Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Starting from L'Aquila earthquake, a paraethnography of urban governance and a street ethnography reveal a descending path from the cranes of the current greatest European building site to the context-sensitive good life "improvisation" of alley's teenagers.

Paper long abstract

In the last decades, some authors consider the performing role of neoliberal capitalist system in creating and trying to impose times of crisis. This "capitalism of disaster" finds a very fertile ground in catastrophe-affected environment where destructive events are considered the crisis-generating factors, mainly regarding urban space and dwelling.

Starting from the case of L'Aquila earthquake, I will show how both emergency and reconstruction management assume bio-political forms addressed to a process of urban space neoliberalization. The combined effects of disaster management on outskirts and centre produce a new urban layout, where multitopic living practices replace a stubborn centripetism. It is around this paradox, undermining the downtown role and its regeneration, that reconstruction urban planning takes place.

A paraethnography of urban governance, following actors and agencies of technical expertise, traces the pathways that localize global development models in "ideas of city". In addition, a street ethnography fieldwork reveals how, in everyday practices, the "negative capacity" allows people to face the created suspension of urban landscape. There, I could participate to an alternative form of appropriation of downtown space that a teenagers group enacted, reworking destruction and emptiness into hip hop culture elements of rapping and writing.

Engaging with them meant a progressive change from a "dark anthropology" to an "anthropology of the good". Analyzing the intrinsic power of the "how one should live" reconstruction formula led to a descending path, from the cranes of the current greatest European building site to the context-sensitive good life "improvisation" of alley's teenagers.