The Endless Reconstruction and Modern Disasters

The Management of Urban Space Through an Earthquake – Messina, 1908–2018

Domenica Farinella, Pietro Saitta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030193607
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030193614
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a study on the long-lasting consequences of a disastrous earthquake that hit the city of Messina, Sicily, in 1908. The quake killed about 86,000 people, and destroyed one of the most important portal cities of the Mediterranean. The book investigates both the forces that shaped that event and made it possible – firstly, urban speculation processes at the end of the nineteenth century – and the role of that occurrence in creating a complex event that, on the one hand, accelerated trends and tendencies that were already in motion; and, on the other, produced an entirely new social space based on social separation and the raise of a widespread marginal class. Such a class developed within urban borders and spaces that, over the decades, grew according to the same logic and directions that followed the reconstruction. Especially the shacks, still a visible presence in the city, represent the lieu of reproduction both of a class and the whole of the social relations stemming from the disaster.

It shows how key-concepts in contemporary scientific analysis, such as "shock economy" and "economy of disaster," can be aptly backdated. Above all, this study broadens the normal analyses of disasters by showing the stratification of institutional techniques and economic forces that, over the decades, intervened and (re-)shaped the site of a disaster and its social structure.

© The Author(s) 2019

Domenica Farinella and Pietro SaittaThe Endless Reconstruction and Modern Disastershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19361-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Domenica Farinella¹ and Pietro Saitta²

(1)

Dipartimento Scipog, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

(2)

Dipartimento Cospecs, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Domenica Farinella (Corresponding author)

Pietro Saitta

End Abstract

1.1 Messina: A Modern Catastrophe¹

Very early on the morning of December 28, 1908, the city of Messina was hit by a devastating earthquake, measuring magnitude seven on the Richter scale, and lasting for about thirty seconds. This proved to be one of the most destructive events ever to hit the Mediterranean area. About five or ten minutes after the earthquake, there was also a huge tidal wave. In Sicily and Calabria, in an area of 600 sq. km., between 70% and 100% of all buildings were destroyed. In total, the victims amounted to 85,000. For Messina, in particular, the outcome was apocalyptic. A few seconds after the quake, the city was a mountain of debris, and at least 65,000 people in the city alone were dead (the figures are still debated) (Guidoboni 2010).

Rescue teams were very slow to arrive and, once on the spot, ineffective. Indeed, the entire reconstruction process was very slow, or rather, characterized by different speeds. Bureaucratic mechanisms were quite fast in certain regards, and very slow in others. In general, however, physical reconstruction was unhurried (De Pasquale 2006).

The reason for our interest in this historic catastrophe lies in the fact that, in spite of the temporal distance, the Messina disaster was a very modern event. The newspapers set up an international network that covered the disaster for months. Donations came from every corner of the world. Political leaders as well as the royal family visited Messina. The royals, and the queen in particular, were portrayed at the site of the tragedy in an endeavor to help the victims. Special financial agencies were rapidly created, and the allocation of resources to small groups of companies and individuals followed, as part of a regime of exception and emergency. Above all, the Messina earthquake was the first massive disaster to hit Italy after the Unification. The event thus acquired symbolic and political meanings for the national government of the time. In spite of the many failures and flaws, the State envisaged the disaster as an opportunity to perform according to modern notions of efficiency and effectiveness (Dickie 2008). As we have already said, ad hoc agencies and new financial levers and tools were thus applied (loans, fiscal deductions, etc.). Consequently, the disaster set in motion financial speculative processes related to the land, and determined the emergence of a new social class of real estate owners—something that produced a structural and cultural shift from a bourgeoisie of traders and merchants to that of rentiers and speculators (Barone 1982).

One of the findings in the book is that the “economy of disaster” and the “shock economy” (Klein 2007) are not specific features of the present. On the contrary, the elements that characterize contemporary disaster-related speculative processes were largely active at the very beginning of the past century and helped the formation of the present. Thus, Messina appears as an ideal space in which to observe the very long-lasting effects of a certain “modern” way of managing disasters.

The Messina earthquake provides many familiar elements for today’s readers, and we believe it is especially worth revisiting because, in our view, the consequences of this disaster are still being felt. A century after the earthquake, thousands of families continue to inhabit shanties made of wood and asbestos, without basic facilities. These shacks—that is, what remains of the original temporary housing received by the international donors and government in the aftermath of the earthquake²—are the most symbolic and tangible element of such continuity. Established in the aftermath of the earthquake, and replaced at times, they became part of the urban landscape and can still be considered “a necessary evil” for many poor families.

The main concern of this study, then, is with the living conditions of this population of the margins, the reproduction of their subordination, and their individual “policies of resistance” to the processes of marginalization that invested them over the course of a century.

