Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place

ABSTRACT

Lingotto used to be an important industrial site and a highly symbolic space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memories, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the last decades, following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. The analysis shows that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin’s resilience strategies used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Furthermore, it shows how Lingotto is a highly resilient urban fragment and building. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve and stage local urban heritages, this paper offers an account of Lingotto’s resilience, which highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingotto thus contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city, stressing the ambiguous role of the often-implicit politics of forgetting and amnesia in a framework of urban resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• forgetting
• multi-functional spaces
• cultural containers
• post-Fordism
• cultural economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.fcagroup.com/en-us/group/history/pages/centro_storico.aspx (last accessed on 13 June 2016).

2. Data source (if an alternative source is not explicitly mentioned) is always Piemonte in Cifre 2015; http://www.piemonteincifre.it (last accessed on 20 August 2016).

3. Project From concept to car (Whitford & Enrietti, 2005); see http://www.fromconcepttocar.com (accessed on 16 August 2016).

4. Griseri (2016).

5. See e.g. ‘Marchionne, il manager che ha fatto del Lingotto un gruppo globale’, Adnkronos online, 10 September 2014; Greco (2015, 2016).

6. See also ‘Bello e superato’, Il Mondo, 23–30 May 1994, pp. 81–82.

7. See, for example, Provost and Lai (2016).

8. Bosio (1983). See also Buffa and Ortoleva (1994).

9. Stefanoni (1994). The article affirms that ‘when the works will be over, [the Lingotto] will be one of the most prestigious multi-functional centres of the world’ (p. 60).

10. Quoted in Stefanoni (1994).

11. This sentence, attributed to Renzo Piano, is quoted in the newspaper article by Minucci (2012). Authors’ translation.

12. http://www.eataly.net/it_it/negozi/torino-lingotto/archivio-torino-lingotto/mare-mater-expo-2015/ (last accessed 3 June 2016, authors’ translation).