Tuscany beyond Tuscany | Giovannoni by DIDA

giulio giovannoni

Tuscany beyond Tuscany

Critical

Rethinking the City from the Periphery

CTS Tuscan

Studies

Critical

CTS Tuscan

Studies

Cultural production on Tuscany is rich and consolidated, making the region a stimulating area of investigation regarding cultural, political, and social dynamics that underlie the construction of this renowned space. In the collective imagination, Tuscany often symbolizes harmony between humans and their natural environment, as the embodiment of a millennial synthesis between nature and culture, or represents the quintessential fulcrum of the so-called spirit of the Renaissance. This idealized vision, however, does not account for its cultural, social, and material complexity. The purpose of the Critical Tuscan Studies series is to highlight such complexity through research that advances the theoretical debate on Tuscan space, history, society and culture in original and thought-provoking ways. This interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed series welcomes contributions on the region of Tuscany concerning different chronological periods and across a range of disciplines, including Architecture, Landscape Studies, Urban Planning, Literature, Cinema, Linguistics, Geography, History, Sociology, Tourism Studies, Art History, Philosophy and Politics, among others.

Critical

CTS Tuscan

Studies

Critical

CTS Tuscan

Studies

Editors Giulio Giovannoni University of Florence Silvia Ross University College Cork Editorial Board Mario Bevilacqua University of Florence Marco Cenzatti University of California at Berkeley Francesco Collotti University of Florence Dario Gaggio University of Michigan Richard Ingersoll Syracuse University of Florence Anna Lambertini University of Florence Medina Lasansky Cornell University Mirella Loda University of Florence Saverio Mecca University of Florence Luca Somigli University of Toronto Mariella Zoppi University of Florence

giulio giovannoni

Tuscany beyond Tuscany Rethinking the City from the Periphery

This book is the result of the studies carried out in the Department of Architecture University of Florence. The volumes are subject to a qualitative process of acceptance and evaluation based on peer review, which is entrusted to the Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture (DIDA) with blind review system. Furthermore, all publications are available on an open-access basis on the Internet, which not only favors their diffusion, but also fosters an effective evaluation from the entire international scientific community. Illustration credits Alinari Archives, Florence 49 (RCB-F-004850-0000) | Lorenzo Antinori 99 | Archivio Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena 44, 45 | Archivio di Stato di Firenze 16, 20, 31, 32 | Author’s collection of old postcards and prints 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 26, 35, 47, 50, 52, 53, 69, 100, 101 | Giacomo Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico della Toscana (Florence 1975) 19 | Renato Biasutti, La casa rurale nella Toscana (Bologna 1928) 14 | Bing Maps 72, 73 | Giuseppe Boffito and Attilio Mori, eds., Firenze nelle vedute e nelle piante (Firenze, 1926) 64 | Walter Christaller, Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Darmstadt 1980) 65 | Comunità delle Piagge 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88 | Carlo Cresti, La Toscana dei Lorena: politica del territorio e architettura (Florence 1987) 36 | Cultura contadina in Toscana (Florence 1983) 22 | Google Maps 21, 66, 102, 104 | Shiva Khoshtinat 91, 92, 93, 94 | Museo Fisogni book cover | Parrocchia di San Luca al Vingone 90 | Massimo Preite 71 | Ricordi di Architettura, IV (Firenze 1881) 40 | Audrey Wells, Under the Tuscan Sun, poster (2003) 1 | Wikimedia Commons 4, 5, 9, 13, 15, 29, 34, 42, 43, 46, 109 | Frank L. Wright, The Living City (New York, 1958) 68 | 123rf.com 25. All other images and drawings are owned by the author. book cover Gasoline Pump

progetto grafico

didacommunicationlab Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Susanna Cerri Gaia Lavoratti

Stampato su carta di pura cellulosa Fedrigoni Arcoset

table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction 9 Rethinking Tuscan Landscape History

Utopia And Dystopia in Tuscan Spatial Narratives

Fantasy Restoration and Identity Building in Tuscany

Politics of Landscape Purification

From Polycentrism to the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Dispersed Centralityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The Social Life of Tuscan Peripheries: A Photographic Survey

109

The Social Life Florence Gas Stations

125

Rethinking the City from the Periphery

153

Bibliography 159 Glossary

167

Index

173

acknowledgements

This book is the fruit of several years’ research during which I was able to benefit from discussions and interactions with many colleagues both in Italy and overseas. Although the responsibility for what is written is exclusively mine, many people have inspired my work in various ways. The first acknowledgement goes to the students that over the years frequented my courses at the University of Florence: “Designing the Urbanized Countryside”, “Inhabiting Modernity: Everyday Life and Urban Design in Modernist Mass-housing Neighborhoods”, “Rethinking Non-Places”, “Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Urban Space”, “Analisi del territorio e degli insediamenti”, and “Gestione urbana”. Their active and enthusiastic participation as well as their contributions to discussions and exercises were on several occasions a source of inspiration. Among my ‘senior’ students I wish to thank in particular Olivia Gori and Robert Kane who incorporated many of the stimuli provided by my courses, developing theses of an exceptional standard. Some colleagues have had a crucial influence on my research. A very special thank you goes to Margaret Crawford with whom I had the privilege of interacting throughout the years, from my first research experience at the Graduate School of Design in Harvard in 2006, to my more recent academic ventures at the College of Environmental Design in Berkeley in 2013. Our numerous conversations and my participation in her courses: “Rethinking Suburban History” and “Histories and Theories of Urban Intervention” opened up completely new research perspectives for me. A heartfelt thank you also goes to Marco Cenzatti, with whom I shared many of the reflections present in this book and who always provided me with precious advice and suggestions. My view of the periphery and settlement dispersion benefited greatly from a period of scholarship which took place between 2007 and 2009 at the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. From this stimulating and extremely productive research phase I remember with particular affection and gratitude Marsha Schachtel. This work is also an attempt to go beyond disciplinary borders. It has greatly benefited from the fertile interdisciplinary collaboration carried out with Silvia Ross on themes centered on Tuscany and urban space. The international conference “Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on

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Urban Space” and the eponymous interdisciplinary course that we have been running for three years at the Department of Architecture in the University of Florence have provided fundamental moments of meeting and exchange between colleagues of varying disciplines. Other than Silvia, with whom I discussed on numerous occasions many of the themes of this research, I am particularly indebted to Medina Lasansky, Dario Gaggio, Andrea Mecacci, Richard Ingersoll, Davide Papotti and Mirella Loda. I extend a heartfelt thank you also to those of my colleagues at the Department of Architecture in the University of Florence who contributed to creating an ambitious and stimulating work environment, beginning with director Saverio Mecca, who literally revolutionized the life of the Department. In the international course which began a few years ago, and generally within the Department of Architecture I found much inspiration and was able to present and discuss many ideas that are developed within this book. For this I express my gratitude to Raimondo Innocenti, Giuseppe de Luca, Giorgio Galletti, Leonardo Chiesi, Raffaele Paloscia, Francesco Collotti, Giuseppe Ridolfi, Giacomo Pirazzoli, Paolo Costa, Francesco Alberti, Fabio Lucchesi, Davide Fanfani, Anna Lambertini, Antonella Valentini and Chiara Agnoletti. This book would not have been possible without the outstanding skill and availability of Susanna Cerri, Matteo Zambelli and Gaia Lavoratti, of the Laboratorio Immagine e Comunicazione, in the editing phase of the book and that of the ‘Critical Tuscan Studies’ series. Rachele Ferrari has made an essential contribution in the revision of drafts and assistance in the preparation of the glossary, as well as in the drafting of some of the final drawings. Special thanks also to Martina O’Leary, who assisted me with exceptional professionalism and patience in the final copy-edit and indexing of the book. The greatest thanks, though, go to Laura, Lucrezia and Vittoria, who with infinite patience and love accompanied me throughout this journey.

introduction

When, some years ago, I began to teach Urbanism courses at the University of Florence, I considered it worthwhile to begin dealing with the discourse on city outskirts. After all, the historic city center and the dense nineteenth-century city seemed to function according to their needs, but the neighborhoods of the outskirts appeared to be an authentic source of social, environmental and urban problems waiting to be solved. I was not yet aware that my society, culture and academic environment had conditioned my view. The charm of the hilly landscape, and the cultural and symbolic weight of Tuscany’s historic city centers prevented me from objectively observing the reality that is so far from the established idea of the city. The outskirts and the urban settlements of the plains were for me a dystopian world that needed to be managed through ‘normalization’. Now, after thirteen years of fieldwork, my point of view has become overturned. Today I see the periphery as a great cultural, social and architectural laboratory, experimenting with new urban forms. This shift in perspective required a double move. First, I needed to go beyond the myth of the old city, both for its inadequacy in its management of problems and for its ideological content. Then, I had to adopt an empirical approach in my study of the outskirts that was free from cultural conditioning. There is no doubt that the center and the outskirts are two sides of the same coin. Our inability to understand and design the ‘new city’ largely stems from the symbolic and cultural weight of the ‘old city’; if we continue to hold on to our entrenched notions of the latter, we cannot understand the numerous opportunities offered by the former. The center/periphery debate is not only a dialectic of old versus new. It is also a place of exchange and conflict between both inherited and new urban identities, and between the interests of the elite and the demands of the most disadvantaged populations. Surrounding these dynamics, important issues regarding spatial injustice arise. Albeit in varying degrees in time and space, the center/periphery dialectic characterizes many or possibly all urban systems. However, such polarization is particularly strong in Tuscany and goes hand in hand with the high/low, hill/plain juxtaposition. That is to say, this dichotomy is certainly due to the pervasive and influential ideals of the historical city and hilly land-

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

scape. This image was produced societally as a result of the cultural hegemony of the nineteenth-century agrarian class. From this ‘indigenous’ cultural substratum emerged countless Anglo-Saxon cultural products. The strong emphasis on culture in Florence and Tuscany reinforces the regressive myth of the old city more so than in other areas. It is not difficult to trace a line of historical continuity in the Tuscan urban debate from the Accademia dei Georgofili through to Fascism and finally arriving at the current policies of landscape protection and maintenance. The profound anti-urbanism of the fascist nineteenth-century landed gentry, who so conscientiously strove for the preservation of a system that had remained substantially feudal, continues to bear fruit even today. In many urban texts the new, that is the periphery, is described like a cancer that devours its agricultural land and that alters the harmony of the landscape. The exaltation of the old and the demonization of the new results in the production of spaces that are strongly unequal and polarized. On the one hand, the historic centers and the countryside become ever more hyperreal and disneyfied, like simulacra that substitute reality. On the other, the outskirts and the suburban areas, that is, the areas in which the majority of the population resides, regardless of the many proposed initiatives, are substantially neglected. I believe that the dominant representations of the periphery are false and unjust. They result in a form of symbolic violence towards those who reside there. Again, the ‘Tuscan myth’ reiterates the spatial injustice and symbolic violence of the past. This is a valid reason to attempt to re-establish the discourse on space in Tuscany. In order to do this, it is necessary to remove the ‘dystopian lens’ with which we imagine the periphery and observe it for what it is by going there and experiencing it first hand. Furthermore, the ‘Tuscan myth’ should be subjected to a careful deconstruction in order to demonstrate its ideological content and perverse effects. We must remove the ‘utopian lens’ through which we view the territory and the society of the past. In my attempt to accomplish this endeavor I utilized various approaches and research methods. The first four chapters of this book conduct a ‘myth deconstruction’ from four different perspectives. The first chapter, “Rethinking Tuscan Landscape History”, delineates concisely a new cultural history of the region. The idealized images of the landscape and of the Tuscan society of the past are compared to their historical reality, examining how these images are in fact groundless. The fundamental hypothesis is that the idealization of Tuscany is rooted in the ideology of the nineteenth-century landed gentry. The representations of the rural world that emerge from the analysis of this ideology are characterized by a purified aesthetics aimed at preserving the status quo. The peasants and mezzadri (sharecroppers) were observed from the same detached distance that

introduction

the ethnographic ‘curiosities’ of the colonies were. Since these groups did not have any way to voice their opinions it is difficult to try to reconstruct their perceptions of the landscape. Nevertheless, I hypothesize that it is possible to conduct ex post anthropological research by using several sources from later eras that are still connected with the rural world that was disappearing. In the last part of this condensed history of the Tuscan landscape I attempt to overturn the way we look at the territory of historical centers, countryside and periphery. In particular, I consider the suburban areas as the landscape of social emancipation of the post-war period. I also describe the historical centers and the purified countryside as a hyperreal Tuscany in which the simulacrum, that is, the idealized image, progressively substitutes reality. Finally, I mention the most recent transformations in which the periphery has, in a certain sense, become the center. The second chapter, “Utopia and Dystopia in Tuscan Spatial Narratives”, analyzes the spatial narratives in several literary, journalistic, cinematographic and iconographic sources. These narratives are characterized by a system of signification in which some parts of the territory are given positive attributes while others negative. The same narrative structure is repeated in the different typologies of texts and in the clear ideological matrix. This maintains a certain status quo and results in precise policy choices. The last part of the chapter analyzes the way in which these spatial narratives have been reified in the production of space through town-planning choices. The third chapter, “Fantasy Restoration and Identity Building in Tuscany” analyzes how fantasy restoration has been used in Tuscany from 1820 until today to construct a national and regional identity. By ‘fantasy restoration’ I mean the type of restoration aimed at constructing an idealized image which is distant from the historical reality of a monument or landscape. The chapter analyzes the different political and economical objectives that have accompanied these fantasy restorations over time, from the construction of a national identity in the Risorgimento, to the touristic and racial policies of Fascism, to the recent landscape protection policies. The underlying hypothesis is that there was a strong historical continuity in the use of fantasy restoration, and that this is still practiced today under the guise of the landscape protection policies. The fourth chapter, “Politics of Landscape Purification”, analyzes the way landscape purification is put into practice at the political or bureaucratic level. The chapter begins with a concise framing of the Lefebvrian concepts of lived space, abstract space and everyday life. I sustain that the implemented policies of landscape purification in Tuscany coincided with social purification. I therefore dwell on the landscape purification techniques used by public administration and on the new social geography determined by them.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

In the final three chapters of the book I speak about the Tuscan areas that do not find a place in the dominant representations of the region but which constitute the living space of most Tuscans. In the fifth chapter, entitled “From Polycentrism to the Dispersed Centrality”, I summarize the settlement transformations in the last one hundred and fifty years and focus on the response of town planners to these transformations. I sustain that the Tuscan and Italian urban culture was not able to interpret the change, and continues to see the city with eyes turned to the past. I give particular attention therefore to some authors that, in my opinion, have proposed more adequate interpretative models for contemporary urban systems. Finally, I deal with the design and policy implications of what I define as the passage from polycentrism to dispersed centrality. The sixth chapter contains a photographic survey on the life of the periphery. While their inclusion is by no means intended as representational of the overall situation, these photographs reveal some unexpected or little-known aspects. The first section contains unstaged images of everyday life in suburban areas and in some social housing neighborhoods. They are very distant from dominant dystopian representations and show a lively and dynamic periphery, rich in cultural associations and initiatives. The social housing neighborhoods, often described as spaces of degradation and conflict, are among the most socially active places. The second section of this chapter focuses on spiritual life and on new ethnic and religious identities. Looking at these images, one gets the impression that distance from flocks of tourists and the ‘purified’ spaces of historic centers and the Tuscan landscape facilitates the freedom to manifest one’s ethnic and religious identity. The third section looks at the social life of shopping malls and the so-called non-places. Although largely neglected by architects and town planners, they have assumed considerable importance. In the reorganization of social life determined by the urban explosion, many of the spaces that Marc Augé defined as non-places have assumed an important social and urban function. The seventh chapter contains a detailed study on one of these new spaces: the gas station. I attribute the relevance of gas stations to the urban transformations determined by the advent of the car and the particular union between food and petrol developed in Italy in the second post-war period. Although many imagine gas stations to be exclusively technical spaces, a thorough on-field study conducted in the periphery of Florence has demonstrated that some of these are important places of sociability. After my presentation of the results of this empirical investigation I focus on their implications for design.

introduction

To conclude, I attempt to expand the breadth of this task of deconstructing/reconstructing the popular image of Tuscany, and, more generally, the idea of the city as described in this volume. While the old/new and center/periphery dynamics characterize political and urban debates in many parts of the world, for historical reasons this opposition is particularly strongly felt in Tuscany. It is indeed for this reason that this region constitutes an exemplary case study from which to begin to reformulate the idea of the city.

rethinking tuscan landscape history

The Discourse on Space in Tuscany Literary, cinematic and media narratives present a stereotyped and idealized view of the Tuscan landscape and of its history1 (fig. 1). Surprisingly, many scholarly works echo their conclusions. These reductive accounts do not do justice to the complexity of a region which is increasingly split between the privileged zones of the historic center and the countryside, often called ‘Chiantishire’, and the urban peripheries, which constitute the site of everyday life for many Tuscans. Perhaps more importantly, the prevailing images of these dualistic spaces conceal the historical truths of Tuscan society. In contrast to the unity of the landscape, this is a history riven by conflicts and divisions, often violent. The goal of this research is to question and to re-establish the discourse on space in Tuscany. Contemporary idealizations of the region and of its landscape stem from nineteenth-century cultural production. They can be traced back to the cultural hegemony exercised by ruling classes and by landed gentry to maintain their quasi-feudal status quo during an era of political upheavals. The centerpieces of this ideology were the idealization of rural life and the simultaneous demonization of urban life, the celebration of sharecropping as an ideal and balanced social and economic system and the situating of the peasant as an integral part of a basically ahistorical and immutable landscape. These elements came together as part of a more general valorization of the relationship between landscape and identity, religion and work. 1 Literary works set in Tuscany are countless and diverse. Also, their number is constantly growing. When I refer to stereotyped views of Tuscany in literature I think of Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy (New York: Broadway, 1996). For obvious reasons, such works as this one possibly have the greatest impact on the collective imaginary. For an excellent review of various and diverse strands of literature set in Tuscany, see Silvia Ross, Tuscan Spaces. Literary Constructions of Place (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Good accounts of cinematic works filmed in Tuscany are: Sandro Bernardi, La Toscana e il cinema (Firenze: Banca Toscana, 1994), Maurizio Bologni Ciak in Toscana: i set del cinema e della pubblicità in terra di Siena (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2000), and Alberto Zambenedetti World Film Locations: Florence (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2014).

Fig. 1 Poster advertising the movie Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) directed by Audrey Wells and based on Frances Mayes’s book of the same name, an incredibly successful bestseller. This is just one of many cultural products promoting an idealized view not only of the Tuscan landscape but also of the past societies that produced it.

