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At present urban sprawl is considered to be the main threat to sustainable urban development by most urban planners. As a trend that was first been observed in North America after the Second World War, it was not seen as a threat to urban development until the 1980s. It was then, with the evolution of the concept of sustainability, that the attitude of planners, most professionals and the wider public changed. In Europe, these problems were faced somewhat later – they became a focus of planners’ concern and research late in the 1990s and particularly in the 2000s. The European Environment Agency (EEA) issued several important documents raising public awareness about the threats that sprawl presented to the environment, the most important being the 2006 report “Urban sprawl in Europe – The ignored challenge”. Cities, as a rule, expand as they grow. To explain why urban sprawl is a threat, urban growth and expansion should be differentiated. Urban growth is, generally, positive – cities are growing because they are becoming more competitive, provide more and better jobs and bolster a vibrant, local economy. However, sprawl is excessive urban expansion, resulting in expansive, low density neighbourhoods. The proponents of sprawl argue that “sprawl is sweet” because it reflects the preferences of residents to live in larger plots in quiet, low density residential areas with a lot of open spaces and greenery. The opponents of sprawl, too, agree that the growth of cities is positive, but sprawl occurs when cities grow excessively, i.e. when the expansion of the urbanised area outstrips the growth of its population. Thus each resident consumes land for housing and for infrastructure excessively, as well as resources such as gas, for commuting. The EEA report of 2006 outlines several major negative impacts of sprawl. Sprawl above all excessively consumes land, raw materials and fuels. Excessive consumption of land means excessive loss of rural land, which is sealed and many of its properties are lost. Biodiversity is sharply reduced. In addition to land, raw materials and fuels, the consumption of water and the production of exhaust emissions are also excessive and affect the climate. Thus the price paid by society for sprawl is high, especially in view that most of the resources consumed are non-renewable. Although the residents of low density suburbs may enjoy open spaces, greenery and high standard of living, suburbs also often become dormitory housing areas, which are socially segregated and less lively than compact, urban settlements. For additional information on this deliverable please email Aleksandar Slaev at slaev@vfu.bg. For additional information on the TURAS project seehere, oremail marcus.collier@tcd.ie.

At present urban sprawl is considered to be the main threat to sustainable urban development by most urban planners. As a trend that was first been observed in North America after the Second World War, it was not seen as a threat to urban development until the 1980s. It was then, with the evolution of the concept of sustainability, that the attitude of planners, most professionals and the wider public changed. In Europe, these problems were faced somewhat later – they became a focus of planners’ concern and research late in the 1990s and particularly in the 2000s. The European Environment Agency (EEA) issued several important documents raising public awareness about the threats that sprawl presented to the environment, the most important being the 2006 report “Urban sprawl in Europe – The ignored challenge”. Cities, as a rule, expand as they grow. To explain why urban sprawl is a threat, urban growth and expansion should be differentiated. Urban growth is, generally, positive – cities are growing because they are becoming more competitive, provide more and better jobs and bolster a vibrant, local economy. However, sprawl is excessive urban expansion, resulting in expansive, low density neighbourhoods. The proponents of sprawl argue that “sprawl is sweet” because it reflects the preferences of residents to live in larger plots in quiet, low density residential areas with a lot of open spaces and greenery. The opponents of sprawl, too, agree that the growth of cities is positive, but sprawl occurs when cities grow excessively, i.e. when the expansion of the urbanised area outstrips the growth of its population. Thus each resident consumes land for housing and for infrastructure excessively, as well as resources such as gas, for commuting. The EEA report of 2006 outlines several major negative impacts of sprawl. Sprawl above all excessively consumes land, raw materials and fuels. Excessive consumption of land means excessive loss of rural land, which is sealed and many of its properties are lost. Biodiversity is sharply reduced. In addition to land, raw materials and fuels, the consumption of water and the production of exhaust emissions are also excessive and affect the climate. Thus the price paid by society for sprawl is high, especially in view that most of the resources consumed are non-renewable. Although the residents of low density suburbs may enjoy open spaces, greenery and high standard of living, suburbs also often become dormitory housing areas, which are socially segregated and less lively than compact, urban settlements. For additional information on this deliverable please email Aleksandar Slaev at slaev@vfu.bg. For additional information on the TURAS project see here, or email marcus.collier@tcd.ie., Suggested citation: Slaev, A., Krunic, N., Zekovic, S., Vujosevic, M., Pichler-Milanovic, N., Baffioni, C., Guttadauria, I., Odorico, M., Vallocchia, S., Voglino, A.M., Maricic, T.; Petric, J., Bajic, T., Nikiforov, N., Konakchiev, D., Nikolov, N., Daskalova, D., Lyubenov, Y., Topchiev, H. and Collier, Marcus J. (2014) Report on the balance between planning and the market relating to sustainable and resilient development of suburban areas. Deliverable 5.6 of the TURAS FP7 Project. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3941456.

Aḥmad Bašīr al-‘Aylah is one of the most prolific and versatile authors of Contemporary Palestinian literary landscape. He is probably best known for his poetical collections, but he is also a journalist, a novelist, a script editor, a radio producer and a short story writer. In 2016 he published his first short story collection entitled Al-ḥabl allaḏī tadallà min al-samā’ (The rope hanging from the sky), that has never been translated into European languages. The stories included in this work are mainly set in Benghazi, which is the city where the author lives since he was a child, and they focus on the tragedy of war and its disasters, first of all the loss and destruction of houses and buildings. Through an in-depth critical analysis of the work – with a special attention to the methodological introduction and the first short story that gives its name to the whole collection (and here provided, for the first time, with an Italian translation) – the author of the present article examines the main features of Aḥmad Bašīr al-‘Aylah’s narrative experience with regard both to the themes he deals with and to his language and narrative style.

