Naked Life, or the Vibrancy of Margins
In our cities there exist marginal areas inhabited by an invisible population which cannot be classified into a sociological category, and which raises the spectre of non-recognition in the eyes of the ‘official’ city. This phenomenon is not the result of shortcomings in social regulation, but an integral part of the contemporary metropolis.
Aldo Bonomi
image by Sisto Giriodi – campaign à la sauvette at the Teksid and Michelin buildings straight after diuse in 1986.
Living on the margins
Lucas works on one of the countless building sites which dot Milan’s endless cityscape, while Anna works for one of the many cooperatives contracted to clean the city’s major hospitals. Lucas and Anna are Romanian, EU citizens with regular jobs, and could be taken as a symbol for successful integration. But for years they have lived in a shack in a large abandoned area on the northern outskirts of Milan. They can’t find accommodation to rent and have ended up trapped there.
Giovanni, on the other hand, comes from the south of Italy, and is a young engineering graduate. He has been lucky – his first job is on a temporary contract, but a prestigious one: he works in the laboratories of a large Milanese company. However, he does not have a house of his own: he will be staying in a boarding house for workers until the end of his contract.
When planning the city of the future, city living must no longer be constructed purely in function to the identity of places, but must represent a space for connecting flows and spaces
The modest stories of Lucas and Anna, and Giovanni blend into the background noise of the metropolis. Yet in my view they are emblematic of the problems of city life which are unfolding before our eyes. Milan has always been at the forefront, as a city able, sponge-like, to absorb and meld diversity and migratory flows in the context of the economic sphere. In the world of work. Nowadays, this work-based model of inclusion is no longer sufficient. Outside the workplace, for those arriving in the metropolis, perhaps without resources or relationships, the barriers to inclusion are getting higher and higher.
So what has changed? Why is a city accustomed to coping with major processes of change finding it difficult to assimilate the human, cultural and economic flows that like a magnet, it attracts, incorporates and radiates out into the surrounding area?
What has happened is that the city, or rather its social body, has shattered. Like other big cities Milan has opened up to the process of globalization. Human flows, but also economic and cultural movements, capital and work in transit, travel across the urban space, shaping it and transforming the bodies and identities of those who live there.
It is as if the city has turned outwards, projected onto the dimension of global competition and neglecting the equilibrium of its internal social cohesion.
Political representation, after the shake-up of Tangentopoli (the corruption scandal of the 1980s) has taken shelter in a role akin to building administrator for the metropolis, in some way giving up on its most important function, that of standing between flows and places. The forms of community that maintained the quality of life on a neighbourhood level, and formed a kind of protective membrane around the individual, have begun to dissolve.
The very social make-up of the city, which has radically mutated along a new axis of division, can be captured in the antimony between the concepts of naked life and life naked. This radical rupture in social patterns is splintering the way of life people were accustomed to.
Within the city there is a form of top-down globalization, the globalization of innovators, the cutting edge in terms of technological progress; then there is a bottom-up form of globalization, that of the multitudes with their very basic needs for food, clothes and a place to live. On the one hand naked life refers to those ultramodern phenomena which increasingly rely on intellectual capabilities and communications skills to produce goods, business and events: a tertiary elite which springs from the intellectual professions and the world of finance, but also incorporates the problem of the precarious professional status of young intellectuals.
It is as if the city has turned outwards, projected onto the dimension of global competition and neglecting the equilibium of its internal social cohesion
On the other hand there is life naked: the world of those who use their bodies to fulfil needs more strictly linked to material life. In terms of employment, it is the sphere of the poor tertiary sector, which in Milan, like in all the world’s major cities, has exploded. In Milan, immigrants, including society’s most downtrodden outcasts, the Roma people, have come to symbolise the problem. They are the image of another city, an invisible city which grows, parallel to that of the glossy new professions and the jet set. But now this hidden dimension is starting to exert a real presence in the eyes of the city’s original inhabitants. Indeed between the opposing poles of naked life and life naked, it is the intermediate sphere, the people of the former Fordist city, who are under pressure. The class which comprises shopkeepers, technicians and office workers, but also what remains of the working class, namely those who draw their identity from their attachment to areas of the city, now feel threatened by the presence of the new population flows, and feel that their very relationship with the city is under threat, with access to living space becoming increasingly plural and complicated, as I observed in a recent study. These are the social groups that most directly experience the problems involved in relating to the ‘foreign’ dimension, and the cultural disorientation that ensues. This is also due to the fact that these groups have had the most direct experience of the crisis which struck the traditional residential model, which comprised a mixture of family-based ownership individualism, and the welfarist model of large agglomerates of council housing, regulating both the rental and purchase markets. The former has now been threatened by the pincer of price increases and mortgage instability, while the latter has been hit by the fiscal crisis of the state and supplanted by the rise of the market.
The housing question, the right to a place to live, is the arena where the destruction of the former inclusive model is most evident. In our ultramodern globalized world, Heidegger’s old adage that “man first dwells, then builds, then thinks about the landscape”, has been turned on its head. Now man “thinks about the landscape, then builds it and then inhabits it”.
In a city of flows and networks, in which community and neighbourhood are no longer inherited from the past, but constructed in the present, a new approach to city living can only come from the ability of residents and institutions to come up with a vision of the future from within the ongoing metamorphosis.