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

Fig. 2 Queen Victoria watching the corso dei fiori from Palazzo Medici-Riccardi on one of her visits to Florence. The corso dei fiori was a parade of flower-covered floats.

opposite Fig. 3 Villa Palmieri, on the slopes of Fiesole, residence of Queen Victoria during her Florentine vacations.

rethinking tuscan landscape history

During the course of the nineteenth century this ideology produced important economic and social effects. These include the lack of industrial development since the ruling elites directed their capital towards financial and railroad investments, the impossibility for sharecroppers to emancipate themselves from their oppressive conditions in the absence of occupational alternatives, and the complete physical and cultural isolation of peasants2. The instability of the existing social system after World War I allowed the advocates of this ideology to assume a prominent role in the rise of Fascism3. My interest in this research is partially rooted in my personal and family history. When I started my doctoral program at the University of Florence fifteen years ago, I was surprised to find that many professors of urbanism continued to praise not only the sharecropping landscape but the society that engendered it. Numerous theses were devoted to research on historical agricultural landscape and on ways to protect it from real estate speculation that supposedly threatened its integrity. In Tuscany, such inclinations to praise the landscape of the past and 2 3

Giacomo Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico della Toscana (Firenze: Irpet, 1975), 37-51. Frank Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7-156.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

opposite Fig. 4 The English Cemetery, one of the symbols of the large Anglo-Florentine community in the nineteenth century. Fig. 5 The tomb of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the English Cemetery.

to criticize the policies and developments of the present are still firmly entrenched, both within universities and in political and media debate. It is difficult to ignore the fact that many proponents are members of local elites, who view the countryside from the height and comfort of their villas. I was always skeptical of these positions since they conflicted with what I knew about my paternal grandfather, who managed to escape his sharecropper destiny at the age of thirteen to find a job in Florence and build a future in the middle class. I was also told of the subaltern conditions in which my father’s uncles, who were still sharecroppers when he was a boy, were forced to live. The landowners would even consider the wearing of a hat, being slightly more expensive than the pezzola or kerchief that peasant women used to wear, to be outrageous and grounds for immediate dismissal from the farm. It was exactly this kind of pre-modern society and environment that appealed to the many British citizens who settled in Florence and Tuscany during the nineteenth century. In order to escape from their own industrialization, they found solace in their fantasies about the unchanging and benevolent order of the countryside4 (fig. 2-5). As their cultural products gained currency around the English-speaking world, this contributed further to the creation of the Tuscan myth. Although I also appreciate the beauty, which is at times breathtaking, of the Tuscan hills, I strongly disagree with the dominant narratives and representations that celebrate the landscape while evading or ignoring the social and economic system that produced it. This practice may be excusable in literature and movies, due to their fictional nature, but becomes more questionable in political and journalistic depictions of Tuscany, and finally, unacceptable in scholarly and academic writing. Such representations can even be found in the work of such a critically aware scholar as Asor Rosa5. However, my argument is more than just historical. This enduring ‘gaze’ upon the Tuscan landscape produces effects today that are no less important than those of the past. One key outcome is the binary valuation of the peripheries, seen as dystopian landscapes when not completely ignored, in contrast to the utopian and idealized view of historic centers and of the countryside. As a result, public policies and investments are almost exclusively aimed at the continuous requalification and improvement of historic centers, and at the preservation of the rural landscape. This largely neglects the periphOne of the leading scholars who have highlighted the relationship between industrialization and the development of a romantic way of looking at the rural world is certainly Raymond Williams. See in particular: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 5 Alberto Asor Rosa, “La mia Toscana Felix”, Repubblica, April 26, 1987; “Il leopardo di Toscana”, Repubblica, February 6, 1988. 4

eries, where more and more people reside each year. Although these areas have developed their own extraordinary reservoir of human life and sociability, the strength of the dominant myths provide little room for them to create their own equivalent ‘urban imagery’. As an urban planner, I see this as a case of ‘spatial injustice’. Although my profession focuses on the organization of material space, in this case I argue that spatial representations play a central role in shaping the material environment. Within the vast body of literature on Tuscany from all genres and disciplines, one can discover a few alternative voices. They usually come from the outside and are free from the stereotypes and cultural influences of the Tuscan intelligentsia. Their opinions have often caused disgruntled reactions, if not diplomatic controversies. At the end of the sixteenth century, the British traveler Sir Robert Dallington had the audacity to declare the Grand Duke’s government to be tyrannical, subjugating of its inhabitants, and one which creates a miserable and pitiable peasant class. The book was popularized in Tuscany with the epithet of falsissima relatione (very false report), prompting the government to convince the King of Great Britain to order its destruction6. Recent observers have looked more skeptically at the preservation of the Tuscan landscape and society. Henri Lefebvre in 1951 observed that the sharecropping system was still considered at that time by some scholars of the agrarian question to be the “paradise of the sharecropper”7. Instead, he defined it as a semi-feudal system based on the highest exploitation of work and on the complete subalternity of peasants. Historian Frank Snowden ironically described the preeminent role played by landed gentry in the Fascist revolution in Tuscany as the “golden age of the mezzadria”8. Medina Lasansky explains the esJames Person, A “Falsissima Relatione”: Robert Dallington’s Survey of Tuscany (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2005). In Lefebvre’s 1951 essay entitled “Les Classes Sociales dans les Campagnes: La Toscane et la ‘mezzadria classica’”, Henri Lefebvre, “Le classi sociali nelle campagne (la Toscana e la mezzadria classica),” in Dal rurale all’urbano, trans. Paolo Sica (Rimini: Guaraldi, 1973), 39-62. 8 Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 7-69. 6 7

Fig. 6-7 An aristocratic complex, located on the outskirts of Florence, before its restoration. The facade of the farmer’s house (fig. 6), a true hovel in terms of hygienic, structural and constructive conditions, had some of the formal features of the main villa (fig. 7), such as overhanging eaves and a painted facade. This was aimed at hiding the miserable living conditions of the peasants, and ensuring the aesthetic unity of the complex. Photos from the late 1980s.

sential role played by Fascism not only in the ideological construction of the myth of medieval and renaissance Tuscany, but also in its material construction through the systematic and comprehensive restructuring of its historical centers9. Ironically, such work received little attention in Tuscany. Lasansky recounts the reaction of a noble baroness who felt offended by her presentation on the re-editing of urban space in Arezzo10. From a different perspective, the urban planner Bernardo Secchi argued that, in Tuscany, the “invention of the panorama” produced a manner of looking at the territory which considers “the historic center and the hills as places of memory and of scenic views, and separate from them, the plains, a technical space, available for that which is incompatible with heritage and with the panorama”11. In addition to such an attitude being completely unsupported historically, he also contended that it ignored the richness and complexity of the historical stratifications of the territory of the plains, and was transforming the countryside into an oligarchic product, “used in a non-intensive way by restricted minorities”12. Such reactions demonstrate the persistence and stability of dominant histor-

D. Medina Lasansky, “Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric: The Fascist Redesign of San Gimignano”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 3 (2004), 320-353 and Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 107-143. 10 Ibid., 265. 11 Bernardo Secchi, “Firenze: la ‘piana’”, Casabella, June 1988, 16-17. The phrase “technical space” used by Secchi recalls Henri Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 12 Bernardo Secchi, “Toscana Felix”, Casabella, June 1987, 20-21. 9

rethinking tuscan landscape history

ically-rooted narratives on Tuscan landscape, history, and society. Such narratives, which already existed in a recognizable form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were appropriated and amplified by Fascism, and still go on to strongly influence, mutatis mutandis, both our perception of Tuscany, and the public policies which are being implemented for this region. Landscape Ideology of the Tuscan Landed Gentry The core hypothesis of this work is that contemporary idealization of Tuscan landscape is rooted in the ideology of the nineteenth-century landed gentry. This section of my research aims to define this ideology through the review of documents on landscape, agriculture, and on the mezzadria system produced in Tuscany between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the fall of the Fascist regime13. In this prolonged period the landed gentry and the Accademia dei Georgofili, its intellectual think-tank, were highly influential, both culturally and politically. The Giornale Agrario Toscano, a journal published by the Accademia between 1827 and 1865, and many other publications by its members up to the first half of the twentieth century, comprise an authentic mine of information, allowing us to accurately reconstruct their ideology. A similar idealized view of the Tuscan landscape was reflected in literature and paintings, photography and cinema. It is based upon an ‘aesthetics of concealment’, or ‘aesthetics of purification’, which is intimately related to the semi-feudal land tenure regime and to the sharecropping system. This feature of Tuscan landscape aesthetics still works today, although in different forms, through various purification policies and techniques implemented by different public administrations14, and in the ways landscape is represented in movies and literature, in pictures and paintings, and by the media. What was concealed in the past consists of whatever offended the sensibility of the ruling classes: namely, the misery and the deplorable living conditions of peasants, who were consigned to decaying hovels15. These living spaces were often concealed by facades which were respectable, if not valuable and noteworthy, in order that they be deserving of the upper classes’ observation from the carriage while journeying home to the villa or castle (fig. 6-7). Temporary and precarious constructions were regularWritings on the mezzadria are countless. For a good collection of writings up to the end of the 1930s: La mezzadria negli scritti dei Georgofili:1833-1872 (Firenze: G. Barbera, 1934); La mezzadria negli scritti dei Georgofili: 1873-1929 (Firenze: G. Barbera, 1935). For a highly ideological example, see Raffaello Lambruschini, Intorno al valore tecnico e morale della mezzeria (Firenze: Cellini, 1872). 14 See chapter “Politics of Landscape Purification” later in this book. 15 The social critique of taste developed by the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu largely influenced my analysis of the purified aesthetics of the Tuscan landed gentry. See in particular: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetics”, in “Analytic Aesthetics”, special issue, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987), 201-210. 13

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The subaltern classes as ethnographic curiosities in Italy and in Italian colonies in Africa. Fig. 8 Sienese peasants in costumes on their typical oxcart in a 1902 postcard. Fig. 9 A peasant on an oxcart in Giovanni Fattori’s Terreno paludoso (marshy land), 1894, Palazzo Pitti. Fig. 10 Ethiopian peasants in a 1940s postcard. Fig. 11 A Libyan contadinella (girl-peasant) in a 1930s postcard. Fig. 12 Peasant women from Siena in a 1920s postcard. Fig. 13 Peasant women depicted in Cristiano Banti’s Riunione di contadine (peasant women meeting), 1861, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

rethinking tuscan landscape history

ly omitted in photos and paintings, as in the works of the Macchiaioli, or of Ottone Rosai16, as were the humiliating living conditions of peasants, which are mostly absent in representations, or at best observed with the detachment of an ‘ethnocentric’ or ‘class-centric’ gaze, as if they were curious expressions of geography and of nature (fig. 8-9, 12-13). Farmers were represented with the same ‘ethnographic’ curiosity and with the same distance with which the inhabitants of the colonies were observed and depicted (fig. 10-11). The same gaze was applied to rural buildings, which were mainly studied for their typologies, according to a sort of linguistics that examined their ‘dialectal’ changes depending on the geography and climate, without saying anything of their inhabitants17 (fig. 14). From the aforementioned sources and approaches a social semiotics of the Tuscan landscape arises, which is, finally, a sort of semiotics of ‘monads’, or ‘fiefs’18. In the end, landscape aesthetics became the aesthetics of clearly detached self-sufficient estates (fig. 15), which had been purified (though only superficially) from whatever could impress or offend the landowners, or remind them of the semi-slavery conditions of the subaltern class of peasants. According to such semiotics, just to give an example, the cypress lines were very often used to create visual barriers in order to hide what was displeasing or offensive, or to conceal what was beyond the limit of the property estate, beyond the fief, marking its boundary with green walls. Such an aesthetics, which as previously mentioned can be found in different cultural products, from literature to painting, from photography to more ‘scientific’ essays, is clearly codified in the cabrei, the maps of the estates possessed by the landowners19 (fig. 16). The aforementioned hegemonic method of conceptualizing and representing landscape did not allow for alternative views to arise, in particular, those of peasants and subaltern classes. At the same time, even celebratory representations are rarely totalizing. With a careful eye, they can be examined for alternative meanings. Just as T.J. Clark used impressionist paintings to uncover suburban proletarian locales in Paris produced by Haussmann’s urban renewal, photographs and even the paintings of the Macchiaioli can be reinterpreted to document physical features of the landscape that reveal their underlying social and economic meanings20.

Mario Tinti, L’architettura delle case coloniche in Toscana con 32 disegni di Ottone Rosai (Firenze: Rinascimento del Libro, 1934); Bino Sanminiatelli, “La casa colonica”, L’illustrazione Toscana (June 1937), 3-6. 17 Renato Biasutti, La casa rurale nella Toscana (Firenze: Zanichelli, 1928). 18 I use the word ‘monads’ in the sense of self-sufficient entities. 19 For a good overview of the history of Cabrei, see Leonardo Ginori Lisci, Cabrei in Toscana: raccolte di mappe, prospetti e vedute (Firenze: Cassa di risparmio di Firenze, 1978). 20 Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). For similar reinterpretations, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). 16

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 14 The distant ‘gaze’ in early twentieth-century geography. The classification of typological variations in Tuscan rural buildings in Renato Biasutti’s La casa colonica in Toscana, 1928: a sort of ‘variational linguistics’ applied to building types without minimal consideration for peasants’ living conditions.

Subaltern Classes’ Perception of Landscape The goal of representing the way in which peasants perceived the landscape is only partially achievable. A major difficulty is that of finding the appropriate sources. Gramsci recognized the necessity of using popular culture and folklore to counterbalance the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes21. However, the few opportunities which subaltern classes had of expressing themselves in public were largely filtered and controlled. For example, the Fascist regime recognized improvised poetry as an interesting folkloristic display of the Italian culture. They organized festivals and competitions whose participants were selected according to their political inclinations22. The possible topics of the lyrics were predetermined, obviously avoiding any political or social issues. CollecAntonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 323-362. 22 Gianni Batistoni, ed., “Cantar in poesia”: due concorsi di poesia estemporanea (Firenze: Polistampa, 2003). The book contains the songs presented at an extemporaneous singing competition held in Sesto Fiorentino in 1938: the winning entry was a song in honor of the Duce. 21

rethinking tuscan landscape history

Fig. 15 ‘Monadology’ of the Tuscan landscape: rural landscape as a set of autonomous and self-sufficient ‘monads’ or ‘feudal tenures’. The Medici estate of Poggio a Caiano in a lunette by Giusto Utens at Villa la Petraia, Florence.

tions of popular songs sung by peasants in festivals or while working in fields were also made in these years, exclusively selecting songs that talked about flowers, seasons, love, and similar topics. More generally, the ruling classes largely shaped how peasants were depicted by presenting idealized, biased and incomplete views of them23. Given the deficient and fragmentary nature of these representations, more recent sources, ideally those produced after World War II, are needed in order to understand the peasants’ and the subaltern classes’ perception of the Tuscan landscape. Unfortunately, there is no Tuscan writer comparable to the Sardinian Gavino Ledda, who came from a family of shepherds, and was illiterate until the age of eighteen, later becoming a writer and a glottology scholar. His autobiography Padre padrone is an invaluable source to understand the living conditions and the perception of the landscape of a young Sardinian shepherd in the 1940s24. Such living conditions were characterized by extreme poverty, violence and conflict (fig. 17). Without analogous literary sources in Tuscany, we can however undertake ex-post reconstructive anthropological work using books and videos that contain the oral histories 23 In their numerous writings, Bino Sanminiatelli and Enrica Viviani della Robbia provide many examples of such an attitude. 24 Gavino Ledda, Padre padrone: l’educazione di un pastore (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975).

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 16 ‘Monadology’ of the Tuscan landscape: rural landscape as a set of autonomous and self-sufficient ‘monads’ or ‘feudal tenures’. The bandita (hunting estate) of Pratolino, north of Florence, in a nineteenthcentury cabreo.

of former peasants recounted in interviews. Although a comprehensive survey of such sources does not yet exist25, from my investigations thus far, one might speculate that the general picture obtained might not be significantly different from that described by Gavino Ledda in reference to Sardinia: a picture of the landscape with the bitter traits of misery and pain, as in the Tuscan song Maremma Amara (bitter Maremma). Recent research has partially filled this gap; see Dario Gaggio, The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016).

rethinking tuscan landscape history

Fig. 17 Poverty, illiteracy, and violence in Padre padrone, an autobiographical story by Gavino Ledda, the son of a Sardinian shepherd. The living conditions of Tuscan peasants were not much better than those in the Sardinian hinterland. The image is taken from the movie Padre padrone, based on Ledda’s book and directed by the Taviani brothers in 1977. Fig. 18 Poverty, moral degradation and violence in the movie Berlinguer ti voglio bene, directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci in 1977. This movie shows the end of the rural world in the urbanized countryside of Prato.

Other sources, such as literary and cinematic, can also prove to be useful. The movie Berlinguer ti voglio bene, for example, filmed in the Prato countryside in the 1970s, perfectly describes the transition from the pre-war agricultural society to the industrial: a transition marked by conflicts, by an environment which was far from idyllic, and quite often by moral and material degradation26 (fig. 18). Curiously enough, at a certain point in the movie one of the actors improvises a song with exactly the same style and melody of those collected from peasants in the Fascist era, as well as in other periods. The content, however, is completely different and possibly more truthful: While the master he’s warm in his castle made of bricks…/…we outside feel so cold we can’t even find our dicks! / Those are things that make you shiver. / But there will be the time we will make him with fear quiver27.

Assembling these multiple sources should reveal an alternative concept of the landscape to the Tuscan ideal. These forms and content are likely to uncover the ways in which op-

Berlinguer to voglio bene, directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci (Roma: AMA Film, 1977). I only partially agree with the interpretation of this movie in Linda Brodo and Stefano Brugnolo, “La modernità degradata delle periferie: un’analisi di ‘Berlinguer ti voglio bene’”, Intersezioni 34, no. 3 (2014), 473-495. While the movie ironically shows the destabilization of traditional gender roles produced by modernity in a post-rural social environment, it also truthfully represents the moral and material degradation of the rural world before modernization. Brodo and Brugnolo nostalgically mention “a disappearing world, the world of small agricultural properties, of craft, and of retail trade” (476). I believe that the connection between moral/social degradation and modernization should not be emphasized. On the contrary, I argue that the post-rural situation described by the movie is in many respects in perfect continuity with that of the preexisting rural society. 27 The quote is from the English subtitles to Berlinguer ti voglio bene. 26

Fig. 19 Map compiled by economist Giacomo Becattini, highlighting in red the valley areas of what he called the campagna urbanizzata (urbanized countryside). Fig. 20 The ‘urbanized countryside’ between Prato and Pistoia in the early 1960s.

pression and subalternity, exploitation and injustice are embodied in physical manifestations. By adding this subaltern perspective, the same forms may reveal a very different content to the idyllic characteristics usually attributed to landscape. The Emergence of Landscapes of Social Emancipation: Post World War II The fall of Fascism determined the end of this semi-feudal social system. As the centuries-old system collapsed, new opportunities for economic and social mobility opened up. Large numbers of rural people, abandoning the countryside, created new landscapes that now dominate contemporary Tuscany. Economist Giacomo Becattini spent his entire life studying the systems of small and medium firms in Tuscany and Italy, investigating the relationships between local societies, economic development, and landscape/urbanization patterns28. In his landmark work Lo sviluppo economico della Toscana (The economic development of Tuscany, 1975), he proposed an analysis of the regional territory based on the recognition of four macro-areas: the campagna urbanizzata (urbanized countryside), the industrial areas, the urban areas and the countryside29 (fig. 19-21). I consider such an analytical division of territory to still be valid today, although in a revised and updated form. It is important to stress that in the dominant contemporary representations of Tuscan landscapes the first two of these macro-areas mentioned are usualFor other major studies adopting similar approaches, see Arnaldo Bagnasco, Tre Italie: la problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977) and Carlo Trigilia, “Le subculture politiche territoriali”, Quaderni Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, no.16 (1981). 29 Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico, 153-183. 28

rethinking tuscan landscape history

Fig. 21 Voids, factories, and homes in the Florence outskirts today.

ly devalued, whereas the second two are idealized30. However, I propose inverting that evaluation. The first two areas, the territories in which most Tuscans currently live, are where social trajectories of emancipation and wellbeing emerged and expanded in the post-war period, and continue to do so today. On the contrary, the second two have developed into mono-functional spaces for the consumption of a ‘perfected’ and purified past: a consumption that is either enjoyed primarily by outsiders or restricted to a small minority. The landscapes of the urbanized countryside and suburban peripheries are, in my opinion, part of the most complex and interesting socio-spatial system that can be found in the region. Here we can find and discover community and family histories and narratives of absolute interest. In such a landscape a historically-oriented anthropological investigation is still possible. Social and spatial complexities form an undistinguishable whole. In the (translated) words of Becattini: the landscape of the urbanized countryside, with its maze at times wide, at times narrow, of streets, factories, and homes, with its intermingling of rural and urban, is nothing else, in our interpretation, than the territorial image of light industrialization; itself a result of the aforedescribed [social] forces31.

