Paper short abstract:

This is a research carried out in the framework of a comparative ethnographic project on the consequences of deindustrialization in Mumbai and in Sesto San Giovanni. It concerns the deconstruction of the role of industrial labour and the metamorphosis of the declining working class neighborhood.

Paper long abstract:

This is a research carried out in the framework of a comparative ethnographic project on the consequences of deindustrialization in Mumbai (India) and in Sesto San Giovanni (Italy). The two cities are going through a large-scale deindustrialization process, which has been conpounded in the mid-80s with the gradual shutting down of the main urban large-scale factories and an increasing loss of jobs. The deconstruction of the social role of industrial labour has had similar outcomes for both Sesto and Mumbai's workers: a biographical fragmentation which make it extremely difficult for them to still recognize themselves as workers; a decline in the male worker's own concept of masculinity; a sense of powerlessness due to their inability to change their surrounding reality; a difficulty to recognize places once familiar but now radically different and increasingly alien. A sense of dispossession that is linked to the idea of the end of one world and the resulting "collapse of the operating handles". The consequences of deindustrialization are also visible in the metamorphosis of the declining working class neighborhoods, called "chawls" in Mumbai and "Falck village" in Sesto, where recent urban renewal has outlined a new skyline, the mark of a new type of urbanization.