The alternative is the spread of the “micro-banlieue” model of individual buildings, neighbourhoods, disused areas, little enclaves characterized by a way of life that greatly recalls the lost lands of the Republic cited by French historian Georges Bensoussan. The common denominator of such lost lands is the perception of the loss of sovereignty of civil rules and forms of coexistence. These are “ghost districts”, which are widely perceived to be places where “nightmares have taken the place of dreams, and danger and violence are more prevalent than elsewhere”. The risk is that the city splits into non-communicating worlds, each guided by the desire to control its own social space, and dominated by sentiments of “mixophobia”.
Heidegger’s old adage that “man first dwells, then builds, then thinks about the landscape”, has been turned on its head. Now man “thinks about the landscape, then builds it and then inhabits it”
The challenge, however, lies not in reviving outdated forms of welfare or nostalgia for the past. This should be kept in mind. It would be a return to models based on an industrial and social set-up that no longer exists. The order of the day is to create a new conception of integration based on the ability to forge relations and networks between communities. We need to begin constructing a “society of immigration” based on fundamental, shared rules. Leaving behind the institutionalization of separation, so acutely represented by the human rights anathema of the Roma camps, the only way forward is to create hybrid spaces where marginalization and resentment can be overcome.
So what is the crux of the matter today? The most pressing need is that of intervening to accompany the development of an intermediate urban society capable of mediating relations between flows and places, and weaving connective tissue between two groups of social innovators: the top-down innovators of the neo-bourgeoisie, which risks becoming overly detached from the local area, and neglecting any kind of responsibility to the area; and the bottom-up innovators, the social group that on a molecular level attempts to repair the tears in the fabric of the local community, using the needle and thread of artificial, proximity-based networks.
In this situation it is therefore a priority to increase the number of places and institutions engaged in reconstructing an intermediate sphere capable of taking on the challenge posed by flows and the people within them, and the places inhabited by those under the “curse” of the short-range network, the local dimension. It is also vitally important to avoid the onset of potential civil conflict on a molecular level, between the original residents of neighbourhoods and villages, and the migrants that by choice or necessity find themselves catapulted into the urban periphery, with both groups attempting to reconstruct their own community spaces, applying codes of blood, land and religion to fence off vital spaces.
When planning the city of the future, city living must no longer be constructed purely in function to the identity of places, but must represent a space for connecting flows and spaces.
Because without a genuine form of integration, beyond the sphere of work, as has been the case up till now, it would be fatal to allow boundaries and internal divides to continue to multiply, with foreign residents staying very much foreign, isolated and seeking to replicate their own original cultural codes.
We need to bring together the social experience accrued by the various elements of the social composition involved in the theme of city living over the years, from the troubled dimension of migrants and micro-banlieues to the equally complex sphere of the transitory habits of the globetrotting managers working for the big transnational companies in Milan. It is time for the charitable bank foundations, the property developers, the neo-bourgeois flows, the tertiary sector – basically the neo-bourgeoisie that has developed within the changing metropolis in the last ten years – to work with the institutions to tackle the issue of city living, to create a starting point for planning the artificial community of the city of the future.
The dimension of capitalism based on networks and cohesion represents the key to reconstructing new forms of social relations. The challenge lies in forging an urban conscience capable of opening up the city. The concept of community has become a spectre, in the sense that it no longer exists, but also in the form of a nightmarish vision: a community that rejects diversity.
it is therefore a priority to increase the number of places and institutions engaged in reconstructing an intermediate sphere capable of taking on the challenge posed by flows and the people within them, and the places inhabited by those under the “curse” of the short-range network, the local dimension
Encampments, shanty towns and micro-banlieues all arise from the exacerbated contradiction of the metropolis that attracts a global workforce but to date has done little to guarantee the creation of a new form of citizenship that responds to the major global changes the city is experiencing.
Milan, a city which is getting more and more global in terms of its ability to attract flows, is much less so when it comes to mediating the impact of this on the daily lives of its inhabitants. This is a contradiction that characterizes all the major metropolitan areas in the world, but is more glaringly obvious in Milan due to the impact that the size of flows and the process of globalization have had on the city.
Amongst the background noise of the metropolis, cries of anguish tend to get lost, and are often not heard by those only with an ear to big business and important property developments. However this is not a form of physical or topological invisibility. Quite the opposite: many of the conflicts between the inhabitants who enjoy inclusion, and those present living in a condition of exclusion, frequently spring from the former perceiving the latter as a disproportionate, almost intrusive physical presence. Evictions, neighbourhood committees targeting Roma encampments, and shopkeepers protesting against unauthorized street vendors, are situations which often fulfil the need to exorcise and banish to the shadows of invisibility those who remind the ‘official’ city that in the current circumstances, it too is at risk. The phenomenon of invisibility that we refer to regards the lack of representation and representatives of a part of the city that has a presence but does not produce politics.
We only tend to do something about these lives on the margin when there is a tsunami, an earthquake or a war, or when they give rise to molecular forms of civil war, such as the arson attacks on the Roma camp in the town of Opera outside Milan. Globalization has catapulted these people onto our doorsteps: the banlieues are not only in Paris now, and the favelas, the informal, subsistence economies that represent one form of modern life, no longer exist only in Bombay or Sao Paolo, but right in the centre of this city.