In these landscapes, the lifestyles and the usages and appropriations of space typical of the preindustrial sharecropping society were reproduced for some decades, and are perfectly evident even to this day. Such is the case for the innumerable factories that doubled as homes, 30 31

See chapter “Utopia and Dystopia in Tuscan Spatial Narratives” later in this book. Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico, 181.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 22 Left: clay shingles sprayed with acrylic paint in order to look old; right: the ‘authentic’, imperfect roof of an old barn.

which very often were built by their owners, usually former sharecroppers who had become small entrepreneurs. This is also the case for the community networks which were one of the main ingredients in the individual and collective wellbeing. However, these are also the landscapes in which the system of small enterprises that produced the socalled ‘Italian miracle’ after the 1960s was in recent years hit the hardest by recession, and where the rates of immigration are highest. These are among the reasons why the future wellbeing of the region will largely depend on the future of these areas, which are socially rich, spatially complex and fragmented, but at the same time adaptable and of great potential. Hyperreal Tuscany: the Historic Center and the Tuscan Countryside According to Baudrillard, the boundaries between reality and its representations are becoming increasingly blurred32. Eventually such boundaries become completely absent, being the real world indistinguishable from its representation. Representations are often so powerful that they ‘kill’ reality by substituting it. Is all this applicable to Tuscany? In a sense it is, since it is quite evident that, in an age of mass tourism and mass communication, spatial representations are so powerful that they tend to transform places into their own stereotypes. I already discussed how the process of 32 This phenomenon is discussed at length particularly in Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). See also Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt & Brace, 1977).

rethinking tuscan landscape history

landscape purification started to be implemented in Tuscany very early, at least from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is one of the reasons why idealized depictions of the Tuscan landscape were able to easily spread and develop, starting from the favorable substratum of a partially purified landscape. Also, the major urban and architectural works deployed by Fascism, excellently described by Medina Lasansky, provided a significant contribution to the success of the myth. After that process was instigated, the idealized version of the Tuscan landscape became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, and any incongruous artifact was progressively cleared out. The trend towards the musealization of landscape is apparently unstoppable. A paradoxical example of such a trend is provided by the usage — which is mandatory according to certain municipal regulations — of clay shingles that, in order to look old, are sprayed with acrylic paint in a way that they reproduce the effect of the moss naturally growing on shingles with the passage of time (fig. 22). This means that time has been flattened to an ahistorical dimension, which is the dimension of a postcard-landscape, always ‘clean’ and ready to be depicted. Finally, the politics of landscape purification then creates a divided Tuscany. It is time for the myth to be deconstructed, and for the geographical value hierarchies to be reviewed and overturned. Recent Transformations: the Periphery Has Become the Center Although the Tuscan landscape is to this day conceived in terms of binary opposition between urban and rural, post-war urbanization had made such opposition obsolete by the 1960s33. The urbanized countryside occupied wide expanses of territory, which were something in between the city and the country. However, until a few decades ago the regional system was still urban-centric. Each portion of the urbanized countryside gravitated towards a historic center where all services (commercial, directional, etc.) were located. Today, such a hierarchy has definitely collapsed and historic centers are just nodes, often peripheral, of wider regional systems whose barycenter is in the periphery. The main commercial, service, and directional functions, both public and private, have moved towards the edge of urban areas, close to major arterial routes. New social spaces have arisen in peripheries as well: from outlets to sports facilities, from multi-theaters to gas stations, from entertainment centers to parking lots. These same historic centers are used in very similar ways to shopping malls: you There exists countless Italian scholarly literature conceiving the urban/rural relationship in such a manner. Whatever has been written by urban planning scholars of the Società dei Territorialisti, one of the main Tuscan urban studies associations, is clearly informed by this view. References to this can be found in the association’s website: http:// www.societadeiterritorialisti.it/. The two main scholars who proposed different views, starting from the early 1990s, were Bernardo Secchi and Francesco Indovina, who were both teaching at the time at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice.

Fig. 23 Firenze Santa Maria Novella, entrance of the underground parking garage, used to park the car before walking in the pedestrian historic center.

get the car, find parking in a multi-story garage, and plunge into a crowd of consumers (fig. 23-24). In terms of regional hierarchies we have shifted from a polycentric system to a centrality that is dispersed throughout the entire urbanized territory34. These structural changes are not recognized and accepted by most scholars and politicians. They go on conceiving the city and the country as two totally distinct worlds. Metaphors alluding to urban walls (urban boundaries, green walls, etc.) are largely used to symbolically or physically mark boundaries that only exist in their minds. In the ‘urbanized countryside’ as well as in most suburban peripheries such boundaries are simply impossible even to imagine. Aside from the fact that a sharp distinction between city and country never existed in the past35, the problem with this way of conceptualizing the territory is that it obstructs our capacity to solve real problems and to seize the many opportunities that contemporary suburban landscapes offer36. New social spaces are assimilatSee chapter “From Polycentrism to the Dispersed Centrality” later in this book. Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: a Compact History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21-32. 36 Thomas Sieverts, Cities Without Cities. An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (New York: Spon Press, 2003), 12-43; Richard Ingersoll, Sprawltown. Looking for the City on its Edges (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 1-22. 34 35

rethinking tuscan landscape history

Fig. 24 Coop shopping mall in Ponte a Greve, the external parking lot in front of the mall.

ed into the non-places of an alienated existence. The corollary of such an absurd postulate is that nobody takes up the task of controlling and guiding the production of these spaces in order to maximize the benefits to society37. Again, a paradigm shift is a prerequisite for better-balanced development: the shift consists of recognizing that the periphery has become the center.

37 This is paradoxical even in historical terms: the shopping mall was invented in 1940s by a socialist utopian, Victor Gruen, in order to create a place for public life in the suburbs; in his visionary Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright conceived gas stations as community centers.

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

This chapter scrutinizes dominant narratives about Tuscany, showing their class and historical roots. The city, the country, and the periphery are identified as three abstract spaces (in the meaning used by Lefebvre), whose largely artificial images emphasize some of their features while concealing others. This tripartition of Tuscany in fact implies a binary opposition between the country and the city on the one hand, and the periphery on the other. The museumized and purified image of the first two is tied to a generic ahistoric past, while the periphery is a sort of anti-Tuscany, housing that which can no more be lodged elsewhere. Such narratives created a simulacrum of Tuscany which tends to replace reality. The image of dystopian Tuscany is the product of frictions produced by that replacement. These spaces form a complex social and material world that does not lend itself to simplistic interpretations and is very often represented as undesirable by dominant narratives1. Such a way of conceiving the territory is the result of a longstanding process of cultural production, commencing in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Tuscan landed gentry and by the conspicuous English-speaking community of Florence. It was further developed under Fascism as a consequence of its anti-urban and pro-rural ideology. As I discussed in the previous chapter, such conceptualization heavily shapes urban and regional policies today, turning the Tuscan myth into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. In the mind of Tuscan policymakers, the ‘good’ city is still the old one: compact and neatly separate from the country. However, the center of Florence increasingly resembles a theme park, an enclave of touristic consumerism. In contrast, the ordinary spaces of the outskirts are becoming the most so1 In this chapter I will use the term ‘utopian Tuscany’ to indicate the parts of the region that are commonly idealized in political and media discourses, and more generally in the perception of most people. Similarly, I will use the term ‘dystopian Tuscany’ to indicate those parts of the region that are generally despised.

Fig. 25 Utopias and dystopias in narratives about Tuscany. The phrase ‘Toscana felix’ synthesizes current narratives about the Tuscan countryside. It provides an idealized image of a land that has never existed. “I always had a notion of finding again in this land a system of values and a lifestyle that continued to function, in which it would be worthwhile to identify ourselves [...] it is impossible not to feel, even in the forms of the landscape, the presence of a millennial boundary” (Alberto Asor Rosa, La mia Toscana Felix, 1986).

Fig. 26 The plain and the hill. Panorama of the city of Florence from the hills of Fiesole in a 1920s postcard.

cially interesting and lively part of the region. Deconstructing the Tuscan myth and understanding its normative and ideological nature is a precondition to achieving more balanced policies and development in Tuscany. The Plain and the Hill Tuscany is a region in the center-north of Italy, bounded westwards by the Tyrrhenian Sea and featuring a prevalence of hills, alternating with wide alluvial valleys. It is internationally famous for its historical cities and villages, as well as for the beauty of its rural landscape. Since time immemorial its territory has been socially charged with a system of symbolic correspondences between the high/low geographic position — on the hills or in the plains — and its condition of dominance/subalternity (fig. 26). Such a dynamic relationship between the low plains and the hills is poetically described by the writer and poet Aldo Palazzeschi: If in this countryside the hills occupy the position of the lady — and almost always she is the true lady, the princess — the plain takes the place of the servant, the chambermaid or handmaid… To the lady, the princess, belong all honors and favors, all liberties and many licenses… Insolent, proud, her sway accepted, she never takes it into her head to look at her subordinate; or gives her, at most, a quick close inspection askance and from above, a look of condescension intended merely to irritate and to display her own unquestioned superiority. The poor servant, on the other hand, looks up at her from below with half-closed eyes, pretending not even to notice the disrespectful way in which she is treated; she keeps her head bowed2. Aldo Palazzeschi, Sisters Materassi, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 506-507, quoted in Ross, Tuscan Spaces, 48.

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

It may be that this particular system of signification initially established itself because of the original state of unhealthiness deriving from the alluvial nature of the plains. However, it implies a dichotomous way of looking at the territory which has by now become firmly established, and which also shaped the entire regional and urban policies in the Florence area and more generally in the whole of Tuscany. In such policies, the hill has been treated as an environment worthy of being preserved, whereas the plain has been considered a second-rate container to be easily spent in order to fulfill any developmental need. The high/ low, master/servant positions finally translate themselves in the valuable/valueless division and in the protect/consume normative distinction. The normative and evaluative — in the sense of ranking values — dimensions tend to occur together and are not easily detachable: they form the basis of a peculiar way of producing space3, which is typical of Tuscany and which dates back at least to the first half of the nineteenth century. Implicit to this way of producing space in Tuscany is a strongly conservative attitude, which glorifies the territory of the past while despising more recent transformations. Utopia and Dystopia in the Toscana Felix La mia Toscana Felix is the title of an article published in 1987 in La Repubblica by Alberto Asor Rosa, a major Italian intellectual and literary critic. Significantly, in the title the Latin word felix (happy) is employed in exactly the same way that the corresponding Italian word felice is commonly used in the phrase isola felice (island of happiness), which is ultimately a synonym of Utopia. The article is rather representative of the diverse figurations of Tuscany, and synthesizes the complex nature — at the same time descriptive and prescriptive — of what can explicitly be defined as the ‘Tuscan Myth’ or ‘Tuscan Utopia’. In such representations, the celebration of certain features of the territory is displayed simultaneously with the despising of other aspects, in a discourse which, from the very beginning, has had a strongly normative connotation: I always had a notion of finding again in this land a system of values and a lifestyle that continued to function, in which it would be worthwhile to identify ourselves. When we cross the Chiarone, a little river that is mild, and unknown to most, which had the fate, however, of dividing Lazio from Tuscany, it is impossible not to feel, even in the forms of the landscape, the presence of a millennial boundary. We leave behind the urban detritus, the monstrous houses both big and small, apartment complexes, apartment hotels, the last towns of Lazio: Ladispoli, Tarquinia, Montalto, where Etruscan tombs, medieval towers, and Renaissance mansions now miserably disappear, humiliated behind the terraced facades of touristic buildings: and we enter into the Toscana felix4. 3 When I speak of “a way of producing space” I refer to the particular use of these terms in Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 4 Asor Rosa, “La mia Toscana felix”.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 27 The city center as a perfectly intelligible whole. “Every scene is instantly recognizable and brings to mind a flood of associations. Part fits into part. The visual environment becomes an integral piece of its inhabitants’ lives” (Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960, 93).

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

Fig. 28 Peripheries as an infection that eats up communities and destroys the country. “An undifferentiated continuum of functions and flows from the center to the surrounding municipalities, that obliterates borders, countryside, recognizable limits, communities” (“Ritorno alla città”, Società dei territorialisti, accessed Setptember 30, 2017, http://www.societadeiterritorialisti.it/images/DOCUMENTI/ RIVISTA/ITALIANO/sdt2_cfp-it.pdf.).

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Tuscany is conceived as an oasis, opposed and separated from its surroundings. The line of demarcation is not geographical (“a little river that is mild and unknown to most”), but rather, it is related to the long history of a specific society (“a millennial boundary”, “a system of values and a lifestyle […] in which it would be worthwhile to identify ourselves”). Its diverse and exceptional nature is legible in the ways the territory and landscape are built and designed. In such a discourse the urban and agricultural landscapes act as the signifiers of an undefined but positively connoted system of values, which is contrasted by a system of non-values symmetrically signified by the urban disorder of Lazio. However, the opposition between Tuscany and its conterminous regions almost immediately becomes an opposition between what, inside Tuscany, is consistent with the aforementioned vague and idealized image of the region, and what instead contradicts its supposed diversity and uniqueness. The positively connoted system of values signified by the beautiful landscape teeters as certain traditionally unanimous and homogeneous parts of the regional constituency seem to push, maybe for the first time, for a use which is at times speculative and at times simply distorted, of the asset ‘culture’. We receive the impression that, in the absence of an alternative global strategy, the areas of good resistance or the frontiers of civilization are penalized for the benefit of those in which modernization relentlessly proceeds with its usual mass tools and parameters5.

In the final part of the article the author describes three cases that are illustrative of such a trend, amongst which he discusses a transformation proposal for the Val d’Orcia, a region in southern Tuscany, where Asor Rosa used to spend holidays in his own country estate. The ‘global strategy’ that he suggests to resist such a trend consists of “introducing the utmost of protective restrictions [and in envisaging] historic natural parks of a completely new kind compared with traditional models”. I have focused at length on Asor Rosa’s article not only because of this author’s relevance to this field, and because of the debate which the article inspired6, but because it provides a complete formulation of what I called the Tuscan myth. The structure of such a myth is synthesizable in the following manner: 1) the exceptional character of Tuscany is stated, implying it to be a utopia; 2) the contrasting character of another region with different features — in the specific case of Lazio — is defined, suggesting it to be an anti-Tuscany, or a dystopia; 3) the opposition between the concepts of utopia and dystopia is extended to all parts of Tuscany that do not conform to its afore5 6

Ibid. E.g. Secchi, “Toscana Felix”, 20-21.

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

Fig. 29 Details from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes of the Good Government (left) and the Bad Government (right). The frescoes, preserved in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, imply the equations: good landscape equals good society; bad landscape equals bad society.

mentioned idealized image; and 4) remedies are suggested to fully realize the utopian version of Tuscany. Both in the territory of the utopia and the dystopia, landscape structures and forms are interchangeable with value systems: the beauty/ugliness of the former corresponding to the goodness/badness of the latter. As in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes of good and bad government, landscape is used as an allegory of society in the aforedescribed Tuscan myth landscape is used as an allegory of society (fig. 29). In such an allegory a beautiful landscape corresponds to a good society and an ugly one to a bad society. The aforementioned argumentative/narrative structure is not always complete in all its steps. The article “Toscana Felix. Viaggio nella regione che non sembra Italia” (Toscana Felix. Voyage in a Region which doesn’t look like Italy), for example, limits itself to the commendable aspects, proposing once again the ‘topos’ of the island of happiness, where landscape is well maintained, the welfare state resembles that of Northern Europe, and citizenry is not dissimilar to that of free towns that are accustomed to bargaining with their rulers7. With appropriate differences and simplifications, the interpretative scheme holds true when shifting from journalistic to literary or cinematic sources. An example is provided by the mov7 Paola Zanuttini, “Toscana Felix. Viaggio nella regione che non sembra Italia”, Venerdì di Repubblica, May 6, 2011, 40-43.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 30 Tuscany and ‘anti-Tuscany’ in the movie Stealing Beauty, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. a) friends and artists have lunch in the barnyard under a grape pergola in an oasis that is completely removed from the ‘real’ world (utopian Tuscany); b) the idyll is broken by distant noises of construction work (perturbation induced by the ‘entrance’ of the real word); c) the television mast under construction on an adjacent hill ‘to brainwash the Italian electorate’ (dystopian Tuscany); d) one of the artists gets hold of a hose and directs it towards the bulldozers (normative ‘reaction’).

ie Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty), by Bernardo Bertolucci, in which a small tract of the Tuscan countryside becomes an oasis that is completely removed from the world, where friends and artists live together. Here, a sort of initiatory path is followed which transforms the beautiful protagonist from an adolescent into a woman. While the inhabitants of this commune of sorts lunch in the barnyard under a grape pergola, distant sounds are heard: “Come and see what we have to put up with”, says the owner of the property, inviting the newly arrived protagonist. In the distance some bulldozers at work can be seen: “They’re building a television mast”, explains one of the ladies. “To brainwash the Italian electorate”, someone else interjects with contempt. Then, one of the artists inhabiting the farmhouse gets hold of a hose and directs it towards the bulldozers, as if it were a gun, while shouting in a French accent: “teste di cazzooo!” (dickheads). The idyll, however, is shattered for no more than an instant, so as to remember that a real world exists beyond the sweet Tuscan hills. And immediately the atmosphere returns to that of enchantment, once again cut off from the world (fig. 30)8. Finally, the aforedescribed texts, be they literary, journalistic or cinematic, have the same

8 Io ballo da sola, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Roma: Fiction s.r.l.,1996). The quotes are from the English subtitles.

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

narrative structure. It is important to stress that in these discourses utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same narrative discourse aimed at promoting a simplified image of Tuscany. They are in a dialectical relationship and in some way each implies the other. In the words of Manuel and Manuel: If in the background of every utopia there is an anti-utopia, the existing world seen through the critical eyes of the utopia-composer, one might say conversely that in the background of many a dystopia there is a secret utopia9.

The Realization of a Utopian Tuscany In regional and urban policies the spaces of the myth — Tuscany and anti-Tuscany, utopia and dystopia — are territorialized. The plains, which we saw described as the servant in Palazzeschi’s novel, end up coinciding with an anti-Tuscany, with the space of dystopia. On the contrary the hills, figuratively represented in the image of an insolent and proud lady, coincide with a utopian Tuscany. The two realities are opposite and do not allow for mutual contaminations. Of course, this is also an opposition between old and new, between the territory of the past and contemporary transformations. Therefore, the hills have become the place of integral preservation, whereas the plains have become the inconvenient presence to which, in the previously cited words of Palazzeschi, a “quick close inspection askance and from above” can at best be given. In terms of urban policies, this clear-cut division materialized with the approval of the Florence Town Plan in the mid 1960s, when any new construction on hills was banned, and the city was exclusively allowed to develop in the northwestern plain. This “arduous saving of Florence” followed some of the positions which had been expressed in the previous decade, in the effort of envisaging some solutions for the organization and containment of the explosive growth of the city10. Barbacci, for example, proposed creating a new town in the Arno plain west of Florence “to peripherally build comfortable blue-collar neighborhoods, instead of spreading them on hills”11. Such a clear-cut position only prevailed after a turbulent political struggle. A prime example of an event that characterized this struggle is the heated debate, which took place in newspapers and other public platforms after the mid 1950s, about the project of an INA-Casa public

9 Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 6. 10 Edoardo Detti, “Il faticoso salvataggio di Firenze”, Urbanistica, no. 39 (1963), 76-86. 11 Alfredo Barbacci, “Ampliamento di Firenze e tutela dell’ambiente urbano e collinare”, Urbanistica, no. 20 (1956), 94.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 31 The original master plan for the new district of Sorgane designed by architect Giovanni Michelucci. In the upper part of the drawing a scenic square was planned, a second ‘Piazzale Michelangelo’ available to the inhabitants of this public housing district and the entire population of Florence.

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

housing neighborhood in Sorgane, southeast of Florence12. In 1956 the state administration bought, in agreement with the municipality of Florence, a partially flat and partially hilly area of 40 hectares, upon which to build “an organic self-sufficient neighborhood”13. This ambitious project, conceived by some of the best Italian architects of the time, proposed among other things several urban services and a scenic square on the top of a hill, inspired by the Piazzale Michelangelo (fig. 31-32). A violent press campaign was launched against this proposal, and after a few years of controversy the hilly part of the project was finally abandoned. In view of this project, “city and country, old city and new center, instead of being in conflict would form a necessary unit and a profound exchange”14. People who were supportive of the project also claimed that it was the right of low-wage classes to benefit from “a pleasant and comfortable natural setting, very different, of course, from that of the industrial area [in the plain] towards Prato”15. As an example of the heat of this polemic, Roberto Papini, one of the fiercest opponents to the proposal, considered the intervention to be a tragedy for the city of Florence, that was “much greater and more dangerous, and productive of devastating effects which would be immediate and far-reaching, than the preceding ones in its long history”16. The triumph of this policy of a clear-cut division between hills and plains, between a utopian and a dystopian Tuscany, was perpetuated in later urban planning policies. The idea of integral preservation was applied to progressively larger areas of the regional territory — up to the point where, under the approval of the Regional Council of Tuscany, the whole region was included in the Norme per il governo del territorio (Territorial Management Act) in July 2014. The first public administration to apply such principles was the Municipality of Florence, which introduced in its Town Plan (1989) the idea of a historic preservation park extended to the whole of the hilly terrain of the municipal territory. Here, preservation was outlined as necessitating support through “appropriate incentives to mainly foster agricultural activities which safeguard the historicized features of the territory”17. Correspondingly, the idea of the integral preservation of the entire regional territory made its way into cultural and political milieus. As Asor Rosa wrote in La Repubblica: INA-Casa is a well-known public housing program implemented by the Italian government in the years immediately following the Second World War. 13 Giovanni Michelucci, “Sorgane: quartiere autosufficiente”, in Firenze: la questione urbanistica. Scritti e contributi 1945-1975, eds. Augusto Boggiano et al. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1982), 186-190. 14 Ibid., 189. 15 Giuseppe Togni, “Risposta all’interpellanza parlamentare del 9 marzo 1960”, in Atti Parlamentari Camera dei Deputati, CCLIII, Seduta di Martedi 9 febbraio 1960 (Roma: Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati, 1960), 12928-12941. 16 Roberto Papini, “Commentario”, in Firenze: la questione urbanistica, eds. Augusto Boggiano et al. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1982), 191. 17 Marcello Vittorini, “Il nuovo piano regolatore di Firenze”, La formazione del nuovo piano di Firenze, eds. Raimondo Innocenti and Carlo Clemente (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1991), 17. 12

Fig. 32 Leonardo Savioli: study sketches for the neighborhood of Sorgane.

