Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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(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 on its way to obtaining more nimble, transparent, and efficient state administration modeled after its North European counterparts (Koenig-Archibugi 2003). As Italians were to find out soon, none of these predictions was accurate: the parties that came down crumbling after the tangentopoli shakeup were promptly replaced by new—and possibly even more corrupt—ones, and, instead of simplifying Italy’s abstruse bureaucracy, the European Union added new, and equally repressive, layers of red tape to people’s everyday life.
For Genoa, the 1990s meant a further deterioration of its industrial sectors. Even though over the previous decade employment rates all over Northern Italy had increased by 10.6 percent, in Genoa they kept declining. By 1992, 13 percent of its population was unemployed (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 890–894)—a number that did not take into account those who had surrendered to a “culture of resignation” (Palumbo 1994: 958) and were no longer even looking for a job. Yet Genoa as a whole did not give in to collective trauma (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 885). In spite of all odds, for many a Genoese the 1990s were still characterized by a cautious optimism driven primarily by the affective impact of urban revitalization and the promise of a new and thriving postindustrial city.
As Ernest Bloch (1986: 10) observed, “The gulf between dream and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his dream…. There only has to be some point of contact between dream and life for everything to be in the best order.” For one, the dreams of many a Genoese were kindled by the promise of transforming Genoa into an all-Italian Silicon Valley (Castelli and Gozzi 1994: 995): a promise that pivoted on the creation of a science and technology park on the Erzelli hill where the local School of Engineering would spearhead the push for scientific research, technological innovation, and employment.12 On a more immediate level—one that touched the everyday lives of many—change was under way in the cityscape itself: moving the School of Architecture to the centro storico brought new life to a formerly degraded and sparsely populated neighborhood. The thirteenth-century Palazzo Ducale, which had formerly been closed off to the general public and utilized for much of the twentieth century as a court, was restored to its original beauty and began hosting high-profile exhibitions that considerably increased Genoa’s visibility and the number of visitors, thus generating revenues for local businesses. In discussing the spatial dimensions of neoliberal hope, David Harvey (2000: 181) pointed out how this entails the creation of a built environment meant to host commercial activities. This is certainly what happened in Genoa’s centro storico—though on a considerably smaller scale than the corporate one surmised by Harvey. The municipal support (in the form of subsidized loans) for small businesses in the centro storico provided the “point of contact”