Tuff City is an ethnographic history of urban renewal in the historic centre of Naples during the 1990s under the stewardship of the city’s first directly elected mayor, former communist Antonio Bassolino. Through the study of two major piazzas and a squatted centro sociale (social centre), the book explores the pivotal role of public space in the administration’s efforts to reorder and redefine a city that had hitherto been commonly regarded as an urban outcast. It thus sets out to investigate how changes to the built environment were, on the one hand, produced and publicly endorsed and, on the other, experienced and contested by different groups of people.  Understanding public space means grappling with the messy and perhaps ugly pluralism that constitutes urban life, rather than unwittingly confirming normative and institutional ideals about a ‘good’ (and, especially in the case of Naples, ‘well-behaved’) city.

The following extract is taken from the case study of DAMM located in the popular quarter of Montesanto.  As a local resident, I grew to appreciate the complex dynamics of the surrounding social milieu that some outside observers have hastily (mis)labelled ‘inner city’ or ‘working class’ and which local orthodox leftists had in the past dismissed as ‘lumpen’ and ‘pre-political’. Following the occupation of a three-storey building in 1995, the occupants of DAMM – a mix of local residents, students and cultural workers – sought to develop an alternative idea of public space through the self-management of an adjacent park and public escalator system that were built following the 1980 earthquake, but which had been left in a state of abandonment. This extract highlights a theme that lies at the heart of Tuff City, namely, how the politics of regeneration was continually stymied and reformulated through everyday uses of, and struggles over urban space.

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Unlike Piazza Plebiscito or Piazza Garibaldi, the Ventaglieri Park was seldom the focus of newspaper debates about public space. Its marginal location reduced the level of media interest. But on the rare occasions in which it did hit the headlines, comments bordered on the vitriolic. At the end of September 1997, the local press complained that the recently inaugurated escalators had become the favourite loitering place for gangs of local children and that the city council had done nothing to deter their misuse. A few days later, an editorial by the left-leaning intellectual Massimo Galluppi entitled ‘The Problem of a New Civic Consciousness: The Ventagliere Escalators’ appeared on the front page of Corriere del Mezzogiorno. Galluppi used the case to reflect on what he considered the city’s deep-rooted backwardness as well as to question the achievements of the Bassolino administration:

The ‘new’ Naples has not been able to assimilate the idea that besides public efficiency, individual discipline is necessary if we want to change the face of the city. From this point of view the episode of the escalators in Via Ventaglieri is the metaphor of a common destiny. In a city that has not recognized the bourgeois revolution and which has never possessed a bourgeoisie worthy of its name, the superficial hedonism [here Galluppi is referring to the administration’s promotion of leisure events such as those organized in Piazza Plebiscito] constitutes an obstacle to the formation of a modern civic consciousness, which needs to be created if one accepts the idea that the use of force is necessary but not sufficient to bring the terrible children of Montesanto to reason. It is a long and difficult job, which somebody sooner or later will have to do. Who and how, for the moment, nobody knows. (Corriere del Mezzogiorno, 1 October 1997)

The same words, ‘terrible children’, were used to describe the climbers of the Montagna del Sale [art installation] in Piazza Plebiscito. But in Montesanto no attempt was made to ‘civilize’ the transgressors. Galluppi claimed that nobody was seeking to bring these children to ‘reason’. It was perhaps fitting that he made no reference to DAMM. According to DAMM, the playful appropriation of the escalators was considered a means of making sense of an ‘alien’ structure in the neighbourhood. Through its everyday experience with children, DAMM mocked the administration’s words of commitment to young Neapolitans. Shortly prior to election in 1993 Bassolino had declared that he would personally oversee a ‘Children of Europe Project’, which would aim to ‘take [children] off the streets, send them to school and fill their free time with sports and cultural activities’ (Il Mattino, 3 December 1993). DAMM turned this idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ places on its head:

 They declare that their objective is to remove children from the streets. For the moment they remove the street with controls and automobiles, tourists and flower boxes, walls and gates, police and vigili urbani. . . . But every day, children regain terrain in the city. They require spaces and want to decide on their own how to use them. (Leaflet entitled ‘Children at risk don’t exist’, spring 1999)

In sharp contrast to Bassolino’s vision of young people as good citizens in the making […], children were here seen to actively and autonomously redefine public space. Indeed, their appropriations of urban space potentially held the most politically potent commentaries on the organization of the city. One can sense in the position of DAMM (or at least those involved with the after-school activities) the influence of the late British anarchist Colin Ward, who gave a lecture at the Mensa dei Bambini Proletari in 1997 and whose book The Child in the City (1978) was translated into Italian by a DAMM activist in 1999. Ward sees the child’s use of space as the only true international culture but also as one which is continually ignored, excluded and regulated. Despite restraints imposed by planners and local authorities, children will nevertheless continue to adapt the urban realm: ‘A city that is really concerned with the needs of its young will make the whole environment accessible to them, because whether invited to or not, they are going to use the whole environment’. By ridiculing the Bassolinian idea of Naples as a ‘city of children’, DAMM exposed the glibness of public pronouncements about cultivating a civic consciousness among young Neapolitans. For all the talk of a common project, children were continually separated into the compliant and the incorrigible, the vulnerable and the disruptive, which recalled the age-old binary conceptualization of children as angels or devils but at the same time mirrored the traditional dualistic representation of Neapolitan society that was now increasingly articulated in terms of the civil and uncivil. Indeed, Massimo Galuppi appears, almost cathartically, to lay the burden of two hundred years of failed civilization upon the shoulders of a few errant ten-year-olds. Sliding down the escalators backwards, they only further distance themselves from an imminent citizenship that is already way beyond their grasp.

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Nick Dines lived and worked in Naples for seven years. Formerly a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, he currently lives in Rome, where he holds teaching positions in urban anthropology and social history at a number of Italian and U.S. universities.

Tuff City was published by Berghahn Books in February 2012.