Peripheries: from the game of opposites to the urban archipelago [Periferie: dal gioco degli opposti all’arcipelago urbano]

Urban sociology is in a phase of reconsideration of the paradigms that have characterized it for a good part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Today the relaunch of the discipline strongly depends on the questioning of dichotomies such as urban vs. rural, center vs. periphery, local vs. global, and the acceptance of a more complex and original articulation of the constituent parts of social phenomena at the territorial level. In particular, this contribution proposes a reflection that, starting from the concept of archipelago, redesigns the urban in a perspective where the concept of periphery loses the meaning usually attributed to it, to be replaced by that of polycentrism. This approach does not deny the importance of the territories and the geo-referencing of the phenomena, but frames them in a broader and geometrically variable perspective.