METRO-CONFLICTS. Representation and governance of conflicts in-between the local and the regional

Focus of the contribution are the forms and outcomes of territorial conflicts at a larger-than local level, with explicit reference to the metropolitan dimension. Metropolitan and regional cities face processes of institutional and governance rescaling that, combined with economic dynamics and global challenges related to climate change and urbanization, challenge urban citizenship and belonging, values and ethics. These processes have evident repercussions on the reconfiguration of pre-existing conflicts and the genesis, management and resolution of conflicts in fuzzy planning spaces with different geographies and boundaries. In this context, the contribution intends to analyze - in a comparative and, at the same, time and space specific contexts - the genesis, evolution and development of territorial conflicts that directly call into question regional and metropolitan cities, with the aim of understanding their forms and outcomes linked to - the presence and/or definition of material and immaterial barriers, connected both to regulatory or political-institutional procedures and boundaries - governance dynamics connected to local and regional actors who, in various ways, contribute to promoting coalitions and aggregation at both levels - representation and self-representation of the metropolitan area/city, as a resource and tool for conflict management, territorial territory governance and the construction of a "metropolitan culture" Aim of the contribution is to engage critically with the nexus between conflict and scale, in order to enhance a better understanding of the ways in which planning - as a contested domain across space and time - can represent, manage, and even elicit strife in spaces in-between the local and the regional, the present and the future.