Hegel speaks of human self-knowledge in terms of “self-elevation” above the singularity of sensation to the universality of thought and as addressing human truth and knowledge. However, if we regard his famous injunction “know thyself” as meaning that a self-conscious I must become another for itself, only in order to be able to identify with itself, then our self-knowledge would rest upon a hypertrophy of the subject’s sense of identity. For this reason Hegel has been charged with subordinating concrete difference and real alterity to abstract and idealistic self-identity. Is this Hegel’s lesson on our subjective identity? To answer this question I examine how the phenomenological path brings to light the awareness of the common rationality of human beings in terms of the subject’s capability to know oneself as oneself within the others passing through the necessity of negating the self-sense of one’s own natural essential singularity. My aim is to show how Hegel’s initially abstract subjective identity (the ‘I’) is torn out of its simplicity and self-relation (I am I), loses its independent punctual subsistence and, by overcoming the indifference and immediacy of what is other than itself, assumes an inter-subjective and objective dimension. I shall account for the ‘I’’s phenomenological process of transforming the accidentality, externality and necessity of its outwardness and inwardness into the socially shared spiritual representations, purposes and norms of any historical statal community of human agents. By focusing on the master-serf relationship and on the import of what appears to be objectified in the serf’s work for the externalization of the master’s own inwardness, I highlight Hegel’s idea of freedom as intersubjective cognitive and practical actualization. In Hegel’s absolute idealism, relational characteristics enter the definition of what is substantial in human individuals qua embodied ‘Egos’, embedded in an interconnected totality.

This study aims at examining some extracts of a 17th century rihla written by the well-known maghribi author Abu Salim al-'Ayyashi, with a special attention to the anxieties and inquietudes of the author as a paradigm for all the coeval travelers who used to undertake their pilgrimage to Mecca.

Pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) can have devastating impacts on urban settlements, due to their dynamic pressure and high temperatures. Our degree of understanding of the interplay between these hot currents and the affected infrastructures is thus fundamental not only to implement our strategies for risk reduction, but also to better understand PDC dynamics. We studied the temperature of emplacement of PDC deposits that destroyed and buried the Villa dei Papiri, an aristocratic Roman edifice located just outside the Herculaneum city, during the AD79 plinian eruption of Mt Vesuvius (Italy) by using the thermal remanent magnetization of embedded lithic clasts. The PDC deposits around and inside the Villa show substantial internal thermal disequilibrium. In areas affected by convective mixing with surface water or with collapsed walls, temperatures average at around 270 °C (min 190 °C, max 300 °C). Where the deposits show no evidence of mixing with external material, the temperature is much higher, averaging at 350 °C (min 300 °C; max 440 °C). Numerical simulations and comparison with temperatures retrieved at the very same sites from the reflectance of charcoal fragments indicate that such thermal disequilibrium can be maintained inside the PDC deposit for time-scales well over 24 hours, i.e. the acquisition time of deposit temperatures for common proxies. We reconstructed in detail the history of the progressive destruction and burial of Villa dei Papiri and infer that the rather homogeneous highest deposit temperatures (average 350 °C) were carried by the ash-sized fraction in thermal equilibrium with the fluid phase of the incoming PDCs. These temperatures can be lowered on short time- (less than hours) and length-scales (meters to tens of meters) only where convective mixing with external materials or fluids occurs. By contrast, where the Villa walls remained standing the thermal exchange was only conductive and very slow, i.e. negligible at 50 cm distance from contact after 24 hours. We then argue that the state of conservation of materials buried by PDC deposits largely depends on the style of the thermal interactions. Here we also suggest that PDC deposit temperatures are excellent proxies for the temperatures of basal parts of PDCs close to their depositional boundary layer. This general conclusion stresses the importance of mapping of deposit temperatures for the understanding of thermal processes associated with PDC flow dynamics and during their interaction with the affected environment.

Il contributo intende illustrare alcuni possibili impieghi della musica nella paideutica femminile del primo cristianesimo a partire da fonti di III-IV secolo di ambiente antiocheno. Il canto, insieme alla preghiera, viene specialmente praticato nel chiuso delle mura domestiche, dove avviene buona parte della formazione delle donne cristiane. L’assiduità nell’esercizio del canto da parte delle donne cristiane può essersi tradotta nell’acquisizione di competenze musicali specifiche, tanto più in un’area culturale come quella siriaca, rinomata per la sua alta specializzazione musicale. Una simile competenza femminile può, quindi, essere stata utilizzata al servizio della liturgia ecclesiale, rendendo verosimile la notizia dell’impiego di coriste donne nella liturgia pasquale antiochena da parte del vescovo Paolo di Samosata, nell’Antiochia della seconda metà del III secolo.. Il canto dei salmi e di altre composizioni, costituisce, inoltre, insieme allo studio della Scrittura, il tratto peculiare di varie realtà ascetico-monastiche femminili di III-IV secolo: realtà che vengono spesso definite dal mondo esterno come “coro” di vergini