Tuff City

Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples

Nick Dines

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781782389118
• eBook ISBN: 9780857452801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

During the 1990s, Naples' left-wing administration sought to tackle the city's infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city's cultural and architectural heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city's historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include heritage, decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe's most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.

Part 1

Urban Change in
an Ordinary City

Naples during the 1990s

Chapter 1

The Centro Storico

History of a Concept and Place

Beyond the commonplace of the centro storico

Like the North American ‘downtown’ area with its skyscrapers towering over low-rise sprawl or the English ‘town centre' with its motley mix of Victorian brick, reinforced concrete and postmodern bric-a-brac, the centro storico is often a taken-for-granted feature of the Italian city. For many people it evokes instant images of ancient churches, palaces, piazzas and cobbled streets. Yet, in actual fact, ‘centro storico’ is a relatively recent term. Its first systematic use can be traced to the ‘Charter of Gubbio', a manifesto for the ‘protection and renewal of centri storici’, drawn up by a group of administrators, planners and environmental campaigners in September 1960 (Cervellati 1991; Dainotto 2003; Corona 2007).¹ The document highlighted contemporary concerns about the disruptive impact of the postwar building boom upon the preexisting fabric of Italian cities. It also mirrored a broader notion of urban heritage that had already been elaborated during the 1950s by cultural elites such as the conservation association Italia Nostra.² Heritage was no longer seen to be exclusively embodied in a few individual monuments but now encompassed an entire urban area corresponding to the city's limits at a certain historical point in time (Corona 2007). Among its various proposals, the Charter of Gubbio called for the formal demarcation of the centro storico, the classification of all historical buildings within it, a stop to the demolition of even the most modest edifices, and a guarantee that any restoration work would not affect the social composition of residents.

From the outset, the centro storico was not simply a descriptive label but relayed a particular idea about the city and its development. As well as simply protecting a city's architectural patrimony, its conservation was underpinned by an environmentalist logic. The restoration and reuse of existing buildings was considered a means to maintain social cohesion and stem the lava-like spread of concrete and asphalt over the surrounding landscape. The ideas that lay behind the centro storico resonated with Jane Jacobs's coeval polemic against the excesses of modern planning in American cities (Jacobs 1961), and in their own way, both the Charter of Gubbio and Jacobs's classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities can be considered forerunners, by some three to four decades, of debates about sustainable urban development. In the immediate term, however, the charter's idealistic demands seemed out of kilter with the pressures of modern life and the rampant economic growth of the early 1960s. As urban expansion continued unabated, the centres of many Italian cities were reshaped with the construction of office blocks and trunk roads, while some quarters were left to crumble as former residents moved out to new suburbs. Nevertheless, a few significant initiatives went against the tide and provided counter-narratives for an urban planning literature otherwise characterized by despair and pessimism (De Lucia 1989; Cederna 1991); none more so than the internationally acclaimed centro storico plan for Bologna, adopted by the PCI-led administration in the early 1970s, which restored and converted old buildings into social housing (Jäggi, Müller and Schmid 1977; De Lucia 1989).

At one level, urban conservationism in Italy pursued a clearly radical agenda. It sought to provide an antidote to urban sprawl and counter real estate speculation both inside and outside the old city (the Bologna plan had in fact proposed expropriating privately owned buildings but had to eventually opt for the less controversial method of buying up vacant property). It also insisted on safeguarding the demographic and economic makeup, as well as the physical fabric, of the centri storici and was at least alert to the risk of their ‘museumification’ (Cervellati 1991). Most of the key figures associated with this ‘urban environmental’ approach, including Pier Luigi Cervellati (author of the Bologna plan) and Vezio De Lucia (chief planner during the first Bassolino administration), were close to the Italian Communist Party, even if they were often in open dispute with the party's limp defence of the public ownership of land and its reticence to stand up to the interests of private construction firms (De Lucia 1989). At the same time, however, debates about the centro storico tended to be marked by a moral paternalism. First, they often betrayed a distaste for the modern city. The postwar periphery represented a sort of rootless ‘anti-city’ that encroached on the ‘authentic’ urban life of the centro storico.³ Second, the idea of the centro storico itself was infused with essentialist discourses about ‘historical identity’ and ‘civic memory’ which, when not fixed in some golden era, were blind to questions of agency and conflict. What the past meant for different people and who had the power to define it were questions rarely posed by partisans of the centro storico lobby.⁴

