Sport and public space in contemporary Italian cities: processes of citizenship construction through body-related practices

The aim of this special issue is to investigate the role of sports practices and urban spaces in the processes of citizenship construction in Italian cities. By focusing on specific places (gyms and sports fields), but also squares, parks and public spaces in specific urban contexts we intend to analyze the practices of social actors who share these physical and relational spaces by virtue of their engagement in the same sports (boxing, football and cricket) and in the same physical activities (i.e.: people attending fitness centers and practitioners of parkour, the so called traceurs) . Their bodily learning processes, either within structured and formalized places or in urban spatially/temporally undefined and informal contexts, turn into embedded body knowledge that is valuable also outside the sports situation and influences the way they construct their identities as citizens. In Italy the analysis of sport and leisure activities and of formal and informal ludic places as contexts of bodily construction upon which the boundaries of a multicultural citizenship are defined has received discontinuous attention in the field of social sciences. However, the meaning that the “inhabitants" of these gyms and urban contexts attribute to sport is not reducible to that of a simple physical activity. How is an embodied form of knowledge produced and reproduced in these urban places and spaces? Is this only a bodily knowledge (something, that is, simply physical or even anatomical) or is it a knowledge that through the body becomes a tool for the deconstruction and reconstruction of new meanings for public space? The existence of fitness clubs, boxing gyms, football and cricket pitches, conceived as areas for recreation, physical and mental wellbeing and socialization through the exercise of a ludic or sports practice should be contextualised within a more ample examination of the relationship between body and space and the role of corporeality in the urban space. There are, for example, bodies which are considered as the "natural" occupants of specific urban spaces and others that are considered "out of place" as soon as they emerge into visibility in places that were not specifically designed for them. At the same time, the emergence of new bodily practices directly into the urban space, eschewing those places specifically devoted to physical activity, reveals new processes of appropriation of the city and modalities of citizenship construction that would greatly benefit from further in-depth investigation. The special issue will explore these processes in the framework of the complex urban Italian network, which mostly consists in small and medium-sized city to which social sciences have rarely paid attention. Bologna, Genoa, Cagliari and Udine are some of the cities on which the invited authors made their reflections.