Reclaiming the Local and Not Only. Territorial Mobilizations in Peripheral Sicily: the Case of Civita Committee in Catania

This paper examines the emergence and transformation of territorial mobilizations in Sicily, focusing on Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULU) conflicts and grassroots claims for more democratic and equitable forms of spatial governance. Over the past two decades, local committees and protest networks have become key arenas of political participation in the island, where residents challenge top-down public interventions and broader projects of neoliberal spatial restructuring. These mobilizations, ranging from the long-standing No Muos movement in Niscemi—opposing the construction of satellite communications facility at the US military base —to the No Ponte campaign against the bridge over the Strait of Messina, represent some of the most enduring expressions of bottom-up politics in Italy’s southern peripheries. By contesting imposed infrastructures, development schemes, and environmental degradation, these movements articulate alternative imaginaries of territory, citizenship, and sovereignty, situating local struggles within transnational circuits of resistance. Within this constellation of mobilizations and movements, the paper focuses on a recent and emblematic case: the formation of the Civita Committee in 2025, a citizens’ and workers’ spontaneous initiative in one of Catania’s oldest central neighborhoods. The committee emerged to oppose the municipality’s decision to pedestrianize a street primarily intended for tourist flows from the port, a measure taken without consultation or participation of local residents. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with committee members, residents, and activists, the paper explores how this protest evolved beyond a narrow dispute over urban planning. It investigates how the Civita Committee has framed its struggle as a broader claim for the right to the city, community self-determination, and recognition within processes of urban transformation. The analysis highlights how the committee’s discourse and practices—regular assemblies, use of social media for coordination and visibility, and emerging alliances with other committees, civic associations and social centers— politicize urban space, reasserting the locality as a contested arena of governance. These repertoires of contention reproduce patterns found in other Sicilian mobilizations, where collective resistance against touristification, environmental exploitation, and securitized governance intersects with demands for social justice, dignity, and effective democracy. In the context of southeastern Italy’s socio-economic periphery, such mobilizations serve as laboratories for a renewed territorial citizenship, grounded in everyday experiences of precariousness and exclusion yet capable of generating new networks of solidarity and political imagination. By connecting this case to broader debates on local contestation and territorialized collective action, the paper argues that peripheral mobilizations like those in Sicily challenge dominant narratives of passivity and clientelism often associated with southern European societies. Instead, they reveal emerging forms of civic agency that transcend the local/global dichotomy and reconfigure notions of belonging, authority, and participation. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions within political sociology and social movement studies about how communities in peripheral regions mobilize to reclaim control over their spaces, redefining both the meaning of the local and the possibilities of democratic action today.