The theme of the centro storico would in fact soon extend beyond the realm of specialists, enlightened administrations and cultural elites to become a grassroots issue. During the 1970s the centro storico was a key setting for collective struggles against, for instance, substandard housing and rising rents (Ramondino 1998; Corona 2007). Urban social movements in major Italian cities, including Naples, organized mass occupations of buildings and the self-reduction of utility bills and public transport tickets. They also opposed redevelopment schemes in city centres, not on the grounds of preserving heritage, but in order to resist evictions and, very often, to assert subaltern attachments to place (Belli 1986). Indeed, over the same period, the threat did not simply come from demolition and modernization, but also from restoration projects in traditionally poorer neighbourhoods (coupled with the purchase of property and termination of protected tenancies) set in action by urban elites increasingly attracted to the centro storico as a place to live and work (Fazio 1977).

The centro storico was therefore never just the product of a particular idea about the city, but it was a lived space that comprised diverse and, at times, discordant social, economic and cultural dimensions. This observation, however self-evident, is a crucial starting point for a more dynamic understanding of the centro storico that recognizes preconceived value judgements about its presumed attributes and cross-examines arguments both for and against its protection. Furthermore, any generalized account of the Italian centro storico runs the risk of forsaking geographical differences for a coherent narrative. While it is possible to identify common trends in their development during the postwar era, the centri storici in Italy actually vary greatly, not only in terms of their physical transformation, local economy and demographic composition, but also with regards to their reputations as places of ‘historical identity’ and ‘civic memory’. Thus, while the centri storici of Rome, Venice and Florence have experienced the impact of mass tourism and gentrification in former popular quarters, those of Naples and Palermo in the South – and to a certain extent, Genoa in the North – continue to possess a large lower-class residential population, as well as local artisan and informal economies, and have more recently seen the settlement of new immigrant communities. At the same time, each centro storico is itself marked by refractory and contradictory elements. As such, the frequent contention that its genesis merely represents the commodification of space or the inevitable ascendancy of the museum city (Dainotto 2003) is both theoretically vacuous and empirically unfounded, even when directed at Italy's principal tourist cities (as exemplified by the protracted altercation between residents and storekeepers in the centro storico of Florence regarding the latter's decision to board up their premises during the 2002 European Social Forum).

Vestiges of a swollen city: the centro storico of Naples

Naples possesses one of the largest centri storici in Europe. In 1500 the city already had a population of over 100,000 people. Under the Spanish viceroys, it enjoyed numerous fiscal privileges and became a pole of inward migration from the impoverished and oppressed countryside. By the eve of the 1656 plague, which wiped out more than half the city's inhabitants, the population of Naples stood at around 450,000, making it roughly the same size as Paris and second only to Istanbul in the Mediterranean.⁵ During this period, the city's economy was unable to absorb the influx of people which instead swelled the ranks of an urban poor that survived by its wits and through a subsistence ‘slum economy’ (Allum 1973; Galasso 1978). Moreover, the city did not grow sufficiently in size to accommodate the rising population. As a result, every available space was converted into living quarters, from stables to caves in the tuff escarpments. Extra storeys were added above buildings to compensate for the lack of territorial expansion. These developments compounded a peculiar pattern of residential stratification whereby different social classes lived on top of each other: the populace at street level, the aristocracy on the piano nobile (usually the first floor), and the professional and merchant classes on the upper floors. Present-day features such as narrow alleyways, ancient high-rise tenement blocks and ground-floor single-room dwellings (locally known as bassi) represent the physical legacy of this intense urbanization.

