U - Podcast

Turin is a city that has represented for Italy what Detroit has represented for the US: the national prototype of the Fordist city, the "One Company Town". It is a city whose industrial past has heavily conditioned its transformation process, because of the material (brownfield) and immaterial (socio-economic and cultural structures and dynamics) legacies. However, Turin is a city that has had - in the past 25 years - a peculiar trajectory in the Italian and European panoramas, since it paved its way out of different economic crisis thanks to a mix of innovative land-use and strategic plans, urban design experiences, and regeneration policies. In the current phase, the city seems to have lost much of the drive that has allowed recent changes and seems to be struggling to find a clear way out from post-Fordism, even if we may still witness different and interesting public and private initiatives. Marco Santangelo is a Professor of Geography at Politecnico di Torino, Interuniversity Department of Regional and