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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on absent timespaces in the form of missing and silenced histories, unrealised futures, and unmaterialised cities. It explores their role in shaping the vertiginous experience of a city and in producing a sense of loss and confusion in its inhabitants.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on the role of absences and how they shape the vertiginous experience of people living in Latina, in Central Italy. I focus on absences in the form of missing and silenced histories, unrealised futures, and unmaterialised cities. Latina was built in 1932 with the name of Littoria by the fascist regime. With the end of the dictatorship, the city was re-named Latina and underwent substantial changes. In the 1950s, Latina was included in a development fund for the South of Italy, which brought significant industrial developments to the area, followed by a decline of the industrial sector once the program ended. Both events were referred to, during my fieldwork, as illusions, having launched the city towards a modern future that never materialised. Moreover, given its relatively recent foundation in 1932, Latina was often referred to as “a young city with no history”, while carrying the weight of a short and contested past, often silenced. Here, I focus on the affective charges exuded by these absent timespaces: as missing or silenced pasts and unrealised futures, and as the defeated potentialities of cities that never materialised. My interlocutors were caught in vertiginous reiterations of these multiple latent cities, which unsettled their sense of belonging, by disrupting the city’s temporal and spatial boundaries. I explore the ways in which these absent timespaces and vertiginous trajectories define the city’s existence, while at the same time also disrupting it, producing a widespread sense of loss and confusion among its inhabitants.