Tuscany is not the same as any other region (but for this reason it can be an example for other regions): it is, as a whole, a cultural heritage significant for the whole world and not only for the nation; a historic-cultural-environmental whole within which a multitude of smaller historic-cultural-environmental wholes places itself, in a continuity which is made of many rifts and diversities18.

This view was adopted by the new regional act. In the words of the Regional Councilor for Urbanism: the rural territory […] must be conceived as territorial heritage […] We are in need of a concept shift similar to that which took place between the 1950s and the 1960s thanks to the contribution of Bianchi Bandinelli, with a move from the recognition of individual valuable buildings to that of entire historic centers as complex organisms19. Asor Rosa, “Il leopardo di Toscana”. Lorenza Pampaloni, “Riforma Legge 1, Marson: ‘Stop al consumo di suolo, pianificazione di area vasta e tempi più brevi’”, Toscana Notizie, October 1, 2013.

18 19

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

In practice, we draw very close to the museumization of the entire regional territory, making it difficult to realize any development. Dystopian Tuscany (which includes all the peripheries that developed in the valleys) becomes a huge requalification area to be conformed, as far as possible, to the idealized and artificial image of utopian Tuscany. Utopian Tuscany between Simulacrum and Abstract Space: Who Gains? The idealization of Florence and Tuscany dates back at least to the first decades of the nineteenth century, and was mainly promoted in its first forms by the Tuscan aristocracy and by the conspicuous English-speaking community of Florence. In the postwar period these groups of people were joined by a cultural and political elite that chose Tuscany for residence or vacation. In this chapter I describe only the postwar developments of this cultural production process and show its implications on urban and regional policies. A detailed analysis of the role and of the interests of the main subjects involved in this cultural production process lies beyond the scope of my investigation, therefore I will limit myself to brief and tentative remarks. In the twentieth century the production of urban utopias has also been a response to the significant and frightening changes produced by tremendous urbanization and industrialization processes. The production of utopian Tuscany has certainly also been, among other things, an all-Tuscan way of reacting to the problems and profound changes wrought by these processes, which in Italy occurred later than in northern Europe, and in Tuscany only in recent times. We might even place the Tuscan utopia/dystopia together with the great urban utopias of Le Corbusier, Howard and Wright. The challenging context in which the Tuscan utopia developed in the postwar period contributed to its success and also enabled its translation into regional and urban policies. These policies were supported by large segments of the population and could therefore pass muster. They also contributed to the preservation of a beautiful territory, which is certainly a positive fact. However, one should not underestimate the side effects on Tuscany of these policies, and of this way of structuring the discourse. Firstly, the binary opposition of plains/hills, utopian Tuscany/dystopian Tuscany contributed to there being less attention directed towards the quality of settlements in the plains. Maybe a more balanced and just result would have been that of having fewer/less perfected hills and historic centers and higher quality peripheries. Secondly, the parts of the region which better conform to the utopian idea of Tuscany are increasingly becoming places of touristic consumption where a simulacrum of Tuscany is produced. The center of Florence increasingly resembles a theme-park, an enclave of touristic consumerism, and the Tuscan countryside looks like a place where time has been frozen

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

Fig. 33 Tourists in line in front of the Duomo.

and space has been flattened to a purified ahistorical dimension, tailored to the needs of wealthy international vacationers (fig. 33). Thirdly, the territory corresponding to utopian Tuscany is becoming unaffordable to most of the residents of this region, and is instead a sort of exclusive reservoir of upscale international tourism. Utopian Tuscany is becoming something in between Lefebvreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abstract space, rigid and difficult to be appropriated, and Baudrillardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s simulacrum, hyperreal and purified. By contrast, dystopian Tuscany, i.e. the urbanized territory of the plains, is becoming the most socially interesting and lively part of the region, despite the scarce attention given to it in urban policies. In the ordinary spaces of the outskirts people go on living their everyday lives, adequately fulfilling their social and material needs.

utopia and dystopia in tuscan spatial narratives

Conclusions In the first part of this chapter I argued that historically in Tuscany the territory has been symbolically charged with meanings that led to a sort of Manichean division between its flat parts and its hilly components. This division is described poetically by Palazzeschi, characterizing the plain as servant and the hill as master. I then analyzed the narrative and argumentative structure of utopian descriptions and representations referring to Tuscany. In their most complete formulations their structure is synthesized as follows: 1) the exceptional character of Tuscany is stated, connoting it as a utopia; 2) the opposite character of other regions with different features is highlighted, connoting them to be an anti-Tuscany, or dystopia; 3) the opposition between utopia and dystopia is extended to all parts of Tuscany that do not conform to its aforementioned idealized image; 4) remedies are suggested to fully realize a utopian version of Tuscany. Expressing the aforementioned narrative structure I showed that the Tuscan myth is intrinsically normative and political, and is aimed at promoting specific interests. Later in the chapter, I showed how utopian Tuscany took over within urban and regional planning, initially in the planning of the Municipality of Florence, then in regional legislation. And finally, I discussed the effects of narrative approaches and urban and regional policies previously characterized as utopian/dystopian. A first outcome is that the binary opposition between utopian and dystopian Tuscany contributed to a reduction in the attention directed towards the quality of settlements in the plains. A second effect is that the parts of the region which better conform to the utopian idea of Tuscany are increasingly approaching a state which is in between Lefebvreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abstract spaces, which are rigid and difficult to be appropriated, and Baudrillardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s simulacra â&#x20AC;&#x201D; hyperreal and purified. A third consequence is that utopian Tuscany is becoming increasingly unaffordable for many of its residents, and public life is moving to the parts of the region which are usually described in negative terms. Such transformations show the importance of deconstructing the Tuscan utopia. Correctly understanding utopian/dystopian narratives about Tuscany is a precondition to achieving more balanced policies and a more socially just development in the region.

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

This chapter analyzes some of the ways in which restoration was used in Tuscany from the 1820s until today to ‘reinvent’ the past in order to shape the regional and national identity. In the technical jargon of preservation studies the concept of ‘restoration’, as opposed to ‘preservation’, designates building projects intended to restore the original state of a building or a monument. Often, this original state is only presumed and in some cases it is fully fabricated and invented. The chapter then investigates the diverse political and economic goals that accompanied major restorations over time, from nation building during the Risorgimento, to Fascist tourist and racial policies, to recent landscape protection and tourism promotion policies. In addition to differences, continuities are highlighted in the use of restoration over time. Such continuities mainly consist of its (at times hidden) use as a tool for building national identity and for constructing the ‘genius loci’. In the international debate the concept of ‘restoration’ is considered to be outdated and has been mostly replaced with that of ‘preservation’1. However, I argue that even today protection policies implemented by public administrations promote idealized images of city centers and of landscape, which are quite distant from their historical reality. These policies produced a ‘purification’ that is at the same time architectural, rural, and social. However, whereas in the past architecture and history were used to shape collective identity, today the de facto museumization of almost the entire region allows for the commodification of Tuscany on international tourist markets.

1 Cf. Marco Dezzi Bardeschi, Restauro: due punti e a capo (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004), 64-88; Marco Ciatti, Appunti per un manuale di storia e teoria del restauro (Firenze: Edifir, 2009), 429-445.

Fig. 34 Bonaventura Billocardi, recreated from the original map by Stefano Bonsignori, ‘Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata’, detail showing Santa Maria del Fiore and the surrounding buildings, etching, 1584. next page Fig. 35 The Piazza del Duomo today from the same perspective as that of Bonsignori’s map.

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

Restoration and Gothic Revival in Europe and Tuscany in the Nineteenth Century The restauro di ripristino (recovery restoration) also called restauro in stile (in style restoration), or restauro di fantasia (fantasy restoration) is founded on stylistic analogies, and had its greatest exponent in Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879)2. For several decades many restorers and architects in Europe and Italy were inspired by the French master. The purpose of fantasy restoration was not to preserve monuments in their true historic forms, but to reconstruct their (often imaginary) ‘original’ shapes, even with deletions and alterations in style. ‘Restoring’ a monument meant recovering its original idea, as if one could go back in time and identify with the creator of the work. Nineteenth-century restorations heavily modified the face of many Italian and European cities. The restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris by Viollet-le-Duc, realized after 1845, exemplifies the kind of changes that were made to monuments and the same urban fabric. According to Viollet-le-Duc, “restoring a building does not mean preserving, repairing, or rebuilding it, it means restoring it to a state of completeness that may never have existed in a given time”3. Fantasy restoration should be framed in the context of romantic nationalism and of the Gothic Revival, the rediscovery of medieval architecture that started in England after the 1740s and then spread in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. Restorations like those of the cathedrals of Paris (1845-1864), Cologne (1842-1880), Prague (1844-1929), and Florence (1876-1887), were aimed at shaping the identities of ‘imagined’ national communities4. It is also important to stress that nineteenth-century neo-Gothic movements and neo-medieval movements represent, in their broadest sense, a way in which western societies dealt with modernity in a time of rapid change5. By framing fantasy restoration within modernization resistance movements, we can better understand the role that the Tuscan ruling classes attributed to it in the nineteenth century.

From now on I will use the phrase ‘fantasy restoration’ to designate such kind of restoration. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture francaise VIII (Paris: A. Morel, 1875), s.v. “Restauration”, quoted in Eugenio Vassallo, “Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879)”, in Stella Casiello, ed., La cultura del restauro: teorie e fondatori (Venezia: Marsilio, 1996), 78. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London-New York: Verso, 2006). An example of such an attitude is provided by Victor Hugo, who equated Gothic architecture to French national architecture, strongly supporting its restoration. In his 1832 edition of Notre-Dame de Paris he recommends: “Inspirons, s’il est possible, à la nation l’amour de l’architecture nationale” [let us instill in the nation, as far as we can, the love for national architecture]. However, Victor Hugo, is also among the first who criticized, together with Ruskin, fantasy restoration. See Dezzi Bardeschi, Restauro, 118-129. 5 Cf. Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 7: “In the course of the revival the Gothic style was attached to social movements of every sort — from political liberalism to patriotic nationalism, from Roman Catholic solidarity to labor reform. Like Marxism, which also drew lessons from medieval society, the Gothic Revival offered a comprehensive response to the dislocations and traumas of the Industrial Revolution. In the broadest view, it is the story of Western civilization’s confrontation with modernity.” 2 3

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

Fig. 36 Gaetano Baccani, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pianta delle Case che compongono la Canonica di S. Maria del Fiore col nuovo progetto del Restauro di diverse case della medesima; e addirizzamento della Piazza del Duomoâ&#x20AC;?, ink and wash, 1823.

These classes were determined to maintain their cultural and political hegemony, and to curb any modernization processes. This political establishment celebrated the medieval past to maintain its status in an era of great turmoil. After the unification of Italy, the glorification of the Middle Ages also helped to strengthen the weak identity of the new nation. A number of fantasy restoration projects of the main city centers were carried out, which promoted an idealized and stereotypical image of the past. From this period we will consider in particular the works of Gaetano Baccani in Piazza del Duomo, Florence and of Giuseppe Partini in the center of Siena. While in the nineteenth century, fantasy restoration served to build a national historic imagery, under Fascism it also took on meanings that were more directly related to fascist ideology and rhetoric. In both cases the image of main Tuscan cities was largely redesigned, promoting an attitude towards history that is still today one of the main features of Tuscan people. From that period we will consider works executed by architect Giuseppe Castellucci in Arezzo in the 1930s.

Fig. 37 New buildings designed by Baccani on the northern side of the square in a sober neoclassical style.

Gaetano Baccani and the Sistematizzazione of the Piazza del Duomo in Florence In his role as architect of the Curia and of the Grand Duke, Gaetano Baccani was given a number of major assignments6. The most important was that of the ‘systematization’ of Piazza del Duomo, Florence. In the early nineteenth century this square had a very different appearance from the one it has now. The Duomo, instead of emerging as an isolated building in the large oval square that contains it, was surrounded by a number of small urban spaces, which obstructed the view of the monument in its entirety. Buildings approached the southern side of the church, resulting in a narrow space between the cathedral, Giotto’s bell tower, and the rectory. Gaetano Baccani was asked to redesign the piazza. The project, completed in 1823, pursued three main objectives: to modernize and restore the rectory of the cathedral, to streamline and beautify the square, and to create a striking view of the Duomo and of the Campanile. Baccani proposed to demolish much of the rectory and to expand the urban space on the south side of the church (fig. 34-36). In order to enhance the monumentality

For an analysis of Gaetano Baccani’s works see: Stefania Bertano and Angelamaria Quartulli, Gaetano Baccani Architetto nella Firenze dell’ultima stagione lorenese (Firenze: Pagliai Polistampa, 2002).

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 38 The long wall made of sarcophagi in the Gothic Revival style stretching from the facade of Santa Maria Novella to what is today Piazza Stazione.

opposite Fig. 39 The bell tower of Santa Croce (1842).

of the cathedral, it was decided that the new buildings were to be constructed in a sober neoclassical style (fig. 37). This intervention, which affected the main urban structure, opened a season of rehabilitation works on the historical center that were to culminate in the inauguration of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in 1895 (now Piazza della Repubblica) after the demolition of the Florence ‘ghetto’. It was also the precursor of similar works made in other Italian cities during the nineteenth century7. In 1840 Baccani was then commissioned to rearrange the interior of the Cathedral of Florence. The architect tried to provide order, symmetry and simplicity to the inside of the church, whose aspect was also very different from the one it has now. Several medieval altars, placed in a disorderly manner, were eliminated. Two large funerary monuments, the works of Paolo Uccello and of Andrea del Castagno, were removed from their original locations and positioned in a symmetrical manner. A new paving with geometric patterns was created. The presbytery enclosure and the macchine d’altare were removed8. Similar interventions were carried out by the same architect in the major Florentine churches. In 1842 the bell tower of Santa Croce was built (fig. 39). In 1857 a design was E.g., works by architect Giuseppe Mangoni in Piazza del Duomo in Milano amd in Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa. The macchine d’altare are complex baroque altar scenes, sometimes colossal in size, made with simple materials such as papier-mâché, wood, and stucco. 7 8

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 40 Giuseppe Castellazzi, restoration project for the Loggia del Bigallo in Piazza Duomo: situation before restoration (above) and after restoration (below). Fig. 41 The Loggia del Bigallo today.

developed which entailed the elimination of altars by Vasari from the nave of Santa Maria Novella and the creation of a furniture series in the neo-Gothic style. In 1859 the interior of the Basilica of San Lorenzo was restored, according to the Brunelleschi style. Other works recreated the medieval ‘flavor’ in urban public spaces. In 1865 a long wall was built stretching from the facade of Santa Maria Novella to what is today Piazza Stazione. It stretched along Piazza Santa Maria Novella and Via degli Avelli, and consisted of a series of sarcophagi in the style of the Gothic Revival (fig. 38). Another project that altered the image of the Piazza del Duomo is the restoration of the Loggia del Bigallo by Giuseppe Castellazzi. Here aediculae were reopened, frescoes were repainted, elegant mullioned windows were created on the first floor of the building, and the gutter and roof were rebuilt (fig. 40-41). The face of the square changed again as the new facade of the Duomo (1870-1883) was completed, designed by architect De Fabris. Viewed as a whole, urban restorations carried out in Florence in the nineteenth century substantially altered the appearance of its historic center. They promoted an idealized medieval image of the city and of the past, which suited the celebration of national and local identity.

Fig. 42 The facade of the Duomo of Siena after restorations carried out by Partini (1877-79). New statues were executed by Tito Sarrocchi and architectural ornaments by Leopoldo Maccari. The three golden mosaics were made from drawings by Alessandro Franchi and Luigi Mussini.

Giuseppe Partini and the ‘Reinvention’ of Neo-Gothic Siena Equally important restoration works were carried out in Siena, where a leading role was played by architect Giuseppe Partini. He built several facades in the neo-Gothic style, in which the rhythm and shape of windows, alternation between travertine and brick, and architectural details, were all inspired by the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena9. In 1867, at the age of twenty-five, Partini began the restoration of the cathedral. In little more than twenty years these fantasy restorations extended to a large portion of the building, radically changing the face of the cathedral and substantially emphasizing its Gothic aspect: the facade, the windows of the naves and of the choir, the marble floor, decoration of interior chapels, and part of the roof and of the dome were all redesigned in this style. The interior of the baptistery was also restored (fig. 42). 9 For an analysis of Giuseppe Partini’s architecture and a list of his works see: Maria Cristina Buscioni, Giuseppe Partini Architetto del Purismo senese (Firenze: Electa, 1981).

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

Fig. 43 Buildings in exposed bricks, one of the most distinctive and characteristic features of the historic center of Siena, are an invention of the nineteenth century. In the picture: the entrance to the old Jewish ghetto.

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

Fig. 44 Project by Giuseppe Partini (1882) for the monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi to be realized in Siena.

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

Fig. 45 Piazza Salimbeni, perspective view by Giuseppe Partini, 1875.

In 1870 Partini drafted an ambitious project to build two large neo-Gothic loggias in Piazza del Campo, next to the Palazzo Pubblico. Although the project was never built, due to economic restrictions, it shows the cultural attitude that inspired public works in Siena during these years. This same attitude, only a year later, was manifested in the project for the restoration of Piazza Salimbeni, in the very center of Siena. Here the headquarters of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena were located, one of the most prominent Italian banks. A project for the expansion and modernization of these headquarters was assigned to Partini. The architect hugely transformed the medieval fortress and completely redesigned the facades of the buildings that were located on the three structural sides of the square (fig. 45-46). The magnitude of restoration works carried out by Partini in Siena once again determined a significant alteration of the urban image. Besides developing neo-Gothic buildings in the old town, and in some of its most important hubs, Partini introduced the practice of changing the materials of ordinary buildings in the city center. In particular, he

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

Fig. 46 Palazzo Salimbeni, the historic headquarters of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, restored by Partini, decorated in the days of the Palio.

removed plaster from facades and uncovered structural walls, restoring and integrating their brick masonry. Buildings in exposed brick, one of the most distinctive and characteristic features of the historic center of Siena, are an invention of this time10 (fig. 43). Giuseppe Castellucci and Urban â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Re-editingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in the Center of Arezzo Restoration works carried out by Giuseppe Castellucci in Arezzo are similar to those implemented by Giuseppe Partini in Siena. However, they are even more significant because they were created almost sixty years later, in the early 1930s; they show the persistence in the use of fantasy restoration to reshape local identity and to emphasize the role of a city on the national level. Before Castellucciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interventions the historic center of Arezzo was in a state of relative decline. The cathedral bell tower was still unfinished, as were the facades of several church-

In the Middle Ages most of the houses were plastered with pastel colors, as shown in numerous paintings. See for example the fresco of the Buon Governo by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

es. The main public buildings of the municipal era were in a state of decay. The homes of Petrarch and Vasari — the most illustrious citizens of Arezzo — were not exploited for the promotion of the city. Only three medieval towers dotted the urban skyline. The main square was one of the few in Tuscany devoid of the municipal building. Arezzo was indeed the ‘city of silence’, as D’Annunzio defined it: sober and little known11. For these reasons, in the late 1920s a group of influential intellectuals and politicians of the city formed the Brigata dei Monumenti. This association promoted a campaign aimed at boosting the image of Arezzo and at making it one of the major tourist attractions in Tuscany. It was decided that the focus should be on the city-state before 1384, that is to say, before the Florentine dominion. Financial aid was given to landlords who restored their properties in the city center in the medieval style. Thanks to these economic incentives the plaster facades of many buildings were replaced with exposed stone facades decorated with large doors and windows, and with the typical decorative elements of civil Gothic Revival. Between 1926 and 1934 the Brigata funded an impressive number of restorations: eight churches, two public buildings, Petrarch’s house, several homes and towers, and the Piazza Vasari were redrawn in the medieval style. An idealized image of Medieval Arezzo was crafted, significantly different from that of the existing city. More than a century after the renewal of Piazza del Duomo in Florence by Baccani, fantasy restoration was still being used to reshape local and national identities. The redesigned urban spaces of Tuscan cities were largely used by the Fascist regime for its historical and political celebrations, some of which were clearly racist, as I will elaborate upon later (fig. 47). The Ambiguity of Fantasy Restoration in Tuscany A common feature of fantasy restoration in Tuscany, from the 1820s to the present, is the ambiguous relationship with the past and with historical truth. In the letter accompanying the project submitted by Baccani to the Deputazione sopra l’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the architect argued that the buildings to be demolished were just ‘temporary huts’ for craftsmen working on the construction of the basilica. Baccani claimed he was bringing to completion the original intention of creating “nicely and regularly shaped buildings [and of] providing the majestic construction with a wide square”12. In his own way the architect advanced a claim to historical authenticity. In fact, the project was inThis paragraph largely draws on Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 107-144. Archivio dell’Opera di S.Maria del Fiore, Serie XI, Deputazione Secolare sopra l’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore istituita nel 1818, 2, Negozi, 3, fols. 458r-464v. 11

