Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization (Contemporary Ethnography) - Hardcover

Buch 16 von 26: Contemporary Ethnography

Guano, Emanuela

 
9780812248784: Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization (Contemporary Ethnography)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812248783 ISBN 13: 9780812248784
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people—educated, middle class—seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival.

Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the 1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emanuela Guano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University.

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IntroductionCities are a combination of many things: memory, desires, signs of a language: they are sites of exchange, as any textbook of economic history will tell you—only, these exchanges are not just trade-in goods, they also involve words, desires, and memories.
—Italo Calvino (1972)Clad in a bright green suit, Beatrice, a tall woman in her forties, is leading a walking tour entitled "I misteri di Genova," Genoa's mysteries. Her group comprises eleven people, all of whom are local; the setting is this city's centro storico (historic center). For the occasion, the medieval neighborhood is bathed in a sallow moonlight. Through the evocative power of Beatrice's words and the suggestiveness of the built environment, we encounter sinful nuns, murderous aristocrats, and medieval mass burials. The highlight of Beatrice's tour, however, is one of Genoa's most recent ghosts: the vecchina (little elderly lady) who haunts Via Ravecca, wandering about with a lost expression on her face on her quest for an ancient vicolo (alley) that no longer exists. Beatrice informs us: "The vecchina began manifesting in 1989. Those who saw her claim that the elderly woman would ask passersby for directions to Vico dei Librai, and then she would vanish. Vico dei Librai no longer exists: it was razed to the ground during the project that destroyed part of the centro storico in the late 1960s to build the Centro dei Liguri complex."

Widely publicized by local newspapers, the ghost's appearances immediately struck a chord with Genoese publics: as a phantom presence that transmits affect through the materialities it haunts (Navaro-Yashin 2012), the vecchina posited an implicit denunciation of the alienation of modernist architecture and of what had been ruined by industrial progress (Benson 2005; Johnson 2013). Yet the ghost's timing also presaged an urban reenchantment process (Ritzer 2010) and an aestheticization of the cityscape that were meant to foster this city's visitability (Dicks 2004) as an alternative to its declining industrial economy. Celebrated in books and websites, the vecchina has now become a staple in local lore. During this walking tour, her presence is effectively channeled through Beatrice: the adept enchantress who, using her personal talents and professional expertise, mediates access to an esoteric facet of urban experience.

Drawing on her evocative words as well as the suggestive settings of the tour, Beatrice allows glimpses of a long-gone Genoa to emerge within the imagination of her audiences, thus conjuring the hidden out of the familiar. Yet Beatrice's tales are not just commodities. Instead, they are also the creative results of her own scholarly interests (she is a published author of urban history books) as well as her passion for the occult. A few days after the tour, Beatrice will be walking around Genoa's centro storico with a subtle energy sensor in her hands. A tremor of her biotensor will indicate a ghastly presence; Beatrice's task, then, will be to use her spells to bring it to the fore. As it leaves its hideout, the ghost may become a story in Beatrice's rich repertoire as a professional teller of tales about all that Genoa hides. Original though her craft may be, Beatrice is hardly alone in her endeavor of shaping new experiences for urban publics eager to view their city through new eyes. Working along with her in revitalized Genoa are scores of fellow walking-tour guides, artisans, shopkeepers, festival organizers, artists, and poets who, since the early 1990s, have contributed to what is now Genoa's culture industry. This book explores how, working in the shade of Genoa's revitalization process, creative individuals like Beatrice have turned their education, interests, and sensibilities into a source of income, thus helping craft urban imaginaries (Cinar and Bender 2007) that reflect their own experiences as passionate explorers of the urban everyday.

The Explorer of the Urban Everyday

The most popular trope in the scholarly analysis of urban experience and the leisurely exploration of a city's social, cultural, and material landscape is that of the flâneur (Kramer and Short 2011). First celebrated by nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur was the prototypical urbanite: the painter of modern life and the man of the crowd (1964). His passion and his profession wereto become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of the movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite . . . thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. (1964: 9)As a malleable allegory for the description and analysis of urban experience, the image and the experience of the flâneur were soon to become objects of intense critical debate (Kramer and Short 2011). Writing in the early twentieth century, German philosopher Walter Benjamin deprecated how the commercial phantasmagorias of consumer capitalism had transformed the flâneur into the badaud: the gaper as a passive consumer of images whose observation skills had gone stagnant (Benjamin 1973). Benjamin's critique became immensely influential for urban studies across disciplinary boundaries. Resonating with the Marxist suspicion of consumption as well as with the elitist disdain for the tastes of the masses and the masculinist contempt for shopping as a female practice (Featherstone 1998; Morris 1993), in the late twentieth century the condemnation of the intensely aesthetic commercial enchantment of the contemporary "voodoo" or "fantasy" city (Dicks 2004; Hannigan 1998; Harvey 1988; Ritzer 2010; Zukin 1996) became synonymous with the allegedly mindless "enjoyment without consequences" (Welsch 1998: 3) of the crowds. While ranging considerably in disciplinary paradigm, methodological approach, and level of empiricism, these studies share a critical focus on the all-powerful role of corporate capitals in shaping the urban everyday. Their core argument is that what ensues from the commercial aestheticization of the urban experience disempowers city dwellers, seducing them into surrendering to the material and ideological might of corporate capitals.

Yet, while much of North Atlantic scholarship indicts consumer capitalism for the loss of truly democratic public space (Mitchell 2003; Harvey 1991; Zukin 1991, 1996), it bears remembering that not all revitalized cityscapes around the world are organized along the lines of the same social, spatial, and above all capitalist criteria as U.S. cities (Soja 1996; Featherstone 1998). In distancing herself from the political economy paradigm that has long been hegemonic in the study of cities, Aihwa Ong (2011: 2) recently argued that the attempt to posit global capitalism as the singular causality of all urban dynamics worldwide inevitably reduces remarkably different cities to the role of manifestations of the same, and globally homogeneous, economic template. Drawing on Michel de Certeau (1984: 159), one may also argue that such analyses are at least partly concocted through an observation of the "concept city": a view from "above" that is enabled by focusing on a "finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnecting properties" while neglecting the intricacies of the city's everyday. The view from "down below" (de Certeau 1984: 158), instead, allows for an ethnographically inflected approach to the varieties of urban practice that can help produce more nuanced analyses of how...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812248783
ISBN 13 
9780812248784
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
242
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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