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The pandemic crisis has made increasingly relevant and urgent to reflect on the way our cities are organised, on an intra-urban scale. The book aims to bring to the reader's attention the theme of urban neighbourhoods, approaching it from a sociological point of view. The first two chapters outline the theoretical and analytical framework of the neighbourhood approach, contextualising social capital in a differentiated urban dimension within it and recognising the specificity of places and territories in which collective life is organised. In the central chapters, declined in more applicative terms, the reflection focuses on spatialisation of public housing and social mix in the city of Bologna; on residential practices and strategies in the Scampia district (Naples), from which the dynamics of an informal real estate market of social rents emerge. The book continues with an action-research on neighbourhood effect and equity in the right to health within the urban context of Bologna. The final chapter is dedicated to the sustainable city and the importance of neighbourhoods in facing the global challenge of climate change.

Covid-19 has dramatically shown some of the limits of our cities. Labor market, tourism, service sector have suffered a backlash that can be read as an "explosion" of pre-existing inequalities. The slow and progressive process of recovery we are experiencing let us talk about a "post-Covid" phase, characterized by a forced coexistence with the coronavirus and its mutations, while the health emergency still affects the organization of urban life. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, this book provides a wide reflection on the multifaceted impacts of the pandemic on the city of Bologna. On the one hand, the chapters show how people are not "all on the same boat" in the pandemic context, with pre-existing inequalities and other vulnerabilities contributing to determine different individual experiences and outcomes. On the other hand, many authors illustrate how the socio-economic fabric of the city has given proof of resilience, with new perspective of social and territorial development in the fields of technological innovation and sustainable mobility.

L'influenza culturale e politica delle teorie sulla concentrazione di povertà e sugli effetti di quartiere negli Stati Uniti è ampiamente riconosciuta dalla letteratura sociologica americana e non solo, ma risulta ancora poco discussa in un contesto scientifico come quello italiano, benché essa si manifesti più o meno consciamente anche in alcuni approcci e programmi politici del nostro paese. Con l'obiettivo di contribuire a innescare un dibattito anche nel nostro ambito disciplinare, questo contributo si focalizza sul più grande esperimento di mobilità geografica e sociale fondato sulle teorie della concentrazione e degli effetti di quartiere, il Moving to Opportunity, nel tentativo di avvia una riflessione critica sulle implicazioni del concetto di concentrazione di povertà e di neighborhood effect quando questi vengono tradotti in politiche e programmi di vasta portata.

Analyzing with an ethnographic approach The Wire, one of the most important TV series on American ghettos, to understand and question the sociological perspective that emerges from the series, positioning it into the broader scientific debate. This is, in a nutshell, the work presented in the book It's all in the Game, the outcome of a laboratorial research activity carried out in 2020 by students and teachers of the Sociology of Communities and Urban Neighborhoods class, at the University of Bologna. The text is structured into four chapters, resulting from the four topics used to analysis the TV series: forms of social capital, the relationship between structural forces- culture of poverty and individual agency, neighborhood effects mechanism and the relationship between statistics and political action. Four subjects that are the core of many neighborhood- studies related researches and on which the TV series makes a clear stand. We analyzed those topics through a critical perspective, not considering them as a truth about ghettos, but as a very precise way of thinking about life in the American suburbs.