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

Fig. 47 The celebration of the Giostra del Saracino in front of the medieval ‘scene’ recreated by Castellucci in a 1950s postcard.

spired by the culture of the time and aimed at transforming Florence into a modern city with large squares and avenues, similar to those of contemporary Paris13. Modernization requirements were combined, especially after the unification of Italy, with nationalistic claims. As Anderson teaches, nations are ‘imagined communities’ produced by cultural and political elites14. In order to create a common shared identity these elites use far-reaching historical narrations that are ‘imagined’, that are partially or totally invented. Literature, architecture, movies, and other forms of expression may all enter this cultural production process. Restoration works by Partini in Siena belong to the cultural and political climate of the Risorgimento. They affirmed the identity of Siena as a Ghibelline city-state, substantially anticlerical, in an era of struggle against the Papal State. It is no coincidence that Partini was asked to design a monumental hall to celebrate the deceased King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II (1878), and a monument in honor of the freemason Giuseppe Garibal13 Graham Smith, “Gaetano Baccani’s Systematization of the Piazza del Duomo in Florence”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 4 (2000), 454-477. 14 Anderson, Imagined Communities.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 48 The beauty of the traditional German city of Nuremberg celebrated in the film Triumph of the Will directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1935: German historical architecture, idealized and purified, was all one with identitarian and racist narratives developed by the Nazis.

di (1882), the national unification hero (fig. 44). Later, this cultural climate was inherited and exalted by Fascism. Before working in Arezzo, architect Castellucci oversaw among other things the ‘patriotic’ fantasy restoration of the Casa di Dante (1911), the main symbol of the ‘Italian genius’. In the 1930s he went on to restore the Casa del Petrarca in Arezzo, the home of another literary figure much celebrated during the Risorgimento years. Under Fascism, however, values inherited from the Risorgimento were exalted up to degeneration. In the restored Piazza Grande in Arezzo the Giostra del Saracino was held annually from 1931. During the joust the knights of the quarters of the historic center hit a metal puppet depicting the moro, or black man (fig. 49). It is significant that this subtly racist tournament, itself a fantasy restoration of the 1930s, was celebrated for the first time only a few years before Italy invaded Abyssinia. Due to the claim to authenticity of imagined communities, ‘fantasy restoration’ tends to be ‘removed’ almost in a Freudian manner. Over time, buildings that were stylistically restored ended up looking authentic. This is the case for restorations by Partini in Siena that, according to Borsi, “are capable of camouflaging, of disappearing”15. His works

Franco Borsi, “La verità del falso”, in Buscioni, Giuseppe Partini, 9.

fantasy restoration and identity building in tuscany

are even omitted in research by Tuscan authoritative scholars on the Duomo of Siena, whose image, as we have seen, he substantially altered. It is no coincidence that the re-editing of the historic center of Arezzo was in a sense ‘unveiled’ and rediscovered by Medina Lasansky, an American architectural historian16. In her book, the author tells of the bitter reactions on the occasion of a presentation of her research17. All this is not surprising. Once identity has been built, questioning it can be destabilizing. However, the deconstruction of identitarian narratives can be very useful. Such narratives are rooted in romantic nationalism, that is, in a conception of the nation as a homogeneous community in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, religion and customs. This idea of the nation may be reassuring in times of great economic and social change18. We are all aware, however, of the excesses produced by romantic nationalism in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the same years in which Fascism re-edited Tuscan historic centers in a neo-medieval style, Nazi Germany celebrated its parades in the wonderful city of Nuremberg. Gifted film director Leni Riefenstahl filmed these parades in her movie Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), extolling the beauty of the Franconian town which was also heavily ‘restored’ before its destruction by Allied bombs in 194519. German historical architecture, idealized and purified, was all one with identitarian and racist narratives developed by the Nazis (fig. 48). The movie was awarded a gold medal at the Venice Biennale in 1935. Three years later, at the same festival, Leni Riefenstahl went on to win the Mussolini Cup for best foreign movie with her film Olympia20. This matter is not only relevant from a historical point of view. Identitarian narratives developed in the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century continue to retain their power. Therefore ‘fantasy restoration’ continues to be practiced, albeit in a different way. Landscape purification policies implemented in Tuscany over the last few decades, on which we will focus in the next chapter, are based on an idealized and ahistorical idea of a Tuscan community that has never existed. They produce a ‘purified’ landscape that also has never existed historically. However, as I have already mentioned, their social effects have not as yet been fully appreciated.

Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 107-144. Lasansky recounts the reaction of a noble Baroness of Arezzo, offended by her presentation on the rewriting of urban space in Arezzo: ibid., 265. 18 Miroslav Hroch, “Introduction: National Romanticism”, in Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe: National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements, eds. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopecˇek (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 4-13. 19 Triumph des Willens, directed by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany: Reichsparteitags-Film, 1935). 20 Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany: Olympia-Film, 1938). 16

tuscany beyond tuscany â&#x20AC;˘ giulio giovannoni

politics of landscape purification

Today, the Tuscan landscape is perceived as the landscape of perfection. Refurbished farmhouses stand out in postcards, movies, and advertising brochures for the purity and simplicity of their geometries, for the quality of their (rigorously traditional) materials, and for their relationship with the landscape, which seems to correspond to the utopian ideal of a harmonious symbiosis between man and nature. However, such a landscape is the consequence of a process of purification and of a veritable cleansing of all the spatial expressions of everyday life — hovels and canopies made with waste materials, architectural additions, creative space appropriations — which featured historically in the living environments of the Tuscan countryside. The purification of everyday Tuscany commenced following the abandonment of the countryside by peasants after WWII and is largely the consequence of urban and regional policies which had the effect of turning a utopian and idealized view of the region into a reality, promoted by hegemonic classes and by foreign expatriates living in Tuscany from the nineteenth century onwards. This chapter aims to reveal the historical inconsistency of such a purified Tuscany, stressing the sharp contrasts between yesterday and today’s uses of space. It also intends to highlight the effects that the politics of landscape purification produce in terms of ‘social purification’. Everyday and Spatial Dynamics: a Compact Theoretical Framework By ‘everyday Tuscany’ I mean the manifestations in everyday life and in the use of space that do not conform to the more stereotypical and commodified depictions of the region that can be found in literature, journals, newspapers and tourist guides written in almost any language all over the world. By ‘politics of purification’ I mean the institutional and media reactions to such manifestations being developed through spatial policies, i.e. planning and regulatory policies, and through a certain way of structuring at various levels (political, journalistic, literary and cinematic) the discourse on Tuscan identity and tradition. Fig. 49 Landscape purification as social purification. During the Giostra del Saracino the knights of the quarters of the historic center of Arezzo hit a metal puppet depicting the moro, the black man. The photo, with no date but presumably from the 1950s, represents the moro.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Henri Lefebvre is the main contemporary philosopher who dealt simultaneously with everyday life and the production of space, in his endeavors to provide a real and tangible dimension to his social and political commitment. For these reasons, I will initially refer to some of Lefebvre’s writings in trying to define a short theoretical framework supporting my analysis. According to Lefebvre, Western thought considered everyday life to be trivial and inconsequential, conferring instead great dignity to ‘higher’ and more specialized pursuits characterized by abstractedness and detachment from the everyday world. The philosophical attitude towards abstract thought is eloquently expressed by the Cartesian aphorism cogito, ergo sum, which presumes the mind-body separation and implicitly asserts the insignificance of the lived and of everyday experience. In such dualism, Lefebvre recognizes the alienation of man from a vital aspect of his own life. Indeed, in everyday life human desires and potentialities are developed and realized concretely. Everyday life is the ‘connective tissue’ that confers structure and consistency to the whole of existence. In a modern world characterized by separation and fragmentation — of time and space, as well as of knowledge and activities — everyday life can be defined by difference: Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined as a totality. Considered in their specialization and their technicality, superior activities leave a ‘technical vacuum’ between one another which is filled up by everyday life1.

Analogously to everyday life, space was also largely neglected before Lefebvre, both in commitments to social reform and in the social sciences generally, as it is clearly stated in the opening words of Lefebvre’s treatise on The Production of Space: Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’, and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space’, therefore, would have sounded strange2.

But if everyday life is the existential continuum conferring unity and meaning to the whole life, space is the physical continuum on which existence unfolds, hence the strict integration of spatial and everyday dynamics. Therefore, both space and everyday life are the two main levels at which the alienation of modern man can be measured and for which re-appropriation strategies should be developed. 1 2

Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, Introduction, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 97. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1.

politics of landscape purification

In modernity the control, the organization, and ultimately the ‘colonization’ of everyday life are largely realized through the production of what Lefebvre calls ‘abstract space’. This is, in short, a space which has been reduced to pure commodity and which has thence been made homogeneous and interchangeable, like any other commodity. In technical terms, abstract space is realized through functional fragmentation, analytic decomposition, and through measurement and assessment in purely quantitative terms. Such space can be defined as a ‘product’ in the sense of an exchange of goods, but not as an oeuvre, that is a ‘work’ in the widest sense of the word. In practical terms, abstract space is emblematized by the grands ensembles, the massive public housing neighborhoods developed in France between the 1950s and the 1970s. In terms of everyday life, however, abstract space is generally characterized as being passively used, instead of being actively lived: its problem is that it is unfit to be used for a full and satisfying social life, which Lefebvre often exemplifies through the image of the popular feast. Everyday life, then, is a level where a dialectic interplay between alienation and disalienation, exclusion and reappropriation, unfolds. In the words of Gardiner: “What is required is a critical knowledge of the everyday, one that aims at the ‘dialectical transcendence’ of the present (aufhebung, to use the Hegelian term)”3. In such a way the critique of everyday life can make a “contribution to the art of living” and foster a “humanism which believes in the human because it knows it”4. Regarding space, this dialectic is reflected in a conflict between use value and exchange value: The fact is that use re-emerges sharply at odds with exchange in space, for it implies not ‘property’ but ‘appropriation’. Appropriation itself implies time (or times), rhythm (or rhythms), symbols, and a practice. The more space is functionalized — the more completely it falls under the sway of those ‘agents’ that have manipulated it so as to render it unifunctional — the less susceptible it becomes to appropriation. Why? Because in this way it is removed from the sphere of lived time, from the time of its ‘users’, which is a diverse and complex time5.

But how does such manipulation of space — and subsequently of everyday life — take hold? Here Lefebvre’s critique mainly targets the state, bureaucracies, and the architects and planners at their service, starting from Le Corbusier and modernist architects, whose architectural discourse “too often imitates or caricatures the discourse of power”6. We assume the aforedescribed theoretical framework as a useful reference in order to understand and explain the complex dynamics — between regulations, everyday life, and production of abstract versus lived spaces — existing in Tuscany today. According to such a frame-

Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000), 78. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 199, 232. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 356. 6 Ibid., 361.

3 4 5

Fig. 50 The House of Dante as it appeared on postcards before 1911.

opposite Fig. 51 The House of Dante after 1911, following its â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;reinventionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by architect Castellucci.

work, indeed, the effects of planning and of urban and building regulations should be measured for their impact on the capacity to promote, or contrarily to inhibit, the appropriation and usage of space and the unfolding of a non-alienated everyday life, that is, of a rich and satisfactory social life. Landscape Purification in Tuscany As everybody knows, Tuscany is a region of Italy that is globally recognized for the wealth of its history and the beauty of its landscape. Such features are both the cause and the effect of urban and landscape policies whose impact on everyday life and on spatial dynamics still needs to be assessed. In this chapter I refer to these normative and regulative approaches as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the policies of purificationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Their history is only partially written: Lasansky extensively covered the Fascist period, but a systematic study in the years of the Risorgimento is still missing7. A review of the policies of landscape purification in the post-WWII era has yet to be written

7 See Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, which devotes much discussion throughout to such policies during the Fascist period.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 52-53 The cleansing of the apse of San Lorenzo in Florence carried out between 1933 and 1938: the state before the works (left, 1920s postcard), and after (right, 1950s postcard).

and it is within the aims of this chapter to investigate them, with particular focus on their socio-spatial effects. The evolution of these policies over time reflects the shift in ideologies between the various ruling classes governing Tuscany from the Risorgimento era until today. During the Risorgimento, idealized representations of Tuscany were produced in literary and historical works ranging from the Sepolcri by Ugo Foscolo (1807) to Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870), from the historical biographies by Pasquale Villari (1859-82) to Gino Capponi’s Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (History of the Republic of Florence, 1875). Such idealization materialized itself in architectural interventions as the completion/remaking of the facades of the Duomo (1887) and of the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence (1863), the progressive staging of the latter as the Pantheon of the Italians, and the actual ‘invention’ of the House of Dante (1911) (fig. 50-51). Fascism assumed and maintained this project aimed at creating and strengthening national identity, translating it in a systematic and demanding set of interventions in historic centers, which in some cases produced a significant architectural cleansing and ‘purification’ of their urban images8. The created myth was turned into a reality, by conforming the latter to its idealized counter-image. An example of such interventions is the cleansing of the apsidal part of the Church of San Lorenzo of Florence from later volumetric additions, realized between 1933 and 1938 (fig. 52-53). In addition to the cultural and architectural production of idealized representations of ‘Tuscan characters’ conceived as synonymous with Italianity, from the beginning of the nineteenth century and throughout the entire Fascist Era a peculiar way of considering rural landscape was established, as the signifier of an honest and genuine society de8

Of Lasansky see also: “Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric”, 320-53.

politics of landscape purification

void of the vices and corruption which would feature within urban life. Such a symbolically charged perspective of the landscape was one of the pillars of the landed gentry’s ideology, since one of its main concerns was that of protecting its quasi-feudatory status quo from social instability risks connected to industrialization and urbanization. ‘Good landscape’ becomes synonymous with ‘good society’, while the terms ‘sharecropper’ and ‘peasant’ are artificially linked to the ideals of severity, moral integrity and loyalty to tradition — rather than to their very real conditions of poverty and exploitation. Such distorted and ideological glorification of the peasants’ condition comes with an analogously factitious celebration of rural architecture, whose inevitable precariousness and poverty — since the farmhouses in which most peasants lived at that time would better be described as hovels — is linked once again to virtuous austerity and rationality, if not to classical harmony and form. Such representations, be they literary, pictorial (as in Rosai’s frescoes and canvases), or photographic, systematically remove from their view both everyday life and the informal uses of space that this miserable social group inevitably made in its relentless struggle for survival. In the post-WWII era the Tuscan myth was so culturally rooted and socially accepted and shared, that the substitution of the ruling class determined by the fall of Fascism was not accompanied by a critical reconsideration of the myth. Although its ideological and justificatory framework basically changed, the politics of spatial purification became consolidated to the extent that it is still today one of the distinctive features of this region’s government in the national and European contexts. As we already noticed, the correspondence between the beauty of landscape and the virtues of the society that inhabits it carries on being implicitly assumed within urban and regional policies in Tuscany. Such a relationship of signification is at the core of public choices that have important social effects. Thanks to the pervasiveness of this way of structuring the discourse on Tuscany — in academic discussions, in media, and in decision making arenas — these policies end up being perceived as ‘natural’ without being sufficiently problematized and assessed. This way of framing the discourse on the region produces a basically Manichean division between its areas that better conform to its idealized and purified standard, and those that differ from such a view. It is interesting to recognize here the kind of geography that the aforementioned division between utopian and dystopian Tuscany produces. Such geography depends on a historically rooted way of valuing the territory according to its position on the plains or on the hills. As I mentioned in chapter two, this has been poetically expressed by the writer and poet Aldo Palazzeschi in his novel Sorelle materassi (The Materassi Sisters), as he writes, while describ-

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

ing the territory of Florence, that “If in this countryside the hills occupy the position of the lady — and almost always she is the true lady, the princess — the plain takes the place of the servant, the chambermaid or handmaid”9. In regional policies the plains end up coinciding with dystopian Tuscany, while the hills coincide with utopian Tuscany. The plains/hills opposition is also an opposition between old and new. I already described the method in which utopian Tuscany became realized in regional and local plans. I also showed that the plains/hills distinction clearly assumes the features of a program aimed at fostering a precise social geography. In the next section I will provide an account of techniques of landscape purification, understood as a set of legal and regulatory devices. The Technique of Landscape Purification A recent study conducted by a group of researchers from the University of Florence defined a method for interpreting and assessing the scenic congruity/incongruity of existing buildings10. The research, although commissioned by the Regione Sardegna, summarizes landscape purification systems largely practiced and rooted in Tuscany. For our purposes, it is significant that the regional administration of an island, which is quite remote from Tuscany, commissioned such research to a group of Tuscan scholars, being that Tuscany is the most strictly preserved region in the country. The results of this study are, in my opinion, of the greatest interest, since they systematize and bring to light a way of managing landscape which is very rooted in public administrations’ bureaucratic behavior. In this section I will describe this method and examine some of its applications, and later I will highlight some considerations on the effects produced by such landscape purification techniques on everyday life and on the usage of space in Tuscany. On the whole, the technique or ‘method’, to quote the authors, is structured into three phases: 1) the identification of the buildings which need to be evaluated; 2) the application of the evaluation method and classification of the incongruity by typology and degree; 3) the provision of an assessment report implicitly containing normative prescriptions for the restoration of congruity. The identification of buildings or constructions that need to be assessed in terms of landscape congruity is carried out, starting from suggestions made through a dedicated web portal. Suggestions can be made by anyone. After the suggestions have been collected, the congruity/incongruity assessment commences. A building is considered incongruPalazzeschi, Sisters Materassi, 506. Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Osservatorio della pianificazione urbanistica e della qualità del paesaggio, Qualità del paesaggio e opere incongrue (Olbia: Taphros, 2013). 9

politics of landscape purification

Fig. 54 At the ‘global context scale’ the interference of constructions with landscape forms, matrices, and structures is assessed. Fig. 55 At the ‘proximity context scale’ the relationship between constructions and contiguous elements is observed.

ous insofar as it stands in a ‘relationship of disharmony’ to its context. The landscape qualities with which the work interferes are identified using six groups of indicators concerning the sense of belonging, visual-perceptive qualities, environmental features, landscape semiotics, historical identity, and landscape elements which are protected by specific regulations. The first thing to be assessed is the scale at which the construction interferes with the landscape. Two possible scales are identified: the ‘proximity context scale’ and the ‘global context scale’. While in the first case the landscape alteration can only be perceived from nearby, in the second case the incongruous construction is visible from far away. Obviously enough, while in urban settings most incongruous buildings belong to the ‘proximity context scale’, in rural settings they are easily visible from a greater distance and interfere therefore with the ‘global context scale’ (fig. 54-55). At the ‘global context scale’ the interference of constructions with landscape forms, matrices and structures is assessed. At the ‘proximity context scale’, instead, the relationship of constructions with contiguous elements is observed and the grade (high, medium, low) of the alteration is determined. At the global context scale an incongruous construction may interfere with the visual-perceptive system (fig. 56), with environmental-ecological systems (fig. 57), or with the semiotic system (fig. 58). Incongruity with the visual system is defined as a “construction’s disharmony with the image-view of the observed landscape”11. This can depend on a peculiar location of a building, for example on a ridge, or on a marked difference in its architectural language from that of its contiguous constructions, a difference which should in any case be perceivable from far away. A work is considered incongruous with the environmental-ecological sys-

Ibid., 110.

