Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of urban repair by entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in Gela, a Sicilian city marked by pollution and unauthorized urban development. It reads repair of the downtown as a way to redeem Gela’s stigma, reinvent its past, shape subjectivities, create potential futures

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores practices of urban repair by entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in Gela, a seaside city in Sicily. In the 1960s, a large petrochemical plant developed in Gela, conveying promises of modernization into a largely peasant society. The plant shut down in 2014, causing a surge in unemployment, emigration, deaths from cancer, the absence of future and a stigma on pollution and unauthorized urban development. Considered among the unsightly cities in Sicily, Gela is characterized by incomplete sewage systems, unfinished buildings, lack of running water, industrial ruins, abandoned historical downtown and archaeological sites.

My ethnography focuses on entrepreneurs who repair buildings and streets of the downtown to open restaurants hoping for the development of tourism. Their repair is an actualization of a local nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial golden age rather than a recovering of spaces’ original function. This repair is a reinvention to redeem Gela’s industrial past and link the city to the imaginary of Sicily, based on artistic beauties, sea and good food. It embodies the gaze of a global tourist that perhaps will never reach Gela and uses it to redeem the city from its role in the symbolic map of Sicily. This repair connects place-making and self-making and is made in opposition to Gela imagined “normal” inhabitants who stereotypically disregard public spaces. By intertwining the aesthetics of the city (beauty) and the ethics of healing spaces (goodness), these repair practices turn private business into an act on the commons and, thus, create potential futures.