Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano

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СКАЧАТЬ stance toward an urban environment that, as the revitalization process began to take its first steps, intensified its role as not only an object of sensuous, material, and cultural consumption, but also as an arena and a tool for the creation of self-narratives involving lifestyle choices (Giddens 1991). During the late twentieth century, cities in Europe and North America developed an increasing focus on leisure and consumable experiences that blended high culture with the popular and the spectacular (Featherstone 2007: 94). In Genoa, too, this process drew on urban consumers’ growing hunger for experiences, their desire for self-development, and the appeal of skilled consumption and self-expression (Richards 2011: 1229) to further shape the middle-class habitus of exploring and enjoying the city purposefully. The latter began to unfold along an experiential continuum that ranges from the pursuit of leisure and sensuous fruition to aesthetic and historical appreciation (Richardson 2008: 148). Driven by the desire to replace this city’s ailing industries with a new economy of tourism, the partial reversal of some of the projects carried out in the name of industrial modernization and the recovery of Genoa’s premodern architecture began in the late 1980s. By then, the Italian media had begun to describe tourism as an “industry without chimneys,” thus pitting it against a faltering industrialism for its allegedly low environmental impact and its high economic potential. Furthermore, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, internal tourism to Italy’s cities of art (Florence, Venice, and Rome) had grown exponentially, fueled by the rising educational standards and the newly found cultural tastes of Italy’s middle classes (La Francesca 2003). A new urban habitus (Bourdieu 1977) emerged as a set of dispositions, tastes, and sensibilities that further honed middle-class subjectivities increasingly keen on assembling reflexive self-narratives (Giddens 1991: 54). With place being integral to the very structure and possibility of experience (Malpas 1999: 31), the city became not just the canvas on which people live their lives (Rotenberg 2014: 29), but also a privileged arena for the negotiation of their self-narratives (Richardson 2008: 167).

      With the rise of cultural tourism in the 1980s, many Genoese, too, became more eager to exercise their own urbanity in novel ways. They became willing to look at their own city through new eyes, consuming it the way they had learned to consume the sites and sights of Florence, Venice, and Rome. As the nexus of place, memory, and self-identity (Malpas 1999: 176–181) became more prevalent, many of them sought out new ways to enjoy their city. What drove them was not just the pursuit of leisure, but also the pride they had long been denied as residents of an “ugly” industrial town as well as the keen curiosity for their own cultural and historical “roots.” Yet even though the new urban model introduced in Genoa pivoted on the production of visitability as a source of revenues (Dicks 2004), its material benefits were not limited to the municipal coffers, the deep pockets of developers, and those of the administrators who earned kickbacks in return for lucrative contracts. Instead, they were also reaped by considerably smaller, and largely middle-class, players. The purpose of this book is to explore the lives and experiences of those middle-class Genoese who, seeking to escape consistently high unemployment rates, invented self-employment venues for themselves: the walking-tour guides, the street antique dealers, the artisans, the small businesses owners, and the festival organizers and participants who creatively established ways of making a living in the shade of a broader revitalization process.

       Genoa’s Creative Class

      Succumbing to the global fascination with Richard Florida’s tenets, in recent years Genoa’s administration utilized his measurements to quantify intangibles such as “talent,” “innovation,” “diversity,” and “tolerance toward homosexuals.” The municipality thus classified its city’s “creative index” at “23.99%,” claiming that Genoa is the “second-most creative city in Italy after Rome.”¹⁰ Yet what the municipality failed to mention is that the differences between Genoa’s “creative class” and its U.S. counterparts as prospected by Florida are remarkable. First and foremost, in spite of its newly found cultural vibrancy—its symposia, its festivals, its theaters, and its public events—Genoa is not a city to proactively attract or nurture a highly qualified, talented, and creative workforce. As a matter of fact, for much of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, Genoa has suffered a deep demographic decrease: though, in 1971, Genoa’s population peaked at over 800,000 and was expected to reach one million in a matter of years, by 2012 it had shrunk back to 580,000: that is, its 1920s level.¹¹ This change was largely due to a steep decline in birth rates as well as to an emigration that often takes the form of a brain drain. While early twentieth-century Genoese emigrants usually belonged to the peasantry and the proletariat, over the last forty years educated individuals have become much more likely to move to other Italian cities or even abroad in order to find a job that matches their qualifications (see also Gabaccia 2000). This is largely due to the limited opportunities locally available in the university, the scientific and high-tech sector, museums, the arts, and the media, where the few jobs available are frequently co-opted through the clientelistic logics of political parties as well as through the nepotism and the cronyism of powerful individuals and families. Hence, what I explore in this book is a creative class that is in many ways residual, in that it frequently consists of those individuals who, often for lack of better prospects, engage in creative practices as a way to support themselves through forms of self-employment that may require a considerable cultural capital but only a shoestring budget. In spite of the professional gratifications (and in some cases the prestige) afforded to them by their entrepreneurship, the majority of the individuals featured in this ethnography live hand to mouth.¹² Many—though certainly not all of them—are women: a social category that is traditionally marginal to Italy’s job market. Put at a disadvantage by patriarchal gender politics, women often have to think creatively in order to find ways to earn a living; their flexibility and their aesthetic and affective expertise make them ideally suited for participation in a neoliberal economy of experience (Freeman 2014). Yet Genoa’s creative sector is also a product of the precarity (Butler 2009) that began in the early 1970s, hurling many of Genoa’s blue- and white-collar (and mostly male) workers into a state of redundancy and vulnerability. Additionally, as I argue in Chapter 1, Genoa’s creative sector is a child of deeply ingrained social inequities that, with their corollary of cronyism, nepotism, and clientelism, curtail the professional hopes of highly educated and talented individuals. Last but not least, it is also a close relative of the precariousness that, with the labor reforms of 2003, maximized the flexibility of a large share of the Italian workforce while minimizing its rights (Mole 2011; Muehlebach 2013), leading some to envision self-employment as preferable to the vagaries of contract work. Yet, as a frequent middle- and working-class strategy in the face of unemployment, the small-scale entrepreneurship of the creative class described in this book is not new, either. The industrial crisis of the 1970s induced many a Genoese to start a diminutive business to make ends meet. Laid-off workers would open hole-in-the wall stores, often subsidizing them with their severance package: the layoffs and the high unemployment rates that began in the 1970s brought about a proliferation of newsstands, dairy and coffee shops, tobacconists, and the like. If many Genoese always regarded self-employment as the last resort, however, what has changed since the late 1980s is the nature of their businesses. What stands in stark contrast is the profusion of tangible though highly symbolic cultural goods and the intangible and equally symbolic experiences that are being sold in contemporary Genoa—from handmade pottery to ghost tours. Not only does such production fulfill the requirements of a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004) where more and more Italian cities occupy a peculiar place as objects of cultural consumption, but it also follows the increasingly pervasive substitution of wage labor with a constellation of immaterial labor practices spawned by the commodification of heritage (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 144). It also responds to the skills, experiences, and sensibilities of individuals who are themselves adept consumers of urban cultures, and who, in producing and selling symbolic goods and experiences, are exercising their agency in shaping the urban experience of their publics.

       A Confession and the Plan of the Book

      Just like Baudelaire’s flâneur, I, too, cherish losing myself in the crowd, soaking in the impressions of the urban everyday even as СКАЧАТЬ