Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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in San Lorenzo. Photo by author.
GeNova—The New Genoa
In the years that immediately preceded the Group of Eight summit of 2001, Genoa’s downtown underwent large-scale renovations meant to valorize its historical heritage and increase its visitability; for many Genoese, this meant an opportunity to start small businesses that would earn them a living in the face of consistently high unemployment rates. Their hopes, however, were to be met only partially. The G8 summit, to which I devote a chapter in this book, turned its promise of showcasing the new Genoa to international audiences into a globally visible display of state repression. Shocked by what had happened under their eyes, many a Genoese resented how their city had been hijacked from them by a political performance, reduced to a battlefield, and then memorialized as nothing else but a dramatic event. Yet even in the aftermath of this disaster, many Genoese still had something to be hopeful for: namely the promise that, upon becoming Capital of European Culture for all of 2004, Genoa would conquer its own place in the sun as part of Italy’s profitable tourist circuit. Even the 7.5 percent demographic increment reported between 2001 and 2005 pointed to an increased confidence among this city’s residents, many of whom, instead of migrating, stayed on and started families (Arvati n.d.: 29).
The year 2004 was a special time for many Genoese, whose legendary propensity toward pessimism and despondency was, yet again, replaced by hopefulness. As indicated by its GeNova (New Genoa) logo, the city that welcomed visitors that year had changed remarkably. A considerable injection of national and EU funds helped establish a beautified cityscape that hosted a wide assortment of festivals, symposia, events, and exhibitions on topics ranging from ancient history to modernity, from art to folklore, from science and technology to industry, and from migrations to sports. By the summer of 2004, tourist flows had grown considerably; the number of museum visitors had increased from 163,000 in 1999 to 410,000 (Hillman 2008: 312), and at all times of the day groups of visitors could be spotted striding through Genoa’s downtown, its centro storico, and the Porto Antico. Revenues for local businesses went up, and the excitement among the residents was palpable. More than once, while wandering about in areas of the centro storico that had previously been off the beaten track, I was stopped by elderly residents who, taking me for a tourist, proudly volunteered directions to freshly renovated historical landmarks. Some of these were in the very same area where, in the late 1970s, locals had pelted my schoolmates with stones during an art history field trip.
While the success of Genoa’s tenure as Capital of European Culture had many hope for the best, the hardship was not over. The following year, Genoa experienced a sharp decline in tourist presences and revenues; with no great event in sight, hope dwindled. Many started wondering if anything would ever change after all. In 2002 the introduction of the Euro, the unified European currency, had brought about a 100 percent price hike that took place almost overnight: due to speculations that went unchecked, all of a sudden what had previously cost 1,000 lire was worth one euro—that is, about 2,000 lire. Unfortunately, salaries, pensions, and savings remained unchanged. If the maneuver reduced Italy’s public debt by half, it also delivered a formidable blow to the financial stability and the well-being of Italy’s middle and working classes. To make things worse, the financial crisis that had begun in the United States in 2008 soon spread to Italy; this country’s large public debt, its lack of growth, and the limited credibility of its government turned the crisis into a full-fledged recession that affected already vulnerable Genoa even more than other Northern cities. For years, ever since the onset of the recession, hardly a week went by without a protest taking place in downtown Genoa. In 2011, massive layoffs were announced by Fincantieri, Genoa’s foremost shipyard. Months of convulsive street protests ensued, during which workers placed a large excavator in front of the prefecture with the implicit threat they would launch it against the sixteenth-century building if their grievances were not to be heard. In 2013, employees of the local public transportation company went on a five-day strike against the privatization of their firm, thus bringing the whole city to a standstill. In the meantime, the escalation of property taxes (IMU) meant to help stem the public debt brought about a steep increase in rents for already struggling small business owners, estimated in the range of 70.1 percent for centro storico properties and 48.1 percent for the rest of the city.13 Combined with the difficulty in obtaining credit and the collapse of consumer spending at the hands of a citizenry bogged down by high unemployment rates, low salaries, and record high taxation (Guano 2010a), these rent hikes caused many a small business to close, thus contributing to the impoverishment of a large section of the local middle class that had been a protagonist of Genoa’s hopefulness.
The Uneven Distribution of Hope
Keen on escaping their predicament through strategies that ranged from installing a tiny dehors in front of one’s hole-in-the-wall coffee shop to taking advantage of a municipality’s subsidized loans by opening a small business for selling one’s own handmade crafts, local small business owners had contributed with their poiesis to making the city from the bottom up (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013: 197). Indeed, the promise of progress and the capitalist mobilization of hope brought about by affective urbanism (Anderson and Fenton 2008; Lashaw 2008) may, under certain circumstances, foster the rise of creative classes (Florida 2012 [2002]) endowed at the very least with cultural and social capital; however, processes of urban revitalization also bring about a deepening of existing inequalities. This happened in Genoa, too.
If, for segments of the educated middle classes, Genoa’s revitalization seemed to prospect opportunities for employment and above all small-scale entrepreneurship, the hope fostered by affective capitalist urbanism was not evenly distributed—nor were its dividends (Anderson and Holden 2008; Appadurai 2013; Miyazaki 2013). Among those who did not expect to garner benefits were the residents of much of the industrial peripheries to the west of the city: those neighborhoods that had been disproportionately affected by industrial degradation, and that did not directly benefit from an increase in tourist flows (Hillman 2008) even as the local factories kept hemorraging jobs. Take, for example, Sampierdarena.
A former seaside village situated to the west of Genoa’s dowtown and a favorite resort with local and international bourgeoisies, Sampierdarena was stripped of its beaches, its pleasantness, and its prestige in the early twentieth century due to the expansion of Genoa’s port. After turning into a working- to lower-middle-class neighborhood, in the mid-1990s Sampierdarena went on to become the destination of a massive immigration from Ecuador. As the Ecuadorian community became the largest immigrant group in Genoa, tensions began between the newcomers and the Genoese residents. Nowadays, some of the most frequently voiced complaints about Sampierdarena are the neighborhood’s rise in crime rates and the difficulties in syncronizing the schedules and habits of the (mostly aging) Italian residents with those of the considerably younger Latin American community. Within apartment complexes, for example, squabbles among neighbors frequently arise around the issue of noise levels that the Genoese are not willing to tolerate. Public space is just as contested: on one hand, Genoese residents complain about the street parties and the brawls that erupt at night, often leaving behind carpets of broken beer bottles (Gazzola, Prampolini, and Rimondo 2014: 120); on the other hand, Ecuadorian youth deprecate the scarcity of public spaces where to get together, play soccer, listen to music, and party without incurring the grievances of Italians (Flores and Valencia León 2007). However, what singlehandedly triggers the most anxieties among the Genoese is the presence of pandillas: gangs of Latino youth such as the Latin Kings or the Netas who, unlike less sensational facets of Ecuadorian immigrants’ life, receive considerable attention at the hands of the local media (Queirolo Palmas 2005).14
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