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 56 Constructions that interfere with the visual-perceptive systems: a) dimensional incongruity, b) incongruity of shape, c) skyline alteration, d) relational discontinuity.

tem as far as it determines a discontinuity or an increase in the fragmentation of ecological corridors. Finally, incongruity with the semiotic system may occur if a destructuration or simplification of the ‘landscape matrix’ is produced, as may happen in the case of improper urbanization patterns or of unsuitably planned infrastructures. At the proximity context scale an incongruous construction may interfere with the visual-perceptive system (fig. 59), with the use-state-function system (fig. 60), or with the historical-identitarian system (fig. 61). Incongruity with the visual system is defined as a ‘semantic cacophony’ determined by the compositional and formal features of the construction, in itself or in relation to the nearby buildings. Some examples of visually incongruous situations provided by the research may be an addition built with different materials than those used for the original construction, a case of ‘excessive confusion’ of commercial signs, or some cases where the architectural language adopted for the whole building or for some of its details contrasts with the context. Incongruity with the usestate-function system may occur if a building is used for functions considered to be inconsistent with the building type or if the construction is in a state of decay and abandonment. Finally, incongruity with the historical-identitarian system occurs if a construction finds itself in historical urban tissues but is in contrast with them. The normative and practical implications of the aforedescribed purification technique

politics of landscape purification

Fig. 57 Landscape alterations that interfere with the ecological-environmental systems: a) consumption of agricultural land, b) fragmentation of environmental-ecological systems, c) interference with hydraulic systems, d) morphological alteration, e) incoherence in the use of vegetation.

are absolutely clear. They consist of the removal of whatever is not consistent with a static, ahistorical idea of landscape. A landscape characterized by uniformity of materials and building typologies, by a fundamentally univocal and fixed relationship between form and function, by the absence of variations from any average parameter featuring style as well as form, materials, size: this is essentially a ‘normalized’ landscape. Evidently, such normalized landscapes are fixed and do not allow for continuous and unceasing transformation. It is, using Lefebvre’s terminology, a ‘landscape-product’ instead of a ‘landscape-oeuvre’, a ‘commodified landscape’ instead of a ‘lived landscape’. Many things can be said about the kinds of aesthetics that advance with the policies and techniques of landscape purification, and about the effects that they produce in terms of their ba-

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 58 Interference with the semiotic system: a) semantic chaos determined by new elements, b) banalization of the semiotic system, c) breaking of existing patterns.

opposite Fig. 59 Interference with the visualperceptive system at the proximity scale: a) chromatic/ material, b) typological, c) dimensional, d) semantic chaos, e) relational disharmony.

nalization and simplification of landscape. The results of a way of producing space that prefers homogeneity to diversity, the old to the new, the static to the dynamic, risks producing an absolutely tedious uniformity, lacking in stimuli and devoid of the kind of unpredictability that attracts the curious eye and captures the interest of the visitor. But this is not the place to develop a ‘critique of the aesthetics of purification’ on its own aesthetic ground. In the final section of this study I will therefore restrict myself to highlighting the historical inconsistency of the purified version of Tuscany that is being produced by the aforementioned policies, and to suggest some hypotheses, both on their effects on everyday life, and on the relationship between landscape purification and social purification. Landscape Purification or Social Purification? As I already mentioned, at the foundation of the politics of landscape purification is the assumption of the existence of a correlation between the landscape’s beauty/purity and its society’s moral fiber. Such an assumption, whose origins can be traced back to the ideology of the Tuscan landed gentry in the nineteenth century, is also involved in today’s discourses on Tuscany. It is not difficult to demonstrate that such a correlation between landscape and society is completely historically inaccurate. Although many examples exist of rural architecture that had been formally designed by

politics of landscape purification

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 60 Alteration of the use-state-function system: a) abandonment, b) deterioration, c) incompletion, d) misuse.

landowners, rural houses have always been very adaptable to their dwellers’ space-usageneeds. One of the features recognizable as peculiar of these types of buildings is their spatial articulation in a multitude of volumes added at different times according to the appearance of new needs. Such spatial articulation, after all, is highly appreciated even today, although it has been subjected to a systematic architectural cleansing process. The product of what was in the past a continuous process of adaptation of space to changing needs, is today valued and appreciated, but as something static and unchangeable. In Lefebvrian terms, the oeuvre produced by the often-miserable inhabitants of the past in their everyday lives is enjoyed and consumed today in a basically ‘cryogenized’ manner. Most importantly, such an image is historically inconsistent. In their struggle for survival, the countryside was used by peasants, who produced any sort of shanty buildings, using whatever recycled materials were available to them, paying no attention at all to form and beauty. This still happens today in the few ‘surviving’ farmhouses that are still used

politics of landscape purification

Fig. 61 Alteration of the historical-identitarian system: a) volumetric additions, b) insertion of new elements, c) incongruous restorations.

by peasants (fig. 62). The reason why we forgot this is twofold: on the one hand photographic representations of rural Tuscany only selected peculiar constructions in particular moments, stressing the architectural value of buildings and almost completely depriving us of any information regarding real living conditions and space adaptations which went on; on the other hand the transformation of farmhouses into villas came after the process of purification which I previously described. Such a process entailed the demolition of incongruous additions, the substitution of waste materials with valuable ones, and the creation of new symmetries and formal rules (fig. 63). Reconstructing the purification of the Tuscan landscape as it happened in the last forty years, after farmhouses were bought and refurbished by Swiss and British citizens, requires long archival investigations. This landscape is, in a sense, becoming hyperreal. It is simplified and stereotypical, corresponding only in part to the reality of the Tuscan landscape due to the selectivity of its representations. Furthermore, large tracts of Tuscany, as I have already stated, today look purified and cryogenized. As previously mentioned, they are places where tiles on roofs are

Fig. 62 A ‘surviving’ farmhouse in the countryside of Florence: the use of recycled materials, and the shanties outside, along with the obvious state of poverty of the construction evident through its rudimentary design make of this farmhouse an authentic hovel.

sprayed to look old, acrylic paints substitute moss since there is no time for authentic mosses to develop: both time and place are, in fact, flattened to an ahistorical dimension, the dimension of a fixed, immutable, and perfected landscape, always ready to be depicted or ‘postcarded’ (fig. 22). What are the social effects of such a transformation? This landscape is perfect for touristic consumption, but does not fit with everyday life, which needs space adaptations and a certain freedom in the usage of space. Ugliness (which can be temporary, especially given the low-quality materials used for structures) is probably a constitutive dimension of a creative way of inhabiting a territory. Such transformations are not only happening in the Tuscan countryside but also in historical touristic centers, which in some cases end up resembling actual theme parks. In a lecture I gave at the University of Berkeley in 2013 I provocatively stressed this by positing the question: “Did God Move to the Suburbs?” while showing a picture of tourists in line in front of the Duomo beside a picture of believers attending an open air mass in front of a shanty community center in the neighborhood Le Piagge, which is very often depicted as a slum. In the second half of this book I speak about this part of Tuscany, which does not find its place in the dominant representations but which constitutes the living space of most Tuscans. In the next chapter, entitled “From Polycentrism to the Dispersed Centrality”, I

politics of landscape purification

Fig. 63 The ‘purification’ of a farmhouse in the countryside of Florence in the early 1970s: the state before (above) and after (below) restoration. The main actions consist of the elimination of ‘incongruous’ volumetric additions, the creation of symmetric arches, and the reopening of a ‘loggia’.

summarize the settlement transformations in the last one hundred and fifty years, and focus on the response of town planners to these transformations. I sustain that the Tuscan and Italian urban culture was not able to interpret the change and continues to see the city with eyes turned to the past. I pay particular attention therefore to some authors that, in my opinion, have proposed more adequate interpretative models for contemporary urban systems. Finally I deal with the design and policy implications of what I define as the passage from polycentrism to dispersed centrality.

from polycentrism to the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;dispersed centralityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The City and Country in the Florence Area The first four chapters of this book analyze and deconstruct the myth of Tuscany from different angles. Such a myth consists of a collection of narratives that idealize certain aspects of the social and landscape history of the region. Idealization goes hand in hand with the tendency to deny, hide, and demonize that which unveils the reductive, when not fake and artificial, nature of these narratives. Very often in the urban planning discourse the city of the past is contrasted with contemporary urbanization. According to such narratives, cities were once clearly separated from their countryside, and displayed a compact, centralized form. The diminishing of such a condition is read as an irreparable loss. The idea of city promoted by these narratives is simplistic and historically inaccurate. However, I argue that it contributes substantially to the production of Tuscan space, promoting once again the interests of the most advantaged social groups. Thomas Sieverts notes that cities are a recent phenomenon, developed in the Middle East and then spreading to Europe and the rest of the world. Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past was mostly nomadic. If the compact city that was clearly separated from the countryside ever existed, it did for but a short interlude in the history of mankind. Observing global contemporary urbanization we can clearly see that the age of compact cities is unquestionably over. Sieverts, like other contemporary urban planning scholars, proposes a new way of looking at urban dispersal. The myth of the old city, he argues, obstructs our view and prevents us from understanding and correctly designing contemporary human settlements1. In my deconstruction of the Tuscan myth I have not yet focused on how representations of the urban form affect the production of urban space in Tuscany. As I have said, these descriptions, based on the idea of a clear division between city and country, have implicit normative 1

Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: an Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, 12-43.

Fig. 64 Florentine sprawl in the Pianta della Catena, a map realized by engraver and painter Francesco Rosselli at the end of the fifteenth century.

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Fig. 65 Christaller’s central place model describes quite well the polycentric settlement structure typical of pre-industrial society and before the advent of the car.

opposite Fig. 66 Satellite view of the Florentine plain today.

implications. In fact, settlements that do not conform to the model are almost always represented negatively. The myth of the compact city is part of a wider set of ideological devices discussed in the previous chapters. In fact, dystopian representations of peripheries have a strong impact on urban policy-making. According to Lefebvre, the production of space happens on three different levels: a cultural/symbolic level, an experiential/lived level, and a designed level2. The fundamental thesis of my research is that there is a cause-effect relationship between the cultural and symbolic production of space and its physical production. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the effects of the myth/ideology of the compact city on the setting of the spatial policy agenda in the Florence area.

This categorization derives from my free interpretation of Lefebvre’s thought. In the words of the French philosopher the ‘spatial triad’ is constituted by: a) the “spatial practice”, b) “representations of space”, c) “representational spaces”. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.

In the history of planning there are many examples of cause-effect relationships between cultural/symbolic production of space, urban agenda-setting, and physical production of space. In her landmark book on the death and life of great American cities, Jane Jacobs demonstrates the perverse effects of media representations on urban policies. For example, the North End, a lively Italian-American neighborhood in Boston, was typically described as a slum by the media and by policy makers. Such descriptions were in outright contradiction with the empirical data collected by the author. Be that as it may, they produced a number of negative effects: they prevented banks from funding any refurbishment projects, they induced planners and policy-makers to conceive of disruptive slum clearance plans, and they finally made the slum a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also thanks to Jacobs, the North End was saved and is today one of Boston’s main tourist attractions3. However, in many other situations the ‘rhetoric of slum’ has produced (and still produces) disruptive effects both socially and physically. So what are the effects of the myth of the compact city on the production of space in Tuscany? I believe these effects are quite similar to those described by Jacobs for Boston’s North End. Spatial narratives described in the chapter on utopia and dystopia are based on a dualistic understanding of Tuscan spaces. While the bel paesaggio and historic towns are celebrated and idealized, peripheries and dispersed urbanization are despised and disregarded. So far I have examined the effects of these self-fulfilling narratives on the production of the bel paesaggio and of historic city centers. In this chapter, I will be dealing with the spatial production of the dystopian part of the myth: the periphery. 3

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 7-13.

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Just as utopia and dystopia are two inseparable sides of the same coin, so the idea that the periphery is a cancer, a problem, is implicit in the myth of the compact city. The ideological nature of the myth is also inseparable from its normativity. The city of the past, whose compactness is taken for granted, is the model and the rule. The periphery, on the contrary, which is fragmented and dispersed, is seen as the violation of the rule to be condemned and fought against. And yet the idea that old Tuscan cities were compact, or at least significantly more compact than today, is groundless. First of all, it should be noted that in the past the population was much more dispersed: there was, at least from this standpoint, much more sprawl. In fact, since the post-war period there has been a steady trend towards urbanization. After all, this trend has lasted for decades all over the world. In 1911, 45.95% of the Tuscan population was ‘scattered’ in farmhouses and in very small nuclei4. In 2011, however, only 3.24% of Tuscans lived in scattered homes and 8.03% in small nuclei5. But there is more. The shape of the city has always been sprawling and fragmented. One need only look at the Pianta della Catena, a bird’s eye perspective of the City of Florence drawn in 1584, for proof of this. The illustration here shows what geographers call the ‘fringe belt’, that is, the transition zone between the city and the country (fig. 64). The map shows that the morphological features of the Florentine suburbs at the end of the sixteenth century are similar to those of contemporary peripheries. One can recognize the main types of sprawl identified in North American literature on urban dispersal, such as scattered developments, ribbon developments, leapfrog developments, and so on6. Almost three hundred years later, in 1861, the shape of the city has not changed significantly. The line of medieval walls, still existing before the demolitions proposed by Giuseppe Poggi, was basically independent from the shape of the urban fabric. This was characterized, both inside and outside the urban walls, by the alternation of built fringes and of green voids. The shape of the city was fragmented and there were many situations of urban/rural mix. What has changed, obviously, is the overall dimension of this phenomenon. In this chapter, I describe the main urban transformations of the last 150 years. Then I discuss how planners and politicians interpreted and understood these changes. I argue that the polycentric metaphor is used as a descriptive and normative tool to promote a to-

Riccardo Mariani, Città e campagna: in Italia, 1917-1943 (Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1986), 82. Istat 2011 Census, data available at http://dati-censimentopopolazione.istat.it E.g. Reid H. Ewing, “Characteristics, Causes, and Effects of Sprawl: A Literature Review”, Environmental and Urban Studies 21, no. 2 (1994), 1-15. 4 5 6

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Fig. 67 A figure-ground representation of the Florentine plain: undeveloped areas are in black, settlements are in white. Moving from east to west there may appear to be a reversal of the figure-ground relationship: while to the east the city may be interpreted as the figure and the countryside the ground, to the west the opposite may likely be the case. This predominance of undeveloped space is due to the protection policies of the hills that surround the city to the north, east and south.

tally unrealistic separation between the city and the country. I sustain that the Tuscan and Italian urban culture was not able to interpret the change and continues to see the city from a traditionalist perspective. This prevents us from appropriately designing contemporary suburbs. I give specific attention therefore to some authors who, in my opinion, have proposed more adequate interpretative models for contemporary urban systems. Finally, I deal with design and policy implications of what I define as the passage from polycentrism to dispersed centrality. The Explosion of the City In the last one and a half centuries the urban population of the Florence area has tripled from about two to about six hundred thousand individuals. The growth was evenly distributed over most of the period, with higher rates in the postwar decades and a temporary reversal after 1981. During the same time the area experienced massive urbanization, starting from the main suburban roads. The progress of urbanization was driven by the same principles that led the growth of cities in the past. However, the rate of growth had changed dramatically. As in many other cities around the world, at the end of this process the open countryside became an internal figure against the ‘background’ of the settled area.

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Observing urban settlements in the metropolitan area around Florence we note their radial development, mainly oriented westwards (fig. 66). Florence is enclosed to the north and northeast by pre-Apennine hills, and to the southeast by the northern foothills of the Chianti. Most of these areas are listed as protected. Therefore, urbanization mainly developed westwards along major historical roads connecting Florence to Sesto, Prato, Pistoia, and Pisa. A figure-ground representation of these settlements and undeveloped areas allows the immediate appreciation of the reversal of the relationship between buildings and voids progressing from east to west (fig. 67). Whereas in the eastern part of the area the urban fabric stands out as a white figure on a black background (made up of hilly areas that are mostly preserved), in the western part agricultural voids stand out as black figures on a white background (made of wide ribbon developments). Although there is some historical continuity in the formation process of modern urbanization, contemporary suburbs are unquestionably very different from old city centers. This requires us to rethink concepts that we are accustomed to applying to understand cities. Many scholars around the world have studied these new suburban environments, and analyzed the economic and social forces that produced them. In their research a multiplicity of definitions was given, variously related to the morphology of settlements and to economic dynamics. A complete list would be too long. Here are just a few examples: informational city, edge city, global region, technopolis, post-suburbia, reverse city, exopolis, post-metropolis, edgeless city, Zwischenstadt, metropolitan archipelago7. Although this ‘naming game’ can be confusing, it is clear that traditional distinctions between town and country, center and periphery, natural and artificial, are now outdated. In addition to being useless, they prevent us from correctly understanding and governing this new, complex reality. This holds true also for the Florence outskirts, which appear as the landscape of fragmentation, containing various assortments of graveyards, penitentiaries, hospitals, major

7 Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991); David Sadler, The Global Region: Production, State Policies, and Uneven Development (New York: Pergamon Press, 1992); Allen J. Scott, Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jon Teaford, Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Paola Viganò, La Città Elementare (Milano: Skira, 2001); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996); Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Malden: Blackwell, 2000); Robert E. Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: an Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt; Francesco Indovina, Dalla città diffusa all’arcipelago metropolitano (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2009).

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infrastructures, malls, parking lots, multi-cinemas, gas stations, warehouses, hospitals, barracks, sports facilities, outlets, fragments of compact city, neighborhood units, linear developments; all of these intermingled throughout with large undeveloped areas for urban agriculture or with no apparent use. This landscape is neither rural nor urban. It is neither the dense old center of the city, where we go shopping and entertain amidst tourists, nor is it the perfect Tuscan landscape of the hills, where we relax in resorts and spas. In this territory — characterized by poor architectural values and the almost total lack of a defined urban form — about half of Tuscans spend their existence. In such living space, away from the hordes of tourists visiting the center of Florence and other historic centers, apparently anonymous spaces are used for social life. Some youngsters listen to music at night in the parking lot of a mall. A group enjoys a beer around the outdoor tables of McDonald’s, at the gas station. Others gather at the multi-cinema, watch a movie, and spend some time in its ground-floor pubs. Demanding palates stop at the coffee shop at the other gas station, which is one of the best in the area. Mothers make an appointment at the outlet, leave their children with their husbands at the playground, and eat a pizza at night at the restaurant in a refurbished farmhouse nearby. Every day the ordinary spaces of the suburbs are used by its citizens in almost infinite ways, satisfying their social and material needs. These areas deserve to be observed and studied without prejudice. We should go beyond old disciplinary paradigms and seize the urban design opportunities provided by the presence of a rich social fabric. However, urban planners are particularly reluctant to relinquish the traditional polycentric model that conceives of the city and the country as two quite distinct elements. Although urban economists interpret the polycentric metaphor in a totally different way from planners, in some plans the two meanings tend to overlap equivocally. Therefore, in order to provide a more accurate analysis of such plans, in the next section I will dwell on the different meanings of the term ‘polycentrism’. Economic and Urban Polycentrism The notion of polycentrism is used in economic and urban literature to emphasize different aspects of urbanization. In urban economics and in programming tools it is used to describe settlements featuring several interdependent and complementary centers. The basic criterion is that these centers should work as a whole; similar to how a larger city that contained them would work. Instead, in the urban planning field the term polycentrism mainly connotes systems in which urban centers are clearly separated from one another by open territory. In this case the criterion is the distinction, separation and legibility of towns. Therefore, there is no connection between a polycentric system in the economic sense and

tuscany beyond tuscany • giulio giovannoni

Fig. 68 “Typical view of Broadacre countryside. Patterns of cultivation mingling with good buildings. Helicopter seen in foreground and, beyond, automatic overpass enabling continuous, uninterrupted traffic four ways.” From F.L.Wright, The Living City, 1958. Although the Broadacre City is a utopian project, the dissolution of the city in the country envisioned by Wright has often become a reality: his project was in a sense ‘prophetic’.

that in the urban planning sense. For example, a regional system can be considered to be polycentric in the urban planning sense if its centers are clearly separated from each other, but not in the economic sense if there are no significant economic interdependencies between them. Similarly, a system of economically interdependent urban centers which are no longer clearly distinguishable from each other due to their being variously connected by urbanization would be defined as polycentric by urban economists. In urban literature however this same system would probably be described as sprawl, metropolitan archipelago8, generic city9, or such like. An example of these different perspectives can be seen in the Los Angeles area, which is described as a polycentric metropolitan region in economic research, and as sprawl in ur8 9

Indovina, Dalla città diffusa all’arcipelago metropolitano. Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 1248-1264.

