The intelligence of the cities. Conflictual Mutualism and the feminist approach through some case studies

Abstract In the plurality of crises-not only economic-which intersect on the global scenario in recent decades highlighting in various ways the inadequacy and insufficiency of the welfare systems in which most of our choices as inhabitants of a place are embedded, the need for a re-positioning at the centre, as something “social” and therefore “everyone’s,” of the “reproduction of living conditions,” as feminist political scientist Alisa Del Re argues, seems clear. In this scenario, on the part of those doing policy research, the most important effort should be to imagine and suggest strong and innovative experimentations; to activate forms of cooperation with unprecedented developments and articulations between freedom of choice and comfort of sharing; to foster welfare projects and struggles to socialise at Regional Studies and Local Development (Apr. 2023) 210 least the most material part of such reproduction. Starting from these premises, the question from which this research moves is articulated in the following way: what characteristics should these practises have in order not to be reduced to soothing the wounds inflicted by the capitalist system and the progressive privatisation of welfare, but to become tools capable of intercepting all the lines of power and oppression that run through social relations? An attempt to answer these questions goes through the identification of practises of a particular type of mutualism, defined by Salvatore Cannavò as “conflictual,” “analysed through a feminist perspective, in order to highlight new and more complex characteristics to connote a city as “intelligent”.