Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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argued Ernest Bloch (1986: 5), “is itself in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs.” In describing the hopelessness that affected the Genoa of the early 1980s, Genoese novelist Maurizio Maggiani (2007: 84) wrote:
I know that Genoa has been a city scattered with shattered mirrors. I remember them, the 1980s…. People walked in the streets with their heads hanging low, and they did not even feel like looking at themselves in the shop windows; it was a city of dirty glasses. Every millenarian city has had its plague, caught its infections. Sometimes it even dies of it. Genoa’s latest plague was the disease of the iron. It had spread to the steel and had turned it into rusty mounds. The rust had spread and had smeared the whole city; people were leaving just like the exodus. The rust melted into the sea and started corrupting the port, and soon enough everything was falling apart. The plague comes when you need to purge your sins, Genoa’s sin was the lethal sin of simplification.
The hopelessness that spread among the youth of the 1970s, inciting drug use and political violence, was in the first place the index of a larger crisis that affected Italian society as a whole (Ginsborg 1990), and Genoa more than other cities. The energy crisis of 1973 had delivered the first shock to Genoa’s industries: the state-subsidized steelworks, the shipyards and the electromechanical sector that were increasingly struggling to compete in international markets even as they kept barely afloat at the national level (Arvati 1988). Genoa’s single-handed investment in statalized heavy industries (its “sin of simplification”) was backfiring. A decade later, the magnitude of the crisis was crushing the Genoese economy. The Ansaldo industrial conglomerate was languishing; the containerization of Genoa’s port had made docks and workers redundant (Hillman 2008); Genoa’s shipyards were suffering from the global demise of transatlantic passenger ships; and its steelworks were unable to keep up with the mounting foreign competition (Arvati 1988: 60–61). The negative trend seemed to have no end in sight. As jobs in traditionally masculine working-class sectors were on the wane (Arvati 1988; 1994), Genoese workers’ struggles began displaying a peculiarly muscular feel.
Dissatisfied with the way their unions were conducting the negotiations, in 1980 Genoese steel and port workers began taking their grievances out of the factory and directly to the streets, with the intent of gaining the greatest visibility possible by disrupting the urban everyday. The sight of cortei (protest marches) slowly striding down Genoa’s main thoroughfares with the explicit intent to bring traffic to a halt became a familiar one. Genoa’s residents had to resign themselves to being stopped in their tracks when workers took to the streets. This trend intensified in January 1983, when street blockades evolved into the full-fledged occupation of one of Genoa’s main railway stations, as well as its highway accesses, the airport, and the junction (sopraelevata) that connects downtown Genoa to its industrial peripheries, thus forcefully bringing the whole city to a chaotic standstill (Arvati 1988: 100).
Many middle-aged Genoese still remember the sight of the gigantic—and excruciatingly slow—machines that, operated by port workers, would irrupt into downtown Genoa. Carousing around its nineteenth-century piazzas, these mechanical giants would intentionally disrupt traffic, thus creating some of the worst congestions ever. What we were witnessing was a new type of strike: one that had moved out of factories and workplaces to claim the whole city as its arena. The old pattern in which workers stopped or slowed production to air their grievances to their employers had morphed into a type of protest in which causing discomfort to the citizenry as a whole became instrumental in forcing local and state-level politicians to intervene for the sake of preserving their own electoral bases (Pipan 1989). This tactic triggered ambivalent responses in those who were not directly affected by the layoffs. On one hand, many sympathized with the workers who were at risk of losing their livelihood for good. The centrality to Genoa’s economy of the electromechanical sector as well as the shipyards and the steelworks also caused concerns about the future of the city as a whole. On the other hand, the workers’ explicit intent to maximize the discomfort to the collectivity alienated many potential supporters by feeding into the old mythology of the “divided city” as well as the more recent representation of blue-collar workers as entitled, if anachronistic, bullies.5
Describing the society of the late 1950s, sociologist Cavalli (1960) had characterized Genoa as a divided city whose left-wing working classes residing in the western peripheries were “arroccati” (entrenched)—that is, refused any contact with the rest of society, a sizable portion of which was suffused with an exquisitely Catholic fear of communists. In the 1980s, the mythology of the divided city was deftly utilized by politicians keen on casting the workers’ movements as fossilized and unrealistic (Arvati 1988: 101). The popularity of such stereotype ended up preventing the dialogue and exacerbating the conflict between the workers who sought to defend their employment on the one hand, and the politicians and entrepreneurs who supported “modernization” agendas entailing the privatization and the reorganization of what had been largely state-run industrial sectors on the other hand. According to those who pushed for “progress,” workers were guilty of continuismo (Arvati 1988: 101): the inability to embrace inevitable change and to proactively adapt to new circumstances by accepting the much touted Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no alternative” to privatization and deindustrialization (Harvey 2000: 17). This narrative blamed the locally hegemonic Left for its unwillingness to shed the ailing state-subsidized industrial economy while embracing the “new”: private ownership with its corollary of reorganization and downsizing. Indelibly etched in this chapter of Genoese history is former Socialist mayor Fulvio Cerofolini’s 1984 refusal to allow Euro Disney to build a theme park in Genoa: “This is not a city of waiters,” he notoriously said, voicing a proud workerist stance that synthetized the legitimate suspicion that the shift from industrial to service sector employment would hardly serve the interests of workers. Yet, to those who did not support his political views (mostly the private sector), this stance epitomized all that was wrong with a city that refused to move on. Three decades later, Cerofolini’s sentence still haunts the collective memory of a largely deindustrialized Genoa that had to struggle to establish itself as a tourist destination.
Hope Is Elsewhere
While 1983 was the peak of the crisis, for much of Northern Italy the rebound was right around the corner (Ginsborg 2003: 32). By 1984, the Italian economy was already faring considerably better (Ginsborg 1990: 406–407). The restructuring and downsizing of Italy’s main companies had increased profits, the stock market was on the rise, and the widely publicized new wave of young managers such as Raoul Gardini, Silvio Berlusconi, Carlo de Benedetti, and Luciano Benetton seemed to demonstrate that social mobility was, at long last, a possibility (Ginsborg 1990: 408). The neoliberal mythology of self-reliance (Ong 2006) made its appearance in a static society in which professions had often been (and continue to be) handed down from generation to generation (Guano 2010b; Yanagisako 2013; Zinn 2001). While Genoa’s blue-collar workers were increasingly deprived of their hope, the educated middle classes saw neoliberal tropes of meritocracy and initiative (Ong 2006), along with the corollary of hedonism seeping in from the North Atlantic, as seemingly offering an alluringly modern alternative to all that had been wrong with Genoese society up to that point. This included complete reliance on the state, bureaucratism, aversion to change, the hegemony of political parties in all decision-making processes, and the cronyism, nepotism, and clientelism that had traditionally controlled the allocation of jobs and resources in a bloated public sector. In the private sector, thus went the rhetoric, initiative and talent were all that counted, and from then on the private sector had to be incentivized and privileged.
In order to better understand the success of this kind of right-wing utopia (Buck-Morss 2002; Harvey 2000) among young Italians of that time, it bears mentioning that the social upheavals of the late 1960s had brought about a profound transformation in the class politics of education—a transformation that was soon to be met with a decrease in the social value of recently democratized types of knowledge. Before then, working-class students had been encouraged to either leave school early or attend vocational institutes where they would learn a trade. Middle- and working-class women could at best expect to obtain some training to become elementary school teachers; lower- to middle-class men often attended professional schools where they acquired the skills they