inquiry. Utilized as an analytical category rather than as a tool for social engineering, Florida’s notion of the “creative class” helps sharpen the focus on the role of middle-class individuals not just as consumers, but rather and above all as producers and marketers of goods and services (see also Freeman 2014; Hoffman 2010; Leshkowich 2014). As such, it invites a reflection on how mid-level processes of cultural production participate in urban revitalization by intervening at a capillary level in a city’s everyday. This agency is precisely what, in recent years, anthropologists have called “poiesis” (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013) or “worlding” (Ong 2011) as ways of making the city through a quotidian practice that may unfold against the backdrop of large-scale interventions on the cityscape.
Placing an explicitly Marxist emphasis on class struggle, anthropological analyses have frequently cast the dichotomy of structure and agency as one of domination and resistance (Ortner 2006: 137), thus forgetting that opposition is only one out of many possible forms of agency (Ahearn 2001: 115; Mahmood 2005: 155). This is part of the reason why the agency of those social groups that may at least in part benefit from neoliberalization has rarely been addressed (Brash 2011).2 Along these lines, the agency of the creative middle-class individuals described in this book does not arise as a form of downright opposition to urban revitalization: a “system” (to co-opt sociological terminology) that, while controlled by the local administration as well as by private capitals, is usually experienced by the subjects of this ethnography as a potential source of opportunities rather than as exclusively oppressive. While certainly not devoid of the challenges and the frustrations that characterize the encounter with the public administration and its bureaucracies (Guano 2010a) and of the anxieties brought about by an increasingly stifling corporate presence, the “system” of Genoa’s revitalization can still, in some cases, be navigated in a fairly fruitful manner by those who have sufficient cultural capital and initiative to do so. Hence, the latter’s agency manifests in its most basic form as a “socio-culturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn 2001: 112; Rotenberg 2014: 36), and as a form of “action and control” (Cassaniti 2012: 297) that tweaks and modifies existing circumstances in order to carve productive niches at their margins. The arena and medium of their practice is a rich public urban sphere where experiences are formed along a continuum of sociability, sensoriality, and consumption whereby city dwellers strive to define their relationship to each other through the spaces they share (Moretti 2015: 7).
Italian Urbanity: Sociability and Sensuousness
“Each time you walk into the piazza, you find yourself in the middle of a dialogue,” wrote Italian novelist Italo Calvino (1972: 37), thus implicitly underscoring how, in the face of a suburbanization that has segregated North American cityscapes, the piazzas of Italian cities have retained their role as stages for an intense practice of relating to others, often through nonverbal performative means (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2007). It is in these piazzas that one is constantly confronted with the physical presence of others—and, along with it, their experiences and subjectivities (Moretti 2008, 2015).3 Yet Calvino was hardly the only writer to comment in the public life of Italian piazzas. Walter Benjamin, too, expressed his amazement at how, in Italian cities, private life keeps bursting out of the domestic sphere to be negotiated publicly. In this environment, Benjamin argued, houses are “less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out” (1986: 171). “Place of promenades, encounters, intrigues, diplomacy, trade and negotiations, theatricalizing itself” as well as a “vast setting where … rituals, codes and relations become visible and acted out”: thus Henri Lefebvre (1996: 236–237) described the intense public sociability of towns and cities all over the peninsula. Out of the multiple practices conducted in the piazzas of Italian cities, one in particular attracted scholarly attention: the passeggiata, or urban stroll (Del Negro 2004; Moretti 2015; Pitkin 1993). As an only approximate translation of flânerie, the Italian passeggiata entails an exploration of the urban everyday that is not just visual but multisensory, as well as a performance of one’s own classed and gendered identity, in a practice where walking is purposeful (Richardson 2008: 148) and being seen is just as important—and socially foundational—as seeing others (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2007; Moretti 2015). Yet, as a form of “being together of strangers” (Young 1990: 234, 256), the passeggiata also opens up the possibility for affective dimensions of this public practice. The proximity with other bodies can trigger responses ranging from repulsion to fear, from mistrust to pleasure, and from curiosity to a desire (Hall 1966) that Calvino thus epitomizes (1972: 24): “The people who pass by each other on the street do not know each other. As they see each other, they imagine a thousand things: the encounters that could take place between them, the conversations, the surprises, the caresses, the bites. Yet nobody acknowledges anybody else, the gazes cross paths for a moment and then they escape each other, seeking out other gazes, they never stop.”4 Calvino’s description of the erotic potential fostered by infinite possibilities of city life highlights an Italian urban sensorium that involves not just sight, but also touch, hearing, and taste as essential components in communication (Howes 2003; Jackson 2007).5 This multisensory communication, I suggest, involves not just the encounter with fellow urbanites but rather also that with the built environment and the materialities of commerce.
Writing about the corridor streets of Italy’s Renaissance cities and their role in framing social practice, James Holston (1989) observed that, in relatively narrow streets where architectural solids prevail over voids, ornate façades may be visually organized in the likeness of both an aristocratic interior and a stage for the performance of elitist spectacles of identity whereby, as Guy Debord put it, “a part of the world represents itself in front of the [rest of the] world, and as superior to it” (1984: 21). Hence, according to Holston, the publicness and openness of the corridor street provides only a fiction of participation. As a fundamental form of public sociability in Italian cities, the downtown urban stroll may well have originated as the practice through which local aristocrats showcased their privilege to each other as well as the commoners (Pitkin 1993). Yet, since Italy’s economic miracle of the 1960s and the rise of the local middle classes, the competent performance of taste and appropriate behavior during a democratized version of the urban stroll has become a means to claim one’s participation in the relatively more inclusive local and national collective imaginaries that materialize against the backdrop of the city (Del Negro 2004). Indeed, in the 1960s the popularization of the passeggiata went along with the increased wealth available to Italy’s new middle classes as well as their willingness to consume the plethora of goods displayed in shop windows. Much ink has been poured to describe the badaud mall-goer who, immersed in a pleasurable substitution of reality (Friedberg 1993: 122) and bedazzled and overwhelmed by its cloistered commercial phantasmagorias, “purchases the part for the whole” (Baudrillard 2001: 33, in Friedberg 1993: 116). Yet, if such claims obviously fail to exhaust the actual range of possible practices in U.S. suburban shopping malls such as walking, people-watching, and socializing, they are all the more inadequate to define the experience of Italian urban strollers. Immersed in a complex street environment that little resembles the sanitized seclusion of malls, the latter constantly juggle multiple tasks. These range from the performative enactment of one’s own classed and gendered identities (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2007; Moretti 2015; Pipyrou 2014; see also Liechty 2003: 23) to the competent evaluation other people’s performances; from assessing one’s own safety in the midst of a heterogeneous crowd to navigating an often challenging physical environment and an unruly traffic; and from appraising the goods on display in the shop windows to running necessary errands. The Italian passeggiata may, indeed, encompass the experiences of both the flâneur and the badaud; however, it also and most certainly exceeds them. The Genoese urban stroll is no exception.
Genoa’s Middle Classes and the City
Like most Italian cities, Genoa, too, has been a traditional haven for the intricate—and formerly elitist—pleasures of the Italian passeggiata. Writing about his travels through Europe in 1867, Mark Twain (2010: 103) observed that “the gentlemen and ladies of Genoa have a pleasant fashion of promenading in a large park on top of a hill in the centre of the city, from six till nine in the evening, and
