The book I perimetri del lavoro – Padova: la città operaia e le sue trasformazioni edited by Tania Toffanin is now available.

This book, financed by the CGIL of Padua, aims to analyse the main transformations that have affected work, economy and urban space within the city of Padua in the last fifty years. It aims to solicit reflections on the city as a collective good and at the same time wants to contribute to rethinking the relationship between work, urban space and trade union action.

Through a multidisciplinary perspective, the volume interrogates the relationship between labour and urban space in Padua. In particular, it proposes to observe the processes of urbanisation and the transition to industrialisation and tertiarisation in a diachronic perspective, functional to rethinking the city as a political subject in which collective rights are exercised.

The perimeter analysed is that which includes the city centre and expands to the east of the city to the industrial zone. Within this perimeter, trade union policies and practices were experimented and urban planning instruments were implemented that were little analysed in their deployment.

The realisation and subsequent expansion of the industrial area of Padua were accomplished through the redefinition, in some ways brutal, of the relationship between city and countryside. The occupation of rural space and the subsequent transformations that took place in the division of labour thus redesigned the new perimeter of production, fuelling dilemmas and questions about the growth dynamics of manufacturing and service activities and their relationship with the environment, work organisation and trade union action.

Contrary to the simplifying representation that has been gaining ground on a global scale – which emphasises the disappearance of manufacturing industry in countries with advanced economies and which considers the expansion of the tertiary sector as the solution to the multiple dilemmas posed by economic development -, the contributions contained in this volume offer a composite and problematising reading of the transformations that have taken place in the territorial sphere observed.

The aim is to solicit reflections on the strategies and policies functional to improving living and working conditions within the city space.

Tania Toffanin is a researcher with the National Research Council at the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean in Naples. She carries out research in the field of the sociology of work, with a particular focus on the analysis of forms of employment and the processes of job insecurity in an intersectional perspective. Her publications include: ‘The fashion industry in Italy: between myths and enduring continuities’, in Social Cartographies (2021), and Invisible Factories. Storie di donne, lavoranti a domicilio (Ombre Corte, 2016).

For further information: publisher’s website