlooked colonial histories, transform neglected places into spaces of memory, and enable alternative narratives. It explores these practices within three case studies located in Italy, the Mediterranean region, as well as the southeastern region of the US. Changing public spaces and threatened heritage reveal how colonial legacies shape urban transformation, resilience and recovery. The session welcomes contributions addressing the Mediterranean Basin, Italy, and comparative perspectives involving US coastal cultural landscapes. Questions may include: How do cities reveal, obscure, or negotiate colonial histories within contemporary space? How do contested memories and invisible traces reshape identities, and senses of belonging? How do urban risks expose unresolved colonial legacies and threatened heritage? How are contested spaces transformed and renegotiated? How can heritage initiatives and communitybased actions make hidden histories visible and support inclusive urban futures? Adopting a transdisciplinary perspective, the session fosters dialogue on colonial legacies, contested memory, urban vulnerability, and contemporary urban transformation.

The history of contemporary architecture and the city is closely linked to the rise of new spaces for displaying and selling goods: from 19th-century covered passages to department stores, right up to more recent shopping centres and malls. Within this context, which has been extensively studied by historians, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the supermarket as a building type. Based on the principles of self-service, free choice and the standardisation of consumption, the supermarket has transformed not only shopping habits, but also forms of social interaction, the rhythms of urban life and the organisation of the suburbs, often becoming the focus of heated controversies and conflicts. Its spread is intertwined with some of the main wounds of the contemporary city: the uncontrolled expansion of suburban areas, the loss of centrality of traditional public space, the fragmentation of the urban fabric and the gradual replacement of civic relations with consumer practices. The supermarket can therefore be interpreted as one of the privileged vantage points through which to interpret the city wounded by economic crises and the transformations of contemporary capitalism. At the same time, supermarkets, superstores and shopping centres were conceived as instruments of political, economic and territorial renewal. In the post-war period, they embodied the promise of a new urban modernity based on democratic access to consumer goods, infrastructural efficiency and the development of new models of community life. In many contexts marked by industrial crisis, urban marginalisation or the scarcity of communal spaces, these commercial establishments have taken on the role of new urban hubs, gradually replacing the town square, the traditional market and other historic venues of public life. They have therefore not only accompanied the transformations of the contemporary city, but have actively participated in the construction of new urban imaginaries and in genuine programmes for the redefinition of communal space. The session has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to reconstruct the spread of the supermarket and its evolution in Italy during the second half of the 20th century; on the other, to examine the role such structures might play in the future of the contemporary city, reflecting on the possibility of transforming what have long been considered ‘non-places’ into tools for urban regeneration and social renewal capable of addressing the fragments of the wounded city.

Touristification and overtourism are real phenomena that, in recent decades, have contributed to radically altering the historic built heritage of many cities, not only in Italy. At risk of permanent change are not only the cities themselves, but also their inhabitants, their habits, and the ways in which they use the cities. This session aims to gather contributions addressing this phenomenon: -f rom a quantitative perspective (for example, through analyses of visitor numbers and the “carrying capacity” of areas affected by tourism pressure);
• in relation to the impact on the communities affected (gentrification, tourism phobia, etc.);
• in relation to the economic aspects of this anthropogenic pressure on the territories;
• in relazione agli aspetti economici di tale pressione antropica sui territori;
• in relation to policies to counteract them and governance models at various levels;
• with regard to the “physical” damage that regions, historic districts, and built heritage sustain at various levels and scales.