The layout of the centro storico of Naples, if not all of the city's buildings, today remains largely intact and, despite a fall in population after the Second World War, is still one of the most densely populated urban areas in Europe.⁶ The centro storico comprises a rectangular ancient core (the centro antico) which conserves the street plan of the Greco-Roman settlement and is where many of the city's architectural monuments are situated. Surrounding the centro antico and climbing up the adjacent hills are a number of quartieri popolari (popular neighbourhoods) which developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps the most (in)famous of these neighbourhoods are the Spanish Quarters, an extremely tight grid of blocks and alleyways punctured by a number of tiny piazzas that rise to the west of the city's principal commercial street, Via Toledo (popularly known by its former name, Via Roma). Originally designed in the mid-sixteenth century during the reign of the viceroys as a garrison for Spanish troops – hence the name – the area swiftly came to be associated with the urban poor, prostitution (both male and female) and, on occasions during the twentieth century but particularly during the 1980s, organized crime. To this day it is still considered the quintessence of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ Naples. Contrary to a tendency which conceives the various quartieri popolari and centro antico as a uniform entity, there are notable social and urban differences between areas and different relationships with the rest of the city.

Between the south-west corner of the centro antico and the sea lies the second monumental district of the centro storico. This area is characterized by a series of wide streets and large piazzas and comprises the city's major public and administrative buildings. These include the former Royal Palace, now a museum and national library; the Maschio Angioino, a castle keep that houses a museum and the city council chambers; Palazzo San Giacomo, the city hall; Teatro San Carlo, the city's opera house; and the Galleria Umberto I, a late nineteenth-century shopping arcade. A few hundred metres along the coast is the Castel dell'Ovo, perched on a rock linked to the mainland by a short causeway, which is used for temporary exhibitions and, like the Palazzo Reale, as a venue for international conferences and political summits. Stretching west from the Castel dell'Ovo are the relatively airy and more salubrious middle- and upper-class quarters of Chiaia (which includes the city centre's principal park, Villa Comunale), Mergellina and Posillipo. Although a variety of fishing hamlets, religious buildings and villas had existed here since at least medieval times, these three areas did not fully urbanize and become an integrated part of the city until the eighteenth century (De Seta 1981). They are physically cut off from the rest of the centro storico by the Monte Echia promontory and Vomero Hill, and they are often considered distinct from the older core of the city.⁷

During the last 150 years, the centro storico has been torn between calls for conservation and demolition and has passed through alternating periods of neglect and attention. The incorporation of the South into the Italian state in 1861 had immense repercussions on the city whose principal economic base had been linked to its status as capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Macry 1997). The city's overcrowded and filthy slums became a thorn in the side of the new state, and their renovation a common theme of national debate. In particular, two somatic terms came to be associated with attempts to modernize the city's ancient ‘body’: ‘risanamento’ (which means ‘building improvements’ but also ‘healing’) and ‘sventramento’ (which implies ‘clearance’ but literally means ‘disembowelment’). The Risanamento, when written with a capital ‘R’, also specifically refers to the extensive building programme which followed the cholera epidemic of 1884. Special legislation was passed to fund slum clearances in the Mercato and Pendino districts near the port. In his masterly study, Naples in the Time of Cholera, Frank Snowden argues that this epidemic was the first national emergency for which the new nation-state could be held morally responsible, and thus the government's intervention ‘carried the powerful subliminal message that Liberal Italy was at last fully committed to answering the grievances of the Mezzogiorno’ (Snowden 1995: 363). The wide boulevards lined with sober buildings served to replace the uncomfortable images of urban blight with a vision of order and modernity. This Haussmann-inspired ‘urban cleansing’ programme, however, did little to alleviate the city's most pressing problems, namely the dire poverty and hazardous sanitary conditions. In her impassioned attack on the Risanamento's failings, Il Ventre di Napoli (The Bowels of Naples), published at the turn of the twentieth century, the journalist Matilde Serao famously described the principal new thoroughfare, Corso Umberto I, as a ‘paravento’ (a windshield), because, she claimed, it had merely protected the middle classes and visitors from ungainly sights (Serao 1994).

Under the Fascist regime, the Monteoliveto market area and the Rione Carità, located between the centro antico and the Spanish Quarters, were demolished to make way for a new administrative centre consisting of public offices, a central post office and government buildings. As with the Risanamento, the Fascist ‘sventramento’ – the disembowelling of popular Naples – was justified as a modernizing, sanitary measure, but the underlying pretext was to reinforce both the regime's physical presence and raise the city's national status.

