The event is organized with the aim to receive contributions from national and international scientific community on urban/rural dialogue within policy agendas of sustainability, transition and cohesion, according to the directions of the Green Deal and Agenda2030.

The 2024 edition of International Symposium “Networks, Markets & People” (#NMP2024) aims to promote the scientific debate about the effects that the contemporary environmental, technological, social and economic global challenges produce on settlement systems, especially in Inner Areas and metropolitan cities of the Mediterranean basin.

Contemporary settlements express the distance between the built environment inertia and the “liquid” society flowing underneath. Blurred lines substituted the neat dualities such as culture-nature, urban-rural, central-marginal, affluent-deprived, enacting perpetual changes in between polarities.

The progressive increase in population raises new issues connected with resources availability and the ecological footprint of anthropic activities.

The theme of the green transition requires multidisciplinary points of view, touching on very different issues such as infrastructures and mobility systems, green buildings and energy communities, ecosystem services and land consumption.

In this scenario, a post humanist epistemology assumes that humans are dependent on the environment, and part of a larger evolving ecosystem whose agency is distributed through dynamic forces. Climate change challenges reinforced the understanding that human is entangled with its environment, encouraging in defining novel epistemologies, including, but not limited to, several disciplines: architecture, urban studies, economics, cybernetics, ecology, ethology, geography, art, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology and quantum physics.

The new frontier of adaptive and flexible production, supported by the ongoing digital revolution, encourages a rethinking of the concepts of proximity and interdependence within human settlements, with a paradigm shift in the center-periphery dualism. In this context, the social reproduction approach is mainly oriented at spatial justice, re-use, regeneration and environmental care.

Digital technologies and artificial intelligence bring extraordinary potential to institutions, companies and social organisations, but also carry the risk of negative impacts of unmanaged innovation.

The Artificial Intelligence, challenging the labor market, has been seen lately as both the exploitation and the destruction of the human being as known until now. The progressive replacement of human workforce with machines no longer concerns the traditional industries only, affecting intellectual and creative productions.

The side effects of this transition need to be studied in order to share benefits and tradeoffs equitably between technology and service developers on the one hand, and individuals and communities on the other.

Accessibility rights to services and goods, social inclusion, commoning and sharing economies, as well as informalities and self-organization permeate the incoming social organization associated with the digital transition, towards inclusive concepts of citizenship.

Social innovation practices, collaborative governance models, open innovation frontiers, human non-human entanglements concur in setting the route for the next generation settlements, notably: the built environment, the social system and the complexity and challenges of the everyday life.

These phenomena are even more significant for marginalized areas, which are compelled to face the risk of widening the socio-economic gap with advanced regions, as happens in some territories of Mediterranean bordering countries.

Green and digital transition are the two pillars on which European policies are based for the period 2021-27, above all through the instrument of the Next Generation EU. The substantial investments planned by the EU to support the green and digital transition in the coming years require multidimensional evaluation systems, capable of supporting decision-makers in selecting the interventions most effective in pursuing the objectives, also considering that the financial resources used for the Policy implementation are borrowed from future generations, who will be held accountable for our work.