From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna's Manifattura delle Arti

Abstract

In this article I examine the visual-material performance of urban renewal in Bologna's cultural district Manifattura delle Arti. Through an evaluation of its physical characteristics and with the aid of personal narrative, I elucidate that the district performs meaning potentials of exclusion and distinction. Not unlike when it was a run-down former industrial area, the district visibly interrupts the cityscape. In doing so, it is now constituted as an enclave for the global(ist) communication of Bologna. Rather than being an organically integrated or politically disruptive presence, this urban enclave ultimately contributes to the deepening of inequalities that are typical of advanced capitalism.

Keywords:

• Bologna
• Global Communication
• Manifattura delle Arti
• Mediatization
• Urban Built Environment
• Visual-Material Performance

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2009 National Communication Association convention in Chicago. The author wishes to thank Greg Dickinson, Karma R. Chávez and the anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments and careful suggestions on this work. The author's parents, Chiara Grande and Vincenzo Aiello, must also be thanked for helping her remember more vividly and for teaching her how to love her neighborhood when it was difficult to do so. This essay is dedicated to the author's sister, Benedetta, who helped her navigate the neighborhood through her childhood and who never got to see it change into its current state.

Notes

I prefer to speak of “advanced” rather than “late” capitalism, since the latter terminology implies that there may be in fact an end to capitalist structures and relations. Speaking of advanced capitalism entails that there is an expansion, rather than a progressive disintegration, of the capitalist mode into various areas of globalist cultural production.

Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale.

This is approximately $300,000. Most apartments were in need of major renovation, and precedence was given to tenants in the apartment sale process.

As Livingstone (2009) explains, it may in fact be more useful to speak of “mediation” rather than “media” when examining contemporary mediated communication. This is both because “mediation” enables us “to avoid tying down the focus to specific media (radio, press, television, etc.)” (p. 3) and, most importantly, account for processes of transformation and hybridization in “the dual centerpiece of the communication field—mass communication and interpersonal (or face-to-face) communication” (p. 3).

In U.S. rhetorical/cultural communication scholarship, this view of the built environment as a material performance (Blair & Michel, 2000) has been applied to a variety of contexts in which significant contemporary subjectivities (e.g., citizen/consumer) may be (per)formed. These include the progressive spectacularization and lifestyling of both urban and suburban areas and the historical memorialization and “musealization” of given urban and rural locales (e.g., Blair, 2001; Blair & Michel; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2005; Stewart & Dickinson, 2008).

Blair (2001) goes on to explain that this may be “particularly difficult in the cases of visual and material objects, for we must ‘translate’ from the senses to print” (p. 275). We most often cannot simply “read” the built environment, as we are fully immersed in it. This structuralist notion of “reading” experienced some popularity in the 1990s, thanks to its implied potential for the systematic and even empirical analysis of meaning-making practices rooted in sensorially rich texts. And, because this notion is problematic, yet convenient and powerful, there ought to be ways for scholars to endow their visual-material analyses with phenomenological texture and depth.

The specific choice of method when collecting personal narratives is utterly dependent on the research contexts and the critical aims of one's analysis. A scholar may elicit stories from local residents through semistructured or conversational interviews, much in the same way as an oral historian may do. Or else, she may compile the stories of her close kin, together with her own, to map out the identities and subjectivities that contribute to the constitution of given cultural formations (cf. Chávez, 2009). Lastly, a scholar may solely speak in her own voice, “as a mode of self-reflexive, cultural criticism” (Park-Fuller, 2000, p. 38).

These attempts at urban preservation were however inscribed into an urban landscape that had already been dramatically altered. In the first half of the 20th century alone, Bologna's city center had been subjected to the demolition of its medieval fortified walls, the modernist widening of several streets, the Fascist government's heavy intervention on the city's medieval layer, and lastly also extensive war bombing. In addition, in the 1960s and 1970s Bologna's urban planning schemes were not guided by criteria for defining what was worthy of preservation from the perspectives of local history and identity, but rather by the national political agenda of the Italian Communist Party, which presided over Bologna and showcased the city as an ideal model of leftist governance (De Pieri & Scrivano, 2004).

This is approximately $700,000,000.

Here I am obviously speaking of a very different kind of spatiality, in terms of setting, scale and the social inequalities that characterize its history and geography. Rather than being a contained space of urban renewal, Anzaldúa's (2007) borderland is a vast space of colonialist domination.

While this is beyond the scope of this article, a more systematic attempt to explore and nuance this tension should concern itself with the dialectic between the notions of gentrification and revitalization. Gentrification is associated with the “loss” of authenticity and social diversity brought about by the renovation, upscaling, commercialization, and overall stylization of formerly working-class and/or ethnic neighborhoods (Jacobs, 1961; Zukin, 2010). On the other hand, revitalization is usually associated with efforts to preserve, refurbish, and bring back to life former industrial or degraded areas for seemingly much more benign and community-oriented purposes. And, naturally, significant overlaps between these two processes have been observed and documented (cf. Gibson 2003). However, more needs to be said on how this dialectic may in fact cater to the constitution of urban spaces that are far more ambiguous and complex (cf. Makagon, 2010).

A pre-dinner drinking and socializing occasion that is fashionable among Italian young adults.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giorgia Aiello

Giorgia Aiello is a Lecturer in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds.