With the rise of cultural tourism in the 1980s, many Genoese, too, became more eager to exercise their own urbanity in novel ways. They became willing to look at their own city through new eyes, consuming it the way they had learned to consume the sites and sights of Florence, Venice, and Rome. As the nexus of place, memory, and self-identity (Malpas 1999: 176–181) became more prevalent, many of them sought out new ways to enjoy their city. What drove them was not just the pursuit of leisure, but also the pride they had long been denied as residents of an “ugly” industrial town as well as the keen curiosity for their own cultural and historical “roots.” Yet even though the new urban model introduced in Genoa pivoted on the production of visitability as a source of revenues (Dicks 2004), its material benefits were not limited to the municipal coffers, the deep pockets of developers, and those of the administrators who earned kickbacks in return for lucrative contracts. Instead, they were also reaped by considerably smaller, and largely middle-class, players. The purpose of this book is to explore the lives and experiences of those middle-class Genoese who, seeking to escape consistently high unemployment rates, invented self-employment venues for themselves: the walking-tour guides, the street antique dealers, the artisans, the small businesses owners, and the festival organizers and participants who creatively established ways of making a living in the shade of a broader revitalization process.
Genoa’s Creative Class
Succumbing to the global fascination with Richard Florida’s tenets, in recent years Genoa’s administration utilized his measurements to quantify intangibles such as “talent,” “innovation,” “diversity,” and “tolerance toward homosexuals.” The municipality thus classified its city’s “creative index” at “23.99%,” claiming that Genoa is the “second-most creative city in Italy after Rome.”10 Yet what the municipality failed to mention is that the differences between Genoa’s “creative class” and its U.S. counterparts as prospected by Florida are remarkable. First and foremost, in spite of its newly found cultural vibrancy—its symposia, its festivals, its theaters, and its public events—Genoa is not a city to proactively attract or nurture a highly qualified, talented, and creative workforce. As a matter of fact, for much of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, Genoa has suffered a deep demographic decrease: though, in 1971, Genoa’s population peaked at over 800,000 and was expected to reach one million in a matter of years, by 2012 it had shrunk back to 580,000: that is, its 1920s level.11 This change was largely due to a steep decline in birth rates as well as to an emigration that often takes the form of a brain drain. While early twentieth-century Genoese emigrants usually belonged to the peasantry and the proletariat, over the last forty years educated individuals have become much more likely to move to other Italian cities or even abroad in order to find a job that matches their qualifications (see also Gabaccia 2000). This is largely due to the limited opportunities locally available in the university, the scientific and high-tech sector, museums, the arts, and the media, where the few jobs available are frequently co-opted through the clientelistic logics of political parties as well as through the nepotism and the cronyism of powerful individuals and families. Hence, what I explore in this book is a creative class that is in many ways residual, in that it frequently consists of those individuals who, often for lack of better prospects, engage in creative practices as a way to support themselves through forms of self-employment that may require a considerable cultural capital but only a shoestring budget. In spite of the professional gratifications (and in some cases the prestige) afforded to them by their entrepreneurship, the majority of the individuals featured in this ethnography live hand to mouth.12 Many—though certainly not all of them—are women: a social category that is traditionally marginal to Italy’s job market. Put at a disadvantage by patriarchal gender politics, women often have to think creatively in order to find ways to earn a living; their flexibility and their aesthetic and affective expertise make them ideally suited for participation in a neoliberal economy of experience (Freeman 2014). Yet Genoa’s creative sector is also a product of the precarity (Butler 2009) that began in the early 1970s, hurling many of Genoa’s blue- and white-collar (and mostly male) workers into a state of redundancy and vulnerability. Additionally, as I argue in Chapter 1, Genoa’s creative sector is a child of deeply ingrained social inequities that, with their corollary of cronyism, nepotism, and clientelism, curtail the professional hopes of highly educated and talented individuals. Last but not least, it is also a close relative of the precariousness that, with the labor reforms of 2003, maximized the flexibility of a large share of the Italian workforce while minimizing its rights (Mole 2011; Muehlebach 2013), leading some to envision self-employment as preferable to the vagaries of contract work. Yet, as a frequent middle- and working-class strategy in the face of unemployment, the small-scale entrepreneurship of the creative class described in this book is not new, either. The industrial crisis of the 1970s induced many a Genoese to start a diminutive business to make ends meet. Laid-off workers would open hole-in-the wall stores, often subsidizing them with their severance package: the layoffs and the high unemployment rates that began in the 1970s brought about a proliferation of newsstands, dairy and coffee shops, tobacconists, and the like. If many Genoese always regarded self-employment as the last resort, however, what has changed since the late 1980s is the nature of their businesses. What stands in stark contrast is the profusion of tangible though highly symbolic cultural goods and the intangible and equally symbolic experiences that are being sold in contemporary Genoa—from handmade pottery to ghost tours. Not only does such production fulfill the requirements of a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004) where more and more Italian cities occupy a peculiar place as objects of cultural consumption, but it also follows the increasingly pervasive substitution of wage labor with a constellation of immaterial labor practices spawned by the commodification of heritage (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 144). It also responds to the skills, experiences, and sensibilities of individuals who are themselves adept consumers of urban cultures, and who, in producing and selling symbolic goods and experiences, are exercising their agency in shaping the urban experience of their publics.
A Confession and the Plan of the Book
Just like Baudelaire’s flâneur, I, too, cherish losing myself in the crowd, soaking in the impressions of the urban everyday even as I seek to track the experiences of those around me. I do this for pleasure, and I do this as a professional ethnographer. This passion of mine accounts for the itinerant, multi-sited (Marcus 1998; Peterson 2010) quality of this book, with several of its chapters presenting a different creative community through their experiences and the kind of urban imaginaries they seek to shape. While this ethnography does not claim to exhaust the range of creative individuals and communities commercializing aesthetic and cultural experiences in Genoa, it seeks to offer a few glimpses into this city’s nature as a fluid assemblage coming into being through the work of a variety of actors as well as a plethora of events (Farías 2010: 15). The temporal depth and the emergent quality of several of the ethnographies in this book stem from my own biography as a diasporic Italian. Genoa is not only my field site; it is also my hometown. Like many fellow Genoese, I left Genoa in 1991 to pursue an academic career from which I would have otherwise been precluded. This is why my account of the transformations in how middle-class Genoese experienced their city initially unfolds against the backdrop of my own formative years as a local. As the narration approaches the decade of the 1990s, however, my attention to Genoa’s urban processes becomes a diasporic gaze whose discontinuity kindles a keen curiosity for the transformations at work not just in Genoa’s cityscape, but also and above all the everyday of its residents. This is where the “ethnographic I” begins to blend with