Creative Urbanity
CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY
Kirin Narayan and Alma Gottlieb, Series Editors
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Creative Urbanity
An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization
Emanuela Guano
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4878-4
Contents
Chapter 1. Chronotopes of Hope
Chapter 2. Genoa’s Magic Circle
Chapter 3. Gentrification Without Teleologies
Chapter 4. Cultural Bricoleuses
Chapter 5. Touring the Hidden City
Chapter 6. Utopia with No Guarantees
Introduction
Cities 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 re-enchantment 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,
