Wetlands are complex ecosystems, considered among the most productive environments in the world. They contain important biodiversity hotspots, provide the resources on which countless plant and animal species depend and perform important environmental and economic functions. Wetlands reduce flooding events, improve water quality and represent a valuable cultural and natural heritage. The European Directive (2000/60/EC) requires fostering an integrated approach to wetland management through collaborative governance processes. The Wetland Contract is a tool that has been developed and implemented in order to promote the sustainable governance of water systems. Among the Mediterranean countries, Italy and Croatia count on a rich variety of coastal wetlands that, together with the plants and animals that inhabit and pass through them, constitute an extremely valuable natural heritage. This paper presents and discusses the results of the Interreg Project CREW that, between 2018–2021, contributed to the drafting of seven new Wetland Contracts. Through a comparative reading, the aim is to understand, on the one hand, how the different Contracts have responded individually to a shared programme based on European requirements; on the other hand, the aim is also to bring similar experiences closer together to assess their overall potential on an international scale. The article shows how the constant exchange between CREW partners and the continuous updating on ongoing activities, methodologies and proposed solutions in the seven target areas facilitated the construction of a shared cross-border strategy for wetland governance. The comparison also highlights some principles considered fundamental by all partners (protection and enhancement; integrated governance; awareness-raising and learning) that have served the construction of a transnational Observatory, aimed at monitoring, sharing practices and able to guide the formation of future Wetland Contracts.

Wetlands are complex ecosystems, considered among the most productive environments of the world. They contain major biodiversity hotspots, providing the resources upon which countless species of plants and animals depend and they perform important environmental and economic functions. Wetlands reduce flooding events, improve water quality and represent a valuable cultural and natural heritage. It is estimated that 2/3 of Europe wetlands have disappeared since the beginning of the 20th Century, mainly lost through development processes which did not take their functions and values adequately into account. The European Directive (2000/60/EC) re-quires to foster an integrated approach for wetland management through collaborative governance processes. The Wetland Contract is a tool that has been developed and implemented to set the ground for voluntary-based commitments for the sustainable governance of water systems. Among the Mediterranean countries, Italy and Croatia count on a rich variety of coastal wetlands that, together with the plants and animals inhabiting and crossing them, constitute an extremely precious natural heritage. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss, whit a critical approach, the output of the Interreg Project CREW that, between 2018-21, contributed to the drafting of seven new Wetland Contracts.

Where finance’s appetites meet housing, examines how London’s housing landscape has become a prime arena for financial expansion. Deregulation and successive crises are reframed as opportunities for capital accumulation, resource extraction and the large-scale reconfiguration of ownership structures. London emerges as fertile terrain not by accident, but through regulatory frameworks that recast the alignment of public and private interests as both necessary and neutral. These dynamics expose a central paradox of neoliberal ideology and its spatial effects: the principle of non-contradiction. In this logic, a place can be simultaneously public and private, open and controlled, inclusive and exclusionary, without appearing incoherent. Contradiction is not resolved but absorbed, allowing the system to stretch while preserving its aura of inevitability. This elasticity resonates with longer histories of spatial domination, in which power operates by appropriating and reshaping local identities within broader, managed narratives. London’s housing market becomes both the stage and the instrument of this ideological project: a city where financial appetites determine what counts as home, who may dwell and how belonging itself is rewritten within a global economy of opportunity.

Where the relationship between real estate and heritage is expanded, introduces the book’s core argument: the growing entanglement between heritage and real estate within contemporary processes of spatial valorisation. As finance becomes the organising force of advanced economies, urban space must be read through networks of speculation, sponsorship and value extraction that treat land as a global asset. London stands as the key laboratory of this alliance, shaped by its financial centrality, dense historical layers and long-standing use of heritage in urban and economic development. Here, heritage operates less as memory than as strategy: a promise of continuity mobilised to stabilise the volatility of regeneration, to soften disruption through familiarity and to script space as narrative. Storytelling, in this context, becomes a form of infrastructure. To discuss financialised urbanism is therefore to analyse the discourses that legitimise it: the images, histories and emotional cues that make speculative transformation appear both necessary and desirable. Moving from the scale of global capital to that of the neighbourhood, the chapter illustrates how heritage rhetoric becomes a cultural credential and an economic technology simultaneously, rearranging London’s past to secure the profitability of its future.

Where the sanctuaries of fake are granted absolution, examines real estate marketing through the lens of visual culture, showing how promotional images and texts do far more than present buildings: they script ways of seeing the city. A central focus is the strategic appropriation of heritage. Historical references are repurposed as emotional anchors that lend projects an air of continuity and legitimacy, transforming the past into a tool for stabilising speculative futures. The chapter argues that such images operate within a threshold zone, a porous space between imagination and materiality, where representation begins to act upon the city itself. Crucially, this is also the zone in which financial capitalism operates: dependent on volatility yet grounded in material form, it requires spaces that are simultaneously symbolic and concrete. Narrative production thus emerges as a form of planning in its own right: a spatial practice operating directly within this threshold, where representation and materiality co-produce the very conditions of urban reality.