The extension of the city is another element of continuity: almost 70 kilometers, or 43 miles, in length for less than 250,000 people. This is, at least initially, the outcome of the early post-disaster speculative processes based on land expropriation. Related to this, there are the elements that compose the local “geography of exclusion” (Sibley 1995). The direction of today’s marginality follows almost the same lines drawn right after the earthquake. In fact, poverty is concentrated in areas that were sketched out in the second phase of the reconstruction, when the shacks were moved from the city center to different locations. These locations were the site for the development of public housing projects, which were interspersed with the shacks, and, in certain cases, residential buildings for the lower middle class. Still in the year 2000, there were an estimated 3100 shacks, with 12,000 people residing in them (figures that have only slightly decreased, according to recent data. See: Comune di Messina 2018). At the root of today’s stratification were the so-called ribaraccamenti, or the relocation of the shacks and temporary accommodation to areas situated outside the emergency plans and the new urban development plan (Borzì Master Plan) (Noto 2008). In short, the present urban geographical and social periphery developed in the years that followed the earthquake, and have become spaces that in the local, intimate imaginary and culture recall the ideas of marginality, crime, poverty, and, later, urban decadence.

Work is a further element of continuity. The economic marginality of the city that followed the seismic event led to the development of the construction industry and the reduction of other sectors—with the noticeable exception of the public sector. For the mass of unskilled workers present in the city, construction was therefore the natural outlet. From a structural point of view, with a dramatic shift from the production of goods to the provision of services, early processes of tertiarization get to characterize the economic life of the city.

The weakness of the manufacturing fabric is counterweighted by the growth in construction and commerce, and by employment in the public sector (Farinella 2009). The extension of manual and temporary employment in the public sector and in the building industry has shaped altogether those forms of income support that are at the basis of political patronage (Gribaudi 1980; Chubb 1982) and the Southern European welfare model (Ferrera 1996, 2010; Esping-Andersen 1999). Both today and in the past, the main alternative for the members of this class is emigration.

With the end of important businesses (mostly active in food processing), the layoff of hundreds of workers, and an increasing business mortality rate, in the early 2000s the weak manufacturing industry of the city has entered a deep structural crisis. Within this context, the public and para-public sectors, subjected to liberalization, privatization, and austerity policies, ceased to be factors of stabilization. The crisis of these sectors, therefore, has determined subsequent crises. Many public agencies, for example, are experiencing a liquidity crisis, which has led to protests over non-payment of wages. What the territory is experiencing, thus, is a further process of socio-economic marginalization, characterized by growth in income polarization and “bad jobs”. That is, jobs that are mostly manual, underpaid, and to varying degrees “irregular” (at least, with regard to the payment of wages, working hours, and services requested). Activities, however, that confirm the findings of many previous studies on the forms of complementarity and integration of such bad jobs with “regular work” (Saitta et al. 2013).

Yet, the population of the city amounts today to about 234,000—almost 10,000 people less than at the beginning of the current decade.

Although early traces of this tendency were already visible in the 1950s, this massive trend toward depopulation has been consistently recorded since the 1980s (David 2008) and indicates a weakness in the fabric of local production, which became more evident over the past few years. With the partial exception of the post-war years, the contemporary history of Messina appears characterized by the gradual disposal of productive activities. Consistent with a trend that preceded the earthquake, the retail trade, service sector, and public administration gradually become the main areas within the local economy (Chiara 2011). The 1991 census data shows that, since the 1980s, the secondary sector had experienced a significant decrease, although the construction industry made up around 41% of that business segment. In 2009, there was a further increase in the population: of the 41,400 people employed in the secondary sector, 23,745 were employed in the construction sector (Istat-Prefettura di Messina 2010). In 2016, however, data from the periodic National Builders Association’s report (Ance 2016) shows that, within the framework of a strong regional recovery in the construction sector, the number of people employed in this industry decreased in Messina by 26% compared to a previous survey carried out two years earlier.

Data of this sort is probably affected by the strong rates of irregularity in that segment of the labor market. However, the loss of over 5000 jobs in the secondary sector—as shown by the 2001 census—and which continued over subsequent years—is mostly real, and should be properly judged in the light of the depopulation that characterizes demographic trends (David 2008, p. 43). In the same figures, it is also realistic to see a shift of a significant number of workers into informal employment. If we see this fall, on the one hand, as the “surrender” of some of the workers, which can be associated with the presence of significant migration flows toward the North, on the other hand, it appears to be a possible indicator of the increasing precariousness of employment relationships within the industry.

On the opposite side of the class lines, the formation of the bourgeoisie followed similar patterns. From 1909, in fact, the establishment of new channels for financing reconstruction and the creation of special agencies for the financial management of economic flow delivered the city into the hands of small interest groups, reconfiguring it both socially and physically—sanctioning the appearance of a new class of “rentiers” (Barone 1982). Since then, a handful of families—some of which came from the province and only emerged into the public arena after the earthquake—have handed down their economic, political, and social capital from generation to generation. Large portions of the lower sections of the same bourgeoisie—that is, the upper middle class of professionals and entrepreneurs—depend both on this handful of families and on the public administration (the State, the Council, the Region, etc.) in order to survive. This phase saw the rise of a number of phenomena that are relevant to the modern city: for example, the consolidation of a new urban “underclass”³ and the emergence of new forms of spatial segregation; the considerable extension of the city as a result of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Researching Disasters: Theories for a Case Study
• 3. History Seen Through the Slums: The Southern Question and the Current Crisis
• 4. Messina, From the Earthquake to the Present
• 5. Working and Dreaming at the Margins of the City
• 6. Formal and Informal Housing in Today’s City
• 7. Messina Today: Representation, Identity, and Mobilization for Change
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter