Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano

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СКАЧАТЬ large-scale private initiatives meant to boost the economy lagged behind. Blaming what they regarded as the entitlements and the combativeness of local workers, the local financial elites preferred to invest elsewhere or not to invest at all; as a result, unemployment rates remained higher than in the rest of the North, thus earning Genoa the title of “meridione del nord” (the underdeveloped South of Italy’s developed North). Even as they were spurred to compete and be ready to claim their place in the sun, the generations of the late 1960s and the 1970s were implicitly being trained to become part of a large population of unemployed or underemployed but highly educated Genoese: an “intellectual capital” to whom a city focused on mourning the demise of its industrial sector had nothing to offer (Arvati 1988: 17). With few employment outlets other than the public administration or a rapidly shrinking school system, Genoa’s intellectual capital languished. Many of the young and the hopeful left Genoa to make a living elsewhere—usually Milan, the thriving postindustrial metropolis that epitomized Italian modernity (Foot 2001). Those who stayed behind may have found ways to earn a living; however, this almost invariably entailed giving up some of their dreams: for many, this meant renouncing professional ambitions, settling for a lifetime of underemployment, postponing—or even renouncing—marriage and parenthood and keeping fertility rates well below replacement (Arvati n.d., 1994; Palumbo 1994).⁸ While in 1971 Genoa had a population of well over 800,000, by 2001 it had dropped to 600,000.⁹ I was one of those who left in the early 1990s, defeated by a lack of opportunities that translated as lack of hope.

       The Rise of Affective Urbanism

      The Genoa of the 1980s, wrote Maggiani, was a city of shattered mirrors. Another famous local novelist, Antonio Tabucchi, wrote about the “diffuse agony” of its centro storico as a “slow leprosy that has invaded walls and houses and whose rot is devious and unstoppable, like a sentence. The garbage collectors come by only rarely, like anyone else they also disdain the detritus of this lower humankind. At night, syringes sparkle in the vicoli, and so do plastic bags, along with the undecipherable mass of some rats that died in a corner where a phosphorescent pest control banner warns not to touch the poisonous copper green baits scattered on the pavement” (Tabucchi 1986: 11). As evinced from the renewal, regeneration, and gentrification processes ignited in the late twentieth century in postindustrial cities worldwide, this level of degradation in a strategically situated neighborhood had the potential to be palatable to investors. Soon enough this waste land shifted, in the words of local city assessor Bruno Gabrielli (1999), from being regarded as a “burden” to becoming an “opportunity.” Even though in 1984 Mayor Cerofolini still thought that Genoa was not a city of waiters, the left-wing administrations’ opposition to developing a tourist industry in Genoa did not last long. After all, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall had caused a profound identity crisis in the Italian Left (Kertzer 1998), which, ever since, had become increasingly sensitive to the lures of neoliberalism (Dines 2012).

      All over Europe, administrations in cahoots with local elites were launching renewal projects that, while advertised as revitalization strategies, were, in fact, meant to bolster revenues for developers allied with the local political classes (Swyngedow, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002). Such transformations often took place through the organization of great events that bring in large amounts of governmental funding, and contributed to considerable interventions on the cityscapes (Mastropiero 2007). In Genoa, too, the conversion to cultural tourism unfolded through the organization of a series of great events—the Exposition of 1992; the Group of Eight summit of 2001, and Genoa’s role as a Capital of European Culture in 2004—meant to showcase the city internationally.¹⁰ As elsewhere, the transformation was presented to the residents as a positive impulse to the lagging economy (Swyngedow, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002); as elsewhere, it was welcomed by a citizenry that, tired of shattered mirrors, eagerly awaited a chance for change.

      Just as in other postindustrial European cities, in Genoa hope started to materialize under the pressure of a new affective urbanism (Anderson and Holden 2008) whereby the planning of great events of international scope extensively used the media to build consensus and promote the vision of a bright urban future (Dines 2012: 42). Promoting hope as “infrastructural to urban change” (Anderson and Holden 2008: 144), affective urbanism flashes promises of “poverty alleviation, employment, better consumption practices (of images, experience), an improved material infrastructure of everyday life (environment, transport, etc.), and fewer ‘incivilities’ (liter, ‘antisocial behavior’)” (Anderson and Holden 2008: 152). Painting a utopian veneer of salvific promises (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) onto a considerably grimmer reality, great events funnel considerable amount of local, national, and EU funding into creating a new, visitable urbanscape (Dicks 2004) that caters to tourists as well as locals. This is what happened in Genoa, too. Yet the pursuit of great events was hardly the only strategy in Genoa’s revitalization.

      In 1986, Genoa’s city administration along with the port consortium and the urban planning department of the Liguria region put forth a strategic plan that sought to stop Genoa’s decline by valorizing its centro storico and by converting its industrial areas to shopping centers (Hillman 2008: 306). The city administration elicited architectural proposals for the purpose of giving Genoa’s old port a complete makeover in preparation for the Expo (Exposition) of 1992 with which Genoa celebrated Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World—its “discovery,” as Italians unencumbered by extra-European perspectives liked to call it. The Italian government had committed 295 billion lire worth of funds for the project (Mastropiero 2007: 176). Among these proposals, a few stood out. American architect John Portman designed a 262-meter-tall tower built on an artificial island at the center of the old port. The tower would host restaurants and a gigantic hotel; built in its vicinity, an underwater aquarium would help attract visitors. The project was to be complemented by a “sfoltimento” (thinning out) of the centro storico: a selective destruction of buildings meant to provide the remaining ones with the space and the light they would need for a consistent property appreciation. Not only did many find serious flaws with the sfoltimento project, but Portman’s plan triggered heated debates, too, and was eventually discarded due to the concern that his artificial island would deface what had been the core of Genoa’s original port. Eventually, the bid was won by Renzo Piano, a Genoese architect of international renown who designed and saw to completion the waterfront now known as Porto Antico (Ancient Port). Installed on the premises of Genoa’s earliest port, Porto Antico became a highly successful marina with a globalized feel endowed with restaurants, cinemas, museums, shops, a public library, a swimming pool, an outdoor theater, a panoramic elevator, a state-of-the-art aquarium, shopping facilities, and a large esplanade, later to be complemented by a swath of luxury housing units. In spite of all these efforts, however, the Exposition of 1992 was not a success. It failed to attract the international attention that the Genoese administration was hoping to elicit; the number of visitors was lower than expected, and so were the revenues it generated.

      Overall, for much of Northern Italy the 1980s had been the years of the boom; the 1990s, instead, were marked by a contraction of the economy caused by a lack of planning at the hands of Italy’s political and economic elites (Ginsborg 2003). The “years of lead” were over; yet the mafia assassinations of two prominent magistrates in Sicily and the bombings of historical and artistic sites in Rome, Florence, and Milan for the sake of bullying the state into submission periodically reminded Italy’s publics that peace and stability were still a long way off.¹¹ The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had eased the Cold War tension that had been particularly high in Italy, and the proclamation of the victory of Western capitalism had precipitated the identity crisis of the Italian Left (Kertzer 1998). Soon enough, however, Italy’s other main parties ended up in a sea of troubles, too: the 1992 eruption of the tangentopoli (bribesville) corruption scandals led to the demise of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and the Socialist Party. For many, the political turmoil of the early 1990s raised hopes that the spoils system and the clientelistic infiltration of partitocrazia (partycracy) into all sectors of Italian society (Della Porta and Vannucci 1999) would finally come to an end. The dream of impending modernization was further intensified by the rise of the European Union, which in turn fed the hope that Italy was СКАЧАТЬ