Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the place-making strategies through which residents of the Bisagno Valley, a postindustrial periphery of Genoa, Italy, seek to shape a vernacular heritage and to promote new forms of dwelling to resist a top-down redevelopment agenda.

Paper long abstract:

What is the process through which residents of a postindustrial periphery labeled as a "worthless landscape" (Walley 2013: 129) and slanted for redevelopment strive to establish and legitimize local "heritage" and "beauty" to protect their neighborhood? What are their place-making strategies, and how do their spatial affects emerge and become formalized as a tool of struggle? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies through which residents of the Bisagno Valley, a postindustrial periphery of Genoa, Italy, seek to shape a vernacular heritage and to promote new forms of dwelling to resist a top-down "progress" agenda entailing the creation of shopping malls, big box stores, and parking lots in the valley. In delving into how the spatial affect of Bisagno Valley activists articulates with their social trajectories, concerns, and challenges, this paper also explores how the political and cultural struggle intrinsic to resisting development articulates with the normative aestheticization of cityscapes that is typical of neoliberal urbanism.