Paper short abstract:

The paper will present snapshots of the ethnography of Corvetto, focusing on the relation between processes of beautification and monstrification.I will show strategies to erase the disturbing aesthetics of the present examining the politics of wanted/unwanted in producing the district of the future

Paper long abstract:

With the term hauntology a long sociological and philosophical tradition had analyzed the spectral presence of a past that haunts the present, in today's particular temporal, historical, and ontological disjuncture that challange the possibility of thinking about the future - what Mark Fisher called the “nostalgia for lost futures” (2014).

My presentation would show a specific fragment of an ethnography of beautification processes and unwanted policies in a Milan’s southern periphery, the neighborhood of Corvetto. Highly stigmatized and criminalized, in the last 5-6 years the district has changed significantly. In fact, a new image, linked to the next Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, is being proposed as an explicit destigmatization strategy to present Corvetto as a “new creative neighborhood”.

If we still find ghosts and monsters of its past, in the official narrative of this neighborhood there is anything but discourses on its charming and wonderful future. Corvetto is now told as “the future in Milan”, well embodied by the landscape of cranes that surrounds this urban area, but today its present disturbs.

If beautification acts erasing the disturbing visuality of the neighborhood, my argument is that the specific imagination conveyed by the normative ‘aesthetics of the future’ operates through an act of futuricide, or rather a slow erasure of possible futures (Fisher 2014). The intervention will look at the consequences and the materiality of the proposal of a single, hegemonic future based on a dominant urban imaginary that allows no alternatives for those who lives in this urban space.