Ilaria Vanni – författare

Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

This book foregrounds socioecological stewardship in urban spaces. It demonstrates how activities like gardening and participating in events that spark ecological learning foster a sense of place, social connections, and lively neighbourhoods. Offering case studies from Sydney, Australia, it presents an innovative, interdisciplinary, place-based design research methodology. This approach combines ethnography to examine people-place-environment relationships with design’s potential for creating change through artefacts and initiatives like maps, curated walks, and workshops. The book contributes to methodological debates by showcasing how visual communication and socially engaged practices strengthen ethnographic understandings of society, culture, and the environment. The authors show that these practices connect everyday environmental actions to broader contexts, such as making cities liveable during climate change, aligning with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Neighbourhood Ecologies offers key insights for scholars and students of urban sociology, human geography, anthropology, design studies, and social movement studies interested in how critical environmental issues become grounded in local contexts.