Beyond the pathological, towards a paradigm of care? Challenging urban regeneration narratives on the south-eastern coast of Palermo

This paper explores whether a paradigm of care can challenge the persistent pathologisation of urban space in regeneration narratives, focusing on the south-eastern coast of Palermo. This 7 km stretch of shore, shaped by decades of speculative urbanisation and institutional neglect, is the target of four regeneration projects originally promoted under Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) – a post-pandemic instrument that, despite mobilising unprecedented public investment, remains embedded in an institutional ecology marked by the lasting traces of austerity. Through critical discourse analysis of the four project documents, fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, the paper examines how regeneration is narrated, contested and enacted across three interconnected axes: theoretical, discursive and socio-spatial. Drawing on feminist care ethics, the study mobilises urban care as a critical counter-paradigm. The analysis reveals that institutional narratives construct the coast as a space of decay to be corrected, deploying a vocabulary of care – decorum, dignity, accessibility – that excludes informal practices, existing residents and participatory processes. Local actors, by contrast, articulate visions grounded in relational practices, ecological attention and situated knowledge. A double definitional confusion emerges: “regeneration” is interpreted in radically different ways by those who implement it, and the “care” in institutional documents does not coincide with urban care as theorised in feminist thought. The paper contributes to the debate on care and post-austerity urbanism by arguing that a caring approach to regeneration must begin from what sustains life in a place rather than from what is diagnosed as lacking.