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ban and regional studies. A contrasting example is that of small historical urban centers of rural Tuscany. These centers remained essentially unchanged because of post-war depopulation and abandonment. Subsequent protection policies preserve them to this day, and in recent years they have undergone substantial touristic development. While spatial planning tools describe these settlements as polycentric systems, in economic planning documents they are treated as tourist districts. Similar differences in meaning can be detected when the term polycentrism is used with normative purposes. Urban planners mainly use it as part of protection policies aimed at strengthening the physical separation between urban centers. Urban economists, by contrast, employ it in the context of development policies aimed at promoting systemic synergies between different centers of a region. In the following section, I will focus on how the concept of polycentrism is used in spatial plans in Tuscany, as both an analytical and a normative tool. In doing so, I will highlight the limits of such a way of conceptualizing contemporary urbanization. Normative Polycentrism and City-Country Division in Tuscan Regional Plans As I said, in Tuscan regional plans polycentrism is linked to the conceptualization of the city and country as two distinct entities and to protection policies aimed at preserving and strengthening such a distinction. Among the strategic objectives of the Piano territoriale di coordinamento (territorial coordination plan) of the Province of Florence, whose update entered into force in March 2013, is the “preservation of the reticular and polycentric character of settlements”10. This is part of an anti-sprawl policy that includes actions such as reconfiguring the boundary which separates the city from the country, containing soil consumption, and opposing the merging of urban areas which were once separated from each other11. Therefore, the plan proposes “an urban and territorial polycentrism to enhance and support individual local identities, starting from their economic, social and territorial features, and at the same time to connect and integrate them into a network based on complementarity and specialization of different systems”12. The plan’s strategy is ambiguous. On the one hand it promotes what we called ‘urban polycentrism’ (countering sprawl and the merging of settlements, redefining urban edges, reinforcProvincia di Firenze, Piano territoriale di coordinamento, Norme Tecniche di Attuazione (Firenze 2013), 5. “Zoning of open areas is closely related to locating the urban edge and aims: to prevent further consumption of agricultural land and to encourage redevelopment of urban-rural transition fringes; to prevent settlements from merging and from consequently saturating residual voids, which should be mainly preserved as green corridors of the provincial ecological network; to preserve and enhance the polycentric and reticular structure of settlements; to safeguard rural land, that is historically featured by multiple and complex functions” (ibid., 20). 12 Provincia di Firenze, Piano territoriale di coordinamento, Relazione, (Firenze 2013), 11. 10 11

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ing local identities). But on the other hand its language refers to what we called ‘economic polycentrism’ (fostering complementarity and promoting specialization between urban centers). The problem with this is that in the real Tuscany, urban polycentrism exists only in rural and touristic areas, whereas economic polycentrism is a typical feature of sprawl and of the urbanized countryside. Furthermore, it is anachronistic to plan polycentrism in an area where —in terms of Gestalt analysis — the countryside has become the ‘figure’, and settlements have become the ‘ground’ (fig. 67). Some reversal or at least change in the design approach should correspond to the reversal of the city/countryside relationship. At least from this standpoint the plan’s approach is backward-looking. The Piano d’indirizzo territoriale (territorial steering plan), passed by the Regional Administration of Tuscany, applies to the entire region and its regulations are more vague. Its strategic vision is based on two components: the ‘urban world’ and the ‘rural universe’. The urban world of Tuscany is made of the “dense network of cities and towns that with different thickness, texture, construction, grammar, syntax and form, mark and distinguish the regional space, outlining a polycentric system of unparalleled historical, cultural and economic value”. It is “a network of cities that spread over the territory, interconnected with dense relationships and dynamics, but that does not invade or eat up the territory with undistinguishable amorphous conurbations”. The rural universe of Tuscany is defined as “diverse rural landscapes having distinct economic and social histories but sharing — both in the plains and on the hills — a high degree of anthropization”. These rural landscapes, which have varying degrees of urbanization, “are strictly connected to urban centers” and are as “a world that surrounds and permeates the inner sphere of cities, their urban fabric, the lifestyle of their citizens, for whom… the country and the city are always mutually at hand”13. The plan acknowledges that this division is an analytical simplification. However, only the Tyrrhenian coast and the Apennine Mountains are listed as exceptions to it. The urbanized countryside and peri-urban settlements are not even mentioned. It is also significant that the plan identifies as an emblematic example of the urban/rural relationship the town of Piombino and its agricultural hinterland of the Val di Cornia: a small city on the Tuscan coast which is not at all representative of the complexity of the region. This simple strategic framework promotes a pre-industrial idea of the city/country relationship. It can describe areas “affected by the process of abandonment” in the postWWII decades that have today become a large tourist area14. However, it does not deal 13 14

Ibid., 41. Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico della Toscana, 169.

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with the “urbanized countryside, with its mesh, sometimes sparse, sometimes dense, made of roads, houses and factories, with its mixture of urban and rural”15. Nor does it deal with much of the suburbs, characterized as they are by high fragmentation and by a similar mix of urban, industrial, and rural functions. This past-oriented attitude is very much rooted in Italian planning culture, which often blames urban dispersal without really studying and understanding it. In the next section, I will outline the debate on urban dispersal in Italy, from the first socio-economic studies, which had a pivotal role in understanding the phenomenon, to the subsequent contributions of a small number of unorthodox planners. Urban Dispersal and Planning Culture In Italy the first studies on urban dispersal were not made by planners, but by economists and sociologists. These studies investigated the social dynamics that led to the formation of small and medium enterprise systems in some regions of Italy16. The new systems of enterprises developed on sprawling historical settlements, and as such, their growth was framed in a long and uninterrupted historical process17. Only later did urban planners become interested in these phenomena. However, they always considered sprawl as a problem to be solved, rather than as something to be managed and improved. Urban planners typically demonstrate a closed mind to the occurrence of sprawl. Research by the Istituto Regionale di Programmazione Economica della Toscana (IRPET) on the ‘urbanized countryside’ and on ‘light’ industrialization in Tuscany was met with great skepticism, not to mention ostracism, by urban planners. As Giacomo Becattini reminded us some ten years after: “Take the case of the new term ‘urbanized countryside’. The powerful ‘party of planners’ (unfortunately powerful only in discussions) regards it as a dangerous apology of ‘suburban bidonvilles’ and others as an attack on the basic idea that social and political progress proceeds one-way from city to country. It will take many years for the term, which meanwhile had established itself in national debate, to be allowed to ‘return home’”18. However, in social and economic research, alternative interpretations to those based on the then dominant Fordist paradigm were offered in these years. These interpretations made it possible “to overcome the resistance of standard economists (and sociologists), [and to affirm the idea] of a ‘third’ Italy, different in its structure and history from the first Italy (the indusIbid., 181. Becattini, Lo sviluppo economico della Toscana; Arnaldo Bagnasco, Tre Italie: la problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977); Arnaldo Bagnasco, La costruzione sociale del mercato: studi sullo sviluppo di piccola impresa in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988). 17 Giuseppe De Rita, La traccia interrotta dello sviluppo: dal ‘sistema-Paese’ alla ‘poliarchia’ (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000). 18 Giacomo Becattini, ed., Mercato e forze locali: il distretto industriale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 14. 15

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trial Triangle) and from the second Italy (the South and Islands)”19. As we know, this had important effects on development policies. Instead, almost thirty years after publication of the aforementioned studies, attitudes towards urban sprawl has not changed among planners, despite advances in the knowledge of the phenomenon. “It had been clear for a long time that the city/country dichotomy was obsolete; it was obvious that urbanization of the countryside was proceeding, but only in the last ten years, more or less. An attempt was made to evaluate and interpret the phenomenon, but, exaggerating, tools being used belonged to the previous world in which the city was what we understood, or rather we idealized, whereas all transformations of the countryside were considered an ‘attack’ to landscape conservation. The effect of this situation was the spread of ‘metaphors’ and of generic ‘interpretations’. Terms being used are, in fact, many and diverse: urbanization of the countryside, dispersed urbanization, urban sprawl, villettopoli, and finally… dispersed city, this term then classified as the ‘negation of the city’”20. The incapacity of planners to overcome the old city/country dichotomy prevented them from seizing the potential of urban dispersal. Until recently, specific design approaches for these settlement systems had not been developed. In particular, some interesting opportunities for creating innovative social spaces were completely missed, as I will discuss later. ‘Middle Landscapes’ Between Old and New Paradigms Most of contemporary urbanized landscapes are ‘in-between landscapes’, halfway between urban and rural. In the face of such fragmented and dispersed landscapes practitioners and scholars may: a) accept the novelty and come to terms with it, or b) reject it and try to recreate traditional urban landscapes. Although both approaches are legitimate, the traditionalist one may at best apply to fragments of larger patchworks which remain in any case complex and chaotic21. They can create, say, oases of negentropic order within wholes distinguished by entropic disorder. Among urban design practitioners who reinvented their methods in trying to cope with change, Koolaas and OMA are almost unrestrained in exploring the implications of these changes on urban design, and are at the end of a wider spectrum of design attitudes. Ibid., 10. Indovina, Dalla città diffusa all’arcipelago metropolitano, 113. 21 For a review of the major neo-traditionalist approaches in the European continent and in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, see Nan Ellin, “Neorationalism”, and “Neotraditional Urbanism or the New Urbanism”, in Postmodern Urbanism (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 23-37, 93-113. 19 20

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A younger generation of architects, from De Meulder to Viganò22, deals even more directly with the Sprawltown or the Zwischenstadt, often conceiving new forms of intermingled urbanity and rurality23. They basically consider fragmentation as an opportunity for hosting new forms of everyday life and for promoting sustainability. Indeterminateness of form and uses can produce unexpected appropriations by the people, which is worth discovering and taking into account before designing. In such situations of fragmentation, the only seemingly legitimate quest for unity of urban form possibly comes from attempts to reconnect urban voids into a web of mostly green areas, conceived as ‘wholes’ that can support diverse social activities and enhance urban environmental performances. Even in Italy, after the early 2000s, new ways of looking at urban sprawl were established, albeit by a strict minority of scholars. Paola Viganò follows “a line and a tradition of thought that looks at cities in terms of inversion of the relationships between void and mass, that is, in terms of the ‘Reverse City’”24. Soviet disurbanism in the 1920s, F.L.Wright’s Broadacre City, H.G.Wells’ urban region, and L. Quaroni’s città regione (city-region), among others, belong to this research tradition (fig. 68). In the context of Italian urban planning research, which is traditionalist and past-oriented, reviving these alternative ways of looking at the relationships between city and country, mass and void, holds a disruptive meaning. The reversal of perspective makes possible new readings of urbanization processes in Italy and permits the identification of new design opportunities in the territories of urban dispersal. In design explorations by Secchi and Viganò for the metro region of Venice, this approach translates into “a project of isotropy [that] is at the same time the recognition of regional specificities, a scenario to be investigated in its different outcomes, and a design hypothesis which may be practically conceived acting on water systems, mobility and public transport, sustainable mobility, a sprawling welfare system, new forms of agriculture, and decentralized energy production”25. Indovina, highlighting limitations of existing research on urban sprawl, raises the question: “Is there something different and new beyond dispersal? How can we improve livability in the context of current trends?”26. To answer these questions Indovina replaces the metaphor

Various design approaches to dispersed and fragmented settlements are presented in: Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel, eds., “Cities of Dispersal,” special issue of AD Architectural Design 78, no. 1, Wiley (2008). 23 Ingersoll, Sprawltown: Looking for the City on its Edges; Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: an Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. 24 Paola Viganò, La Città Elementare (Milano: Skira, 2001), 127-150. 25 Paola Viganò, “Water and Asphalt: the Project of Isotropy in the Metropolitan Region of Venice”, in “Cities of Dispersal”, eds. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel, special issue of Architectural Design 78 (2008), 37. 26 Indovina, Dalla città diffusa all’arcipelago metropolitano, 209-230. 22

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Fig. 69 The central Via dei Calzaiuoli, connecting the Duomo to the Palazzo Vecchio. While today it is the pedestrian heart of the city, in the past it was an important traffic hub. It is significant that until the middle of the 1800s the customs of Florence were located in Palazzo Vecchio.

città diffusa, used to describe dispersed urbanization in Veneto, with the metaphor metropolitan archipelago. This analogy describes new urbanization trends and foreshadows a different design approach. New trends consist of the relocation to suburbs of central urban functions which until then were exclusive to traditional compact cities: government services (political, administrative, economic, media, etc.), centers for excellence (in research, training, culture), and so on. New urbanization patterns affect mobility flow and attract other ‘central’ functions to suburbs: “A trend arises that can be defined as territorially articulated specialization: the territory is organized in small specialized centers (e.g. for commerce, leisure, healthcare, higher education, theater, etc.) whose fruition is not ‘local’ (by people living in the surroundings), but regional, that extends to a wider area; each ‘micro’ pole serves the population of the entire region”27. 27

Ibid., 221.

from polycentrism to the ‘dispersed centrality’

Florence Commerce Heavy Traffic Social life

Rome Fig. 70 The coinciding of heavy traffic, commerce and public life: the case of Siena.

ERCE SOCIAL LIFE

This different design approach consists of going beyond the rejection of urban sprawl, in recognizing its positive aspects, and in trying to contain its environmental and economic costs. This implies reassessing the role of regional planning. As a result of the aforementioned changes, regional planning becomes “the most advanced frontier of urban and regional government.” Indovina argues that regional planning has never been focused on designing and managing the metropolitan archipelago, and formulates a hypothesis about its possible function: “it cannot but play a key role in the construction of an enlarged urban context; it should define articulated polarities for the entire territory; it should ‘include’ (in terms of definition and implementation) all public policies necessary to accomplish goals”28. It should also promote fairness and culture, local development and the diffusion of innovation, densification and the reuse of real estate assets, the settlement of conflicts and the development of infrastructures. The aforementioned studies by Viganò and Indovina foreshadow a paradigm shift in our way

Ibid., 225.

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Fig. 71 The explosion of the center in the Florence plain. Urban commercial centers coexist with large commercial, leisure and service facilities close to the major mobility nodes. This set of facilities is arranged in a loop around a large void, the Florence Metropolitan Park, which is in fact the true center of the metropolitan area.

Administrative Boundaries Highways Thoroughfares Main Roads Planned Roads Railroads Parco della Piana Monte Morello Urban Areas Tertiary Mixed Areas Industrial Areas Regional Facilities Central Shopping Areas Large Retail Medium Retail (1000-2500 sqm) Existing New Business Types Large Food Retail Shopping Center Department Store Large Specialist Retail

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Fig. 72 The main square of the historic center of Sesto Fiorentino, now entirely peripheral to mobility flow.

opposite Fig. 73 The Ipercoop shopping mall in Sesto Fiorentino, a ‘new center’ of the city located on a major thoroughfare and facing the Florence Metropolitan Park.

of looking at urban dispersal. They overcome and in a sense ‘overturn’ dominant ways by which urban dispersal was interpreted and understood in the past. Their focus shifts from the city to the suburbs. In the isotropic space metaphor used by Viganò the compact city has practically no existence. In the metropolitan archipelago metaphor it becomes rock, or at best island: important but no more central. In both metaphors the distinction between center and periphery disappears: everything is central and peripheral at the same time. I believe we are facing a paradigm shift in the making. As in any scientific revolution this perspective has its hardest opponents, certainly including Gibelli and Salzano, with their “strict and well-argued criticism of indifference to public and collective costs of urban sprawl shown by much of recent Italian planning culture, and [their] awareness of the need for reforms in the field of urban and regional planning”29. However, traditional urban paradigms are in fact totally inadequate to explain contemporary transformations. Management methods based on such paradigms do not go beyond a more or less disguised throwback. As argued by Sieverts, the main concepts traditionally related to the idea of the city, such as urban-ness, centrality, density, and mixed use, are obsolete and should be replaced30. 29 30

Maria C. Gibelli and Edoardo Salzano, No sprawl (Firenze: Alinea, 2007), back cover. Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: an Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, 19-45.

From Polycentrism to the Dispersed Centrality: Towards a New Form of Regional Planning The analysis conducted so far reveals some shared points from which we can start to build a new urban paradigm. In particular, there is a significant convergence regarding the need to manage new settlements at the regional scale. This is clear in Viganò’s design proposals, in Indovina’s analysis, and in that of Sieverts, who proposes “a new form of regional planning”31. This is a fundamental move that should be of great concern to planners. In fact, accepting change and working on a new paradigm, urban planning comes to play a key role despite its marginalization in recent decades. However, I believe that the contents and role of this new form of planning have not yet been defined in a convincing and exhaustive manner. My hypothesis proposes that not only regional planning, but planning at diverse scales should focus on the designing of infrastructural and ecological networks conceived as integrated systems of public spaces. I will try to explain the two main reasons for this. The first is that one of the main aspects of urban sprawl is the abundance of open spaces. Al31

Ibid., 121-148.

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most every building is contiguous with or at least close to some plot of green land that is used for urban farming, for parks, or that is unused. This allows the designing of open spaces as an integrated system of interconnected elements. This system can be thought of as a dispersed centrality, or as an isotropic center, which can be accessed from any part of the territory. This position is not distant from that of landscape urbanism scholars and practitioners32. The second reason is that public space in contemporary cities lost some of its most important functions and features: the function of connecting and the fact of being itself part of the mobility infrastructure. Having lost this purpose, traditional public spaces are often on the margins of the main flow of people, goods and information. I believe that in urban studies this major change did not get the attention it deserves. And indeed, it has tremendous consequences on the shape and functioning of urban systems. To understand the extent of the change you may notice that in all historic towns public spaces largely coincided with major regional routes. For example, the central Via dei Banchi in Siena connected the main squares and public spaces of the city while being at the same time the urban section of a regional route, the Via Cassia, connecting Rome to Florence. Similarly in Florence, as in all European cities, main public spaces were highly integrated into the urban sections of major regional routes. Slow and fast mobility coexisted on the same infrastructure and public spaces were the main flow channels (fig. 69-70). In contemporary cities all this is no longer possible. For obvious reasons, slow and fast mobility use separate networks. Compared to the past, the ‘center’ — understood as infrastructure where social life concentrates — was ‘unpacked’ into at least three components: high speed thoroughfares exclusively dedicated to mobility, slow vehicular streets that can still accommodate some central functions, and alternative mobility networks mostly dedicated to pedestrian and cycle traffic. For the sake of simplicity I will call these three networks the ‘fast network’, the ‘slow network’ and the ‘alternative network’ respectively. The meta-center made up of such networks is at the same time isotropic, reticular, and multilevel. Functional nodes linked to these networks are, so to speak, the new dispersed center of the contemporary city: commercial spaces close to the fast network, pedestrian-

According to Charles Waldheim: “In place of regional and historical distinctions, many industrial cities have long since lost most of their inhabitants to their decentralized suburban surroundings, in place of traditional, dense urban form, most North Americans spend their time in built environments characterized by decreased density, easy accommodation of the automobile, and public realms characterized by extensive vegetation. In this horizontal field of urbanisation, landscape has a newfound relevance, offering a multivalent and manifold medium for the making of urban form, and in particular in the context of complex natural environments, post-industrial sites, and public infrastructure”. Charles Waldheim, Landscape Urbanism Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 15.

from polycentrism to the ‘dispersed centrality’

ized areas in historic city centers, large leisure facilities, office complexes, spaces for worship, and spaces for education, amongst others. The design of public space in the contemporary city-region is the overall project of these networks and nodes (fig. 71). To the separation of traffic from central spaces in the contemporary city can be added the well-known separation of places of consumption from places of residence. Changes affect both old city centers — which are often tantamount to tourist enclaves or to outdoor shopping centers — and new ‘cathedrals of consumption’33. While at the weekend such spaces are often overcrowded, at other times of the week they can be used more comfortably for leisure and recreation. Because of this double function it is important that these new centers, which today are almost exclusively linked to the ‘fast network’34, are also made accessible from the ‘slow network’ and from the ‘alternative network’. These complexes should uphold such dual characteristics or consist of ‘ambiguous and composite buildings’35, able to interface the local dimension with the regional scale. However, spaces of consumption, be they the Disneyfied historical centers or new shopping malls, meet the need for sociability only in part. In the absence of a compact urban form, social life moves from streets and squares to places that are not specifically designed as public spaces. It appears where social and material needs of everyday life find satisfaction: in front of schools and in children’s playgrounds, in gas stations and in parking lots, along river banks and in other spaces used for sports and leisure. Such situations provide interesting opportunities to create small community centers where everyday social life is separated from consumption. Finally, the regional plan should be a multilevel project of the two main networks (ecological and mobility), and of the social nodes which are linked to them.

George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2005), 8-22. Maurizio Morandi, “I centri commerciali nella città diffusa: Le nuove centralità,” in La città vetrina: I luoghi del commercio e le nuove forme del consumo, ed. Giuliano Amendola (Napoli: Liguori, 2006), 131-142. 35 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1981), 168-171. 33

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the social life of tuscan peripheries: a photographic survey opposite Fig. 74 Children playing with their parents in the playground of the Coop shopping center in Vingone, Scandicci.

Pictures contained in this photographic survey were taken in various parts of the periphery of Florence between September 2013 and June 2017.