Following the Second World War, the city experienced a massive and unplanned expansion. Thousands of middle-class residents moved out to the new, more comfortable suburbs which were mushrooming around the old city. They were later followed by a sizeable number of poorer inhabitants who moved out to the public housing estates that were built from the late fifties onwards, such as Rione Traiano in the western district of Soccavo. The population of the centro storico subsequently fell from 621,000 in 1951 to 495,000 in 1971, while the city's total population over the same period rose from 1,011,000 to 1,227,000 (Comune di Napoli 2007). The urban landscape was totally transformed. The surrounding hills that had been farmed for centuries were suddenly covered in high-rise blocks of flats. The unplanned building developments during the Monarchist and Christian Democrat administrations of the 1950s and 1960s were officially sanctioned as a social and economic palliative and often involved collusion between local politicians and speculators, as was famously denounced in Francesco Rosi's 1963 film Le Mani sulla Città (Hands Over the City).⁸ Serao's Il Ventre di Napoli was now eclipsed by the città abusiva: the unplanned, illegal city.

The rapid and unregulated expansion of Naples led to a de facto demarcation of the centro storico. In comparison to its outskirts, there was relatively little construction work in the heart of the city. New buildings were erected on sites damaged by bombs during the Second World War, but, with the notable exception of the redevelopment of Via Marina by the port and the extension of the Rione Carità by the Monarchist administration under Mayor Achille Lauro during the 1950s, these barely altered the overall morphology of the centro storico. While the massive expansion of the periphery ultimately spared the centro storico from the bulldozers, the political inability or disinterest to implement urban improvements meant that large tracts of it were left in a state of decay. The area was afflicted by a series of crises which reinforced the external image of a ‘backward’ city. Rotting edifices collapsed, often with tragic consequences, and by the late 1970s, between 250 and 300 families were being made homeless every year (Belli 1986: 79). An outbreak of cholera in 1973 suggested that sanitary conditions had improved little since the time of the Risanamento. The whole city lacked basic services: a local education commission in 1973, for instance, concluded that 4,000 extra classrooms were needed to solve the problem of school sharing (Cederna 1991). Nevertheless, the centro storico remained the fulcrum of commercial, tertiary and administrative activities and was thus burdened with ever-increasing levels of traffic. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, planning agendas were consumed by the need to modernize the city centre's road system and relocate activities to a new administrative and business district (known as the Centro Direzionale), which after over two decades of discussions was eventually commenced in 1985 to the immediate north of the railway tracks of the central station.⁹

On 23 November 1980 a violent earthquake struck Campania and Basilicata, causing over 2,700 deaths and destroying whole villages. While the loss of life in Naples was relatively low compared with the epicentre in the mountainous region of Irpinia, the earthquake had a devastating impact on the city.¹⁰ Almost 10,000 buildings were declared unsafe for habitation, and by the end of January 1981, 112,000 people (approximately 10 per cent of the city's population) had had to abandon their homes (Belli 1986). The centro storico bore the brunt of the disaster: in the poorest neighbourhoods, such as Montecalvario and Mercato, between 30 and 60 per cent of inhabitants were evacuated. The homeless were temporarily housed in hotels and makeshift caravan parks around the city and on ferries in the port. Many were later moved to empty holiday homes along the Domitian coast, to the north of Naples, and into 2,500 prefabricated huts on the edges of the city. The compounding effect of the tremor upon existent social and economic problems led to an upsurge in unrest: schools and other public buildings were squatted, the unemployed intensified their fight for regular employment, while social movements mobilized against the transferral of residents from the centro storico.

Despite the damage to buildings and disruption to everyday life, there was no major plan to restore or rebuild the old city. Although the ‘219’ law for the reconstruction of Campania and Basilicata, passed by central government in May 1981, earmarked funds for the structural renovation of damaged buildings (Belli 1986: 119-23), most of the main projects for Naples were located in the rundown suburbs in the north and eas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1. Urban Change in an Ordinary City: Naples during the 1990s
• Part 2. The Making of a Regeneration Symbol: Heritage, Decorum and the Incursions of the Everyday in Piazza Plebiscito
• Part 3. Deprovincializing Urban Regeneration: Piazza Garibaldi and Immigration during the Bassolino Era
• Part 4. An Alternative Idea of Public Space: The Centro Sociale in Montesanto
• Glossary of Italian Terms
• Bibliography
• Index