Paper short abstract:

The Italian periferia is a central site from where we can test tensions between politics and planning in post-war Italy. In my paper I discuss how urban social movements have differently engaged the Milanese periphery, its tensions and contradictions across a long term period.

Paper long abstract:

In post war Italy, architects and planners had been engaged in the conceptualisation of a modern future for the city that is most visible in the creation of new neighbourhoods in the urban periphery. Drawing on my own fieldwork in a neighbourhood in the Milanese periphery, I explore, through visual, archival and ethnographic methods, how the idea of future proposed by modern architecture has been “emptied” in the course of the 1970s. This space has been occupied by a number of different forms of imagination of politics itself involving recurring ideas and insinuation of corruption such as that of “rito ambrosiano” to refer to the bending of planning regulation by corrupted politicians and developers. I propose that this void can still be assumed as a new creative laboratory for a future oriented anthropology of planning and activism that could intervene in the making of the city.