Commentary
Italian cities pushing people to the edges
Here we see how this triumphant advance of cold, hard cash and this precipitous retreat of compassion are putting a strict condition on politics.
In Rome, at the Ostiense station, we’ve seen marble benches with steel cylinders sticking out so you can’t lie on them. And we remember the deputy mayor of Trieste bragging about throwing away the clothes of the homeless.
We still remember when the Villa Comunale in Naples was open, with its original layout as a seaside walkway, just as we remember when a gated enclosure was commissioned from the Mendini workshop in 1999, one with closed gates: not to delimit the area, but to close it off.
So the two news stories coming in from the north and south of Italy at the beginning of the new year, from two cities that were its capital once and are now metropolitan centers, brought back many memories for us. The first came from Turin, where there was a protest by citizens and sellers in District 1 denouncing the municipality’s neglect of the arcades, where the homeless are sleeping in boxes (mind you, they call them “cardboard dwellings,” but they are nothing more than boxes and packaging material), and the municipality pledged to take action.
The other came from Naples: the Umberto Gallery will be closed at night, with gates specially commissioned from an artist for €900,000.
They’re saying it’s appropriate to do so, to ensure safety and decorum for the citizens – by which they mean the good ones, the residents, those who have a voice at city hall, and who are not ashamed to point the finger at the other, even if the other is the most dispossessed; those who feel they are more citizens than the others. Those who get their voter ID in the mail.
There is a photo of Naples’ beautiful Gallery, still open: you can see the perspective effect created by the marble, the glass skylight at the top, a single-brand beauty product store on the left, and on the right, in the foreground, leaning against a storefront, a boy sitting on woolen blankets, with a hood covering his head. Herds of inebriated tourists take up the center of the gallery. Now why would that boy be sitting there instead of at one of the small tables belonging to food establishments that the other arm of the gallery is filled with? And why indeed do the homeless in Turin pee under the arcades on Corso Vinzaglio at night and not in their own bathrooms, in their warm homes?
Here we see how this triumphant advance of cold, hard cash and this precipitous retreat of compassion are putting a strict condition on politics: one must have an idea of what one wants their city to look like. What to do with a problem, how to look at it, where to point the finger to start solving it, and the responses that will come out of it: that is the essence of politics.
Minister Piantedosi has invoked the two words “decorum” and “security” over and over on New Year's Eve, using them as a cudgel – same as the local governors – to push people’s pain away from the center of cities, to further marginalize the marginalized. De Vito said it well in this newspaper: one day we will wake up from the illusion of the “red zones” in the city centers and see the faces of those outside the fence, “the victims of the unequal growth of the cities.”
It is a terrible loss to close down our open cities.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/le-citta-e-quei-dolori-lasciati-fuori-dal-cancello on 2025-01-05