Creative Urbanity
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In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people—educated, middle class—seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the 1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have.
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Creative Urbanity
Kirin Narayan and Alma Gottlieb, Series Editors
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Chapters 4 and 5 delve into the experiences of two social groups whose poiesis (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013) has made substantial contributions to Genoa’s public image as a “city of culture”: street antique dealers and walking-tour guides. Chapter 4 describes how, since the mid-1990s, a proliferation of antique fairs have given chronically under- and unemployed middle-class women an opportunity for self-employment. This chapter explores how middle-class women antique dealers draw on their gendered and classed skills such as their aesthetic sensibility to stake out a place for themselves in an urban economy of culture, even though the domestic and decorative aura that at times surrounds women’s endeavors may still undermine their efforts. Drawing on an ethnography of how Genoa’s walking-tour guides describe and present the city as well as on the analysis of their professional histories and experiences, Chapter 5 suggests that these protagonists of Genoa’s newly found tourist vocation are agentive cultural intermediaries who mediate between high and popular culture as they shape the urban experiences of their publics. Acting independently from the political and corporate entities that traditionally drive the transformation of postindustrial cities into consumption hubs, Genoa’s walking-tour guides draw on their own creativity, their talents, and their educational background to generate venues of self-employment by spinning tales of concealment and discovery around the master narrative of Genoa’s industrial decline and its tourist potential.
While Chapter 4 and 5 focus on the experiences and biographies of some of Genoa’s creative individuals, Chapter 6 dwells on the kind of worlding practices that may emerge in the shade of revitalization. This chapter is an ethnography of the Suq (Souk): a multicultural festival held in Genoa every year under the supervision of two women who, since the late 1990s, have used their background in sociology, political science, and theater to further the cause of diversity in Genoa. Multicultural festivals have been frequently denounced as opportunities for the consumption of “other” cultures that are added as commoditized and politically irrelevant “spices” to the otherwise allegedly “bland” everyday life of mainstream groups (hooks 1992; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991). Yet these critiques often fail to explore how such events articulate with sensuous modalities of constructing dominant identities. This chapter seeks to contextualize the Suq within the broader politics of representing and consuming selves and others in contemporary Italy, and it argues that the Suq’s specific brand of strategic orientalism attempts to penetrate the Italian sensorium for the sake of challenging hegemonic representations of culture, identity, belonging, and roots. Just as importantly, this chapter suggests that, in a society where small businesses are a fundamental source of livelihood for both natives and immigrants, the Suq supports an alternative to forms of consumption increasingly shaped by the shopping malls and the big-box stores that, since 2000, have proliferated in Genoa’s deindustrialized peripheries, bringing about blight in formerly thriving neighborhoods.
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