Paper Short Abstract:

While Prato’s Chinatown is still seen by many as a place of tension and decay after four decades of constant Chinese migration, groups of K-pop and anime fans, as well as language and food enthusiasts use their skills, knowledge, and networks to change the status quo.

Paper Abstract:

Starting from Abdelmaliq al Simone’s idea that people in cities form a human infrastructure that connects individuals, institutions, spaces, and processes that make the city work at any given time (2021, 2004), I look at how cosmopolitan consumers of East Asian pop culture deploy to transform tensions generated by migration in Prato, an Italian city next to Florence.

Macrolloto Zero, a former industrial neighborhood, was the recipient of massive Chinese immigration in the 1990s and the 2000s. The neighborhood wears a spatial and social stigma (Waqcuant, 2007), seen as a decaying urban space.

Pieces of urban human infrastructure have been deployed over the years to work towards social inclusion and incorporation of migrants in urban life – social centers, schools, cultural associations, religious institutions, and political actors. Enthusiasts of East Asian pop culture may not seem significant.

After a year of ethnographic work in Prato’s Chinatown, I argue that due to the increasing popularity of East Asian cinema and the music industry in the past decade, the number of fans in search of a place that connects them to the culture they admire created a new consumption demand for Chinatown.

In this paper I look at how some of these enthusiasts use their skills, knowledge, and networks to form associations, organize events, and lobby institutions, thus creating pieces of human infrastructure deployed to renegotiate the spatial and social stigma. They turn the “dirty stinky China” picture painted by anti-immigration voices into the “cool Asia next door”.