Everyday Life in the Florence Suburbs Life in the suburbs is less intense than in historical centers, but it is also more relaxed and spontaneous. The widespread presence of green and open spaces creates numerous opportunities for social interaction. While walking through the urban voids of the periphery, it is not difficult to find old chairs which, even when empty, testify to the presence of small local communities. At times, these seemingly trivial and insignificant spaces become areas of a socially-rich everyday life. In the outskirts of Florence, far from the spotlight of the city center and the ‘perfection’ of the purified countryside, several local associations have been created. These associations generally use some small temporary buildings which were often self-built by its members, without too many bureaucratic hurdles. Although these spaces are devoid of any architectural or aesthetic value, they are socially rich. Some of them use just tents, which are removable in an instant. Others use less precarious structures, such as a self-built construction for use as a church, a cultural center, or a small bar. The public housing neighborhoods in the suburbs of Florence are often depicted by the media as places of conflict and decay. In fact, the fieldwork I conducted with various students during the last decade has shown that residents in these neighborhoods have a good perception of such places. In some cases they have developed a strong sense of belonging. These are communities where neighbors get to know each other and where their control of space is high, contradicting the dominant idea that they are unsafe. In these districts the ‘modernist failure myth’ — that is, the myth of the failure of all modernist public housing, created by authors such as Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman, and Charles Jencks — is contradicted by evidence1. 1 I argue that the idea that modernist architecture cannot work because it is inherently badly planned and designed is a ‘myth’ mainly created in Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (New York: MacMillan, 1973), and Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli International, 1972). Although very popular today, the ‘modernist failure myth’ is contradicted by evidence. I developed this idea in: Giulio Giovannoni, “Beyond the Modernist Failure Myth,” Current Trends and Methodologies on Architectural Design, ed. Hande Tulum (Istanbul: Dakam, 1995), 107116. On the topic also see: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach and Lawrence Vale, Public Housing Myths. Perception, Reality, and Social Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2015), 1-118.

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Fig. 75 Retired men playing cards in summer in the shade of trees along a road in Scandicci, a municipality on the outskirts of Florence. Fig. 76 A public space in a low-income neighborhood.

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Fig. 77 Young girls joyfully interacting in a small public space. Fig. 78 Young peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nightlife in Isolotto, a public housing district of Florence.

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Everyday life in Le Piagge, a modernist public housing neighborhood in the periphery of Florence (fig. 79-82). Fig. 79 A conference presentation by Serge Latouche at the ComunitĂ delle Piagge. Fig. 80 An open-air lunch.

the social life of tuscan peripheries: a photographic survey

Fig. 81 An African music event. Fig. 82 The opening ceremony of Piazza Ilaria Alpi e Miran Hvrovatin, dedicated to the memory of the two journalists murdered in Somalia.

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The Display of Ethnic and Religious Identities in the Outskirts of Florence Religious and ethnic diversity are some of the main features of contemporary multicultural societies. As I argued in the chapter “Fantasy Restoration and Identity Building in Tuscany”, our city centers are also the product of identitarian policies developed during the Risorgimento years and under Fascism. City centers are essentially public stages where only a certain kind of identity can be displayed without prejudice. In a sense, the kinds of ‘performances’ that are possible in city centers are limited and predetermined. Whatever is not consistent with this standard can cause violent reactions. For example, when the Filipino community of Florence organizes its yearly feast, with barbecues and drinks in Piazza Indipendenza, a central square of the city, newspapers discuss this for several days, emphasizing the problems caused for residents by such an event. In the suburbs the situation is different. For example, members of the Sri Lankan community in Florence meet up periodically in a small park along a busy street of the suburbs. Here they can celebrate their Buddhist ceremonies in total freedom and enjoy delightful moments of community life. Ultimately, it is much easier to have a spiritual life and to freely express one’s ethnic and religious identity in the periphery than it is in the city center. Also, in historical city centers that are becoming more and more dominated by tourism it is not easy to pray or to celebrate even mainstream religious festivals. To go to mass in the cathedral of Florence one has to enter through a side door that is, in effect, hidden from tourists. To prevent non-worshippers from entering the Duomo during religious celebrations, all other doors are closed and the only entrance that is open is controlled by two guards. In the suburbs the situation is different. In Le Piagge, a suburban public housing neighborhood of Florence, one can participate in an open-air Mass held by Don Santoro, a maverick priest who is also the leader of the so-called Comunità delle Piagge. Although this small community of people gathers in shacks and makeshift buildings, it is a hub of cultural and social events and has even founded a publishing house. San Luca al Vingone is a parish situated in the outskirts of the populous municipality of Scandicci. It is located in a typical suburban environment, featuring many open spaces and with a small shopping center, a sports field and various public and private apartment buildings in the surrounding vicinity. Although the area is highly fragmented, San Luca is a place of peace and tranquility, bordered by olive trees and away from the bustle of the city center.

the social life of tuscan peripheries: a photographic survey

Fig. 83-84 Buddhist celebrations carried out by the Sri Lankan community in Florence in a small park along a thoroughfare in the periphery.

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Fig. 85-86 Chinese New Year celebrations in Prato.

the social life of tuscan peripheries: a photographic survey

Religion in Le Piagge. Fig. 87 Open-air Mass. Fig. 88 Indoor celebration in the multifunctional building of the ComunitĂ .

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The church of San Luca al Vingone in a highly fragmented semi-rural area of Scandicci. Fig. 89 The church within its olive groves. Fig. 90 The beautiful interior of the church during Mass.

the social life of tuscan peripheries: a photographic survey

The Social Life of ‘Non-Places’ The concept of the ‘non-place’, introduced by Marc Augé, is widely used both in social sciences and in common language to describe “everyday sites such as supermarkets, chain hotels, airports and motorways, in which faceless, contractual obligations replace human interaction”2. After more than twelve years of fieldwork in the periphery of Florence, I came to the conclusion that non-places are central to contemporary everyday life, and that both the notion of the non-place and our way of looking at such spaces need to be entirely rethought. I argue that this is a precondition for the development of appropriate spatial policies for our contemporary societies. Socio-anthropological fieldwork can demonstrate such a thesis, permitting the unveiling of real-life stories. For example, we can discover that a gas station’s McDonald’s restaurant in the periphery of Florence works as a youth meeting-center where customers and managers know each other by name; or that the coffee shop of another service station in an adjacent neighborhood is the only store open at night in the whole area and is very popular among young people to get together for cocktails; or that a shopping center in a public housing quarter located a little further away acts as the main venue where people gather, young and old; or that a given spot of empty land along a peripheral route can become the place where ethnic communities congregate on a regular basis. Shopping malls are generally considered by planners as an enemy to fight, a product of globalization that impoverishes historical centers and that causes people to live as alienated consumers. But this is mainly the viewpoint of a privileged urban elite who can afford to pay the high rents of city centers. For many of those who live in the suburbs, the town centers are only a distant periphery to their own living environment. Shopping malls, although neglected by architects and planners, are home to a range of social activities of absolute importance to suburban dwellers, such as cultural, musical, and sporting events, functions for children, and much more. If shopping malls were planned and designed with care, these socially and culturally thriving locales would be all the richer for it.

2 Joe Moran, Reading the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2005), 94; Augé’s own discussion of his concept of the ‘nonplace’ can be found in his work: Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). Here I draw on Marc Augé’s notion of non-place because it effectively describes a way of looking at such spaces which is persistent and widespread well beyond the work of the French scholar.

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The social life of the Ipercoop, a shopping mall in the outskirts of Sesto Fiorentino (fig. 91-94). Fig. 91-92 Children playing and engaging in workshops.

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Fig. 93-94 Music events for children on a Saturday night.

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The Coop shopping mall in Le Piagge as a civic center (fig. 95-98). Fig. 95 Carnival party. Fig. 96 Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entertainment.

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Fig. 97-98 Sport events.

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Literature on gas stations is limited to a handful of approaches: the nostalgic/historical approach concerning the first vernacular architectural manifestations of such roadside artifacts1; the bleak approach, portraying them as ‘non-places’; the obvious technological and functionalist approach; and a few other minor ones. Gas stations are almost never considered public spaces. However, gas stations, as well as other curbside artifacts, are bursting with social activity. This is particularly true in Italy where, thanks to the post-war tradition of Autogrill, gas stations are often much more than just places to refuel the car. They have coffee shops, restaurants, pastry shops, as well as newsstands, stores, food vendors, not to mention more recently the inevitable McDonald’s drive thru. All of these activities are accessible, with easy parking, and in many instances are open 24/7, in a country which is closed for business at 7.00 pm, or at latest 9.00 pm. Therefore, gas stations become the center of many social interactions, especially — but not only — of youth subcultures. For these reasons gas stations deserve to be studied for what they are, avoiding both the nostalgic and the bleak approaches I previously outlined. This chapter presents the first results of an ongoing research on the social life of gas stations in central Italy. It is structured in five main sections. Section one synthesizes the main theoretical positions on gas stations, from the pessimistic ones equating gas stations to non-places, to the more optimistic, framing them within street and car cultures. Section two contextualizes the relevance of gas stations within the wider transformation of cities produced by the advent of the car. Section three provides a historical framework in order to explain today’s social relevance of gas stations in Italy. Section four presents research findings on the social life of such ‘architectures in motion’, confirming the importance of gas stations for public life. The final section of the chapter discusses policy implications of such findings, claiming the necessity of explicitly designing gas stations as places for public life. 1 While today’s gas stations are mostly standardized and produced in series, the ones produced in the U.S. until the 1950s had more local variations in architectural style. For this reason, gas stations that did not respond to a company standard and had local architectural styles are considered vernacular architecture.

Fig. 99 The car and the city. Map of a SW section of the periphery of Florence with the main destinations accessible by car.

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A Love-Hate Object Since their appearance, gas stations have been both loved and hated: loved by street culture enthusiasts, especially in their first manifestations; hated by those adverse to car culture and its impact on contemporary cities. In any case, the importance of the gas station in everyday life goes well beyond its mundane role. Several researchers consider infrastructure-related spaces as ‘non-places’. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the concept of ‘non-place’ was introduced by the French anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) to describe what he defines as the typical space of supermodernity. According to Augé, supermodernity is a historical moment characterized by excesses: of time as “overloaded with events that encumber the present along with the recent past”2; and of space, making the Earth smaller and allowing us “an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet”3. Such overexposure makes us lose the senses of time and space. Being manifestations of a condition of separation from time and space, ‘non-places’ are condemned to the impossibility of being arenas of social life: Since non-places are the space of supermodernity, supermodernity cannot aspire to the same ambitions as modernity. When individuals come together, they engender the social and organize places. But the space of supermodernity is inhabited by this contradiction: it deals only with individuals (customers, passengers, users, listeners), but they are identified (name, occupation, place of birth, address) only on entering or leaving. Since non-places are the space of supermodernity, this paradox has to be explained: it seems that the social game is being played elsewhere than in the forward posts of contemporaneity. It is in the manner of immense parentheses that non-places daily receive increasing numbers of individuals4.

In Italy, Augé’s position is shared by the majority of scholars. Paolo Desideri, for example, describes an Autogrill, the typically-Italian motorway restaurant with an annexed gas station, crowded with a heterogeneous metropolitan population arriving to eat ready-made sandwiches. He misses the time when “at night, in towns, in main streets, in nice Italian piazzas, we met to add our own history to the collective one”5. According to Desideri, the collective actions going on in a ‘non-place’ perpetually remains the summation of single individualities without ever producing a shared public identity6. But nevertheless, Desideri admits that continuing to apply to this ‘tinplate city’ the spatial configuration categories of the historical city, only produces “effects of complete desolation and of stronger bewilderment”, and that it is necessary to open-mindedly design the spaces of a civitas Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 111. 5 Paolo Desideri, Città di latta: Favelas di lusso, autogrill, svincoli stradali e antenne paraboliche (Milano: Costa & Nolan, 1995), 13. 6 Ibid., 77. 2 3

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which is essentially made of travelers and consumers. Obviously, the way gas stations and infrastructure-related spaces are perceived depends on the cultural context. Northern American scholars are generally more interested in street cultures and their manifestations; in particular, the tradition of cultural landscape studies attributes great dignity to all kinds of spaces that have an impact on everyday life, even if they possess no real architectural value, including spaces related to the typical streetscape generated by car culture, such as the parking lot and the gas station. The same spaces that are classified as ‘non-places’ by Marc Augé, become both socially — and culturally — interesting locales. For example, parking lots are defined by Kunstler as the “most common little dead ‘non-places’ of the postwar streetscape”7; John Brinckerhoff Jackson instead argues: I am tempted to dwell on the importance of the parking lot. I enjoy it as an austere but beautiful and exciting aspect of the landscape. I find it easy to compare it with such traditional vernacular spaces as the common: both are undifferentiated in form, empty, with no significant topographical features to determine use, both easily accessible and essential to our daily existence. But on another level, the parking lot symbolizes a closer, more immediate relationship between various elements in our society: consumer and producer, public and private, the street and the dwelling8.

Furthermore, the way gas stations and infrastructure-related spaces are perceived has changed considerably over time. Post World War II, when the car was an almost ubiquitous symbol of liberty and wealth, gas stations had a much more positive meaning than they have today. However, already by the 1960s, bleak depictions of those spaces were emerging. A view of motorway restaurants as alienating and homogenizing places is conveyed, for example, by the 1963 movie Ro.Go.Pa.G. At that time in Italy the motorway restaurant, commonly named ‘autogrill’, was an incredibly powerful symbol of modernity and affluence. In the episode Il pollo ruspante (The free-range chicken), directed by Ugo Gregoretti, the stop at the autogrill during a Sunday trip literally transforms visitors into battery chickens, oblivious of the liberty of their free-range ancestors, and only interested in mass consumption. While the leading actor buys useless goods and eats a standardized meal together with his family, Professor Pizzorno, a renowned Italian sociologist, holds a conference on consumption, where he invites his audience “to always study new advertising campaigns in order to stimulate new desires, new needs, to create a sort of systematic dissatisfaction in consumers”. The episode ends with a scene in which the actors, sitting at a table in the motorway restaurant, are transformed into battery chickens9. James H. Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 136. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) quoted in Eran Ben-Joseph, Rethinking a Lot. The Design and Culture of Parking (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 3. 9 “Il pollo ruspante”, segment directed by Ugo Gregoretti, in Ro.Go.Pa.G., directed by Jean-Luc Godard et al. (Rome: Cineritz, 1963). 7 8

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Although many consider infrastructure-related artifacts to be nothing more than manifestations of the worst aspects of modernity, these artifacts can often provide opportunities for urban embellishment. In the words of Oriol Bohigas: It is necessary to interrupt the old and counterproductive dichotomy between urbanism and the politics of public works, which has given a schizophrenic tone to the development of our cities. While the urbanists analyzed and planned, looking for a new method to work on the city, the technicians of public works continued to work in the healthy tradition of constructing the city realistically, but without an integrated vision of its areas… or devoting themselves unilaterally to traffic engineering. It is time to approach urbanism with the tools of public works; build an urbanism that is capable of uniting and harmonizing the projects of urbanization. Designing and realizing plazas, streets, boulevards, ramblas, intersections, pedestrian paths, street furniture, street signs, monuments10.

Also in the last four decades there has been a growing awareness of the possible role of transportation networks as structuring elements of social spaces. Infrastructural interventions realized in Barcelona under the direction of Oriol Bohigas between 1980 and 1992, offered the opportunity to rethink in an integrated fashion the system of public spaces, which led to globally redesigning the city aspect and style. However, apart from the aforementioned cases, the so-called ‘non-places’ are rarely designed with explicit attention to the public life that they can potentially host. This is true also in the case of gas stations, whose literature deals mainly with three approaches: a historic/nostalgic approach concerning the first vernacular incarnation of such roadside artifacts; the aforementioned bleak approach stressing their character of ‘non-places’; and the obvious technological/ functionalist approach of engineering character. Gas stations are almost never considered public spaces, but, like other roadside artifacts, they are locations that are high in social activity. This is particularly true in Italy, where thanks to the post-war tradition of Autogrill and Ristoragip, gas stations have far surpassed their original purpose as fuelling points. Gas Stations, the Car, and the City The urban and social importance of gas stations should be contextualized with regard to the transformations produced by the car in cities and in everyday life. In preindustrial cities, but more precisely, before the advent of the car, thoroughfares coincided with the most crowded and vibrant public spaces. Before the era of the car the following equation was true:

Oriol Bohigas, Reconstrucción de Barcelona (Barcelona: MOPU, 1986), quoted in Ingersoll, Sprawltown: Looking for the City on its Edges, 116.

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[COMMERCIAL SPACES = THOROUGHFARES = PUBLIC SPACES]11 Commercial spaces, thoroughfares, and public spaces tended to overlap. The advent of the car made all of that impossible. Cars were too big and too fast to fit in the public spaces of cities without disruption, excepting of course spaces that had been explicitly designed to accommodate them. In these early stages, there were little or no measures taken by policy makers to deal with congestion, and city residents had no choice but to coexist with a multitude of these obtrusive machines. That was when the urban crisis exploded. This happened earlier in the biggest northern American cites, later on in European and Italian cities. Afterwards, urban managers and politicians started to cope with the new situation. Some great urban utopias envisioning a global revolution in cities were developed, and practical policies were established to ease the situation of existing congestion in cities. Regarding the car/city relationship, these policies were in a range between two extremes. At one extreme were policies aimed at adapting the city to the car, such as various contemporary versions of Haussmannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s approach whose most famous case is probably the Boston Central Artery, along with Robert Mosesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interventions in New York, but which in varying degrees have been adopted in almost every American and European city. In this case the aforementioned relationship becomes: [COMMERCIAL SPACES = PUBLIC SPACES] | THOROUGHFARES The vertical bar separating both commercial and public spaces from thoroughfares identifies a relationship of both spatial proximity and physical separation. Public and commercial spaces still tend to coincide as before. At the opposite extreme the car was completely banned from cities, separating residential zones and public spaces from traffic. Because accessibility is vital to commerce, the separation of traffic from public spaces also implied the disconnection of the latter from businesses, since business is dependent upon proximity to main thoroughfares. This solution was adopted in many modernist plans, which devised residential neighborhoods equipped with pedestrian public spaces, and commercial areas astride these same neighborhoods and the main thoroughfares. The aforementioned equation was then changed into the subsequent: PUBLIC SPACES | COMMERCIAL SPACES | THOROUGHFARES In this case commercial spaces are in a relationship both of spatial proximity and of physical separation (vertical bar), between thoroughfares and public spaces simultaneously. Public spaces instead are completely separated from thoroughfares by commercial spaces or by In these equations the following symbols are used as follows: equal (=) means spatially coincident; vertical bar ( | ) means spatially contiguous but physically separated.

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other kinds of buffer zones (office buildings, green areas, etc.), aimed at protecting social life from traffic. Existing alongside these two approaches, which are the output of public policies, is a complex reality produced by the natural tendency of the market and by the almost unrestricted freedom of movement made possible by the car. This tendency had been largely foreshadowed by the visionary work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who envisaged the sprawl of residential settlements in the countryside and the creation of the social, cultural and commercial centers necessary for community life in close proximity to the thoroughfare network. Although Wright’s Broadacre City was a completely idealistic and impractical social and political project, it was in some respects prophetical, since many of its spatial configurations were put into practice on a large scale in the U.S. and quite extensively also in Europe. Wright’s proposal was realistic and pragmatic at least in one regard, in its assuming the car to be central in contemporary life. For this reason, the urban reorganization planned by Wright largely came true by itself, as an effect of interactions between individual preferences, market trends, and local planning systems. As Fishman states: Wright also had a remarkable insight into the highway-based world that was developing around him. Above all he understood the consequences of a city based on a grid of highways rather than the hub-and-spokes of the older city. Instead of a single privileged center, there would be a multitude of crossings, no one of which could assume priority. And the grid would be boundless by its very nature, capable of unlimited extension in all directions12.

Apart from the United States, this out-and-out explosion of the center envisaged by Wright came true also in European cities, whose commercial, social and cultural centers became dispersed in a multitude of shopping malls, multiplexes, conference centers, sports facilities, entertainment facilities, gas stations, almost always in close proximity to mobility infrastructures. Old historical centers are no longer at the top of the urban and regional hierarchy, but are just one of the numerous nodes of a basically non-hierarchical network. A special function was assigned by Wright precisely to gas stations, which were supposed to become real community centers dispersed throughout the region: One more advanced agent of reintegration, an already visible item in the coming decentralization of the City, may be seen in any and every roadside service station happening to be well located along the highways. The roadside service station may be — in embryo — the future city-service-distribution. Each station may well grow into a well-designed convenient neighbourhood distribution centre naturally developing as meeting place, restaurant, restroom, or whatever else will be needed as decentralization processes and integration succeeds. Already, 12

Robert Fishman, “Megalopolis Unbound,” The Wilson Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1990), 37.

the social life of florence gas stations

hundreds of thousands occupy the best places in the towns or, more significantly, pretty well outside the towns. Eventually we will have a thousand new city-equivalents at work detracting from every small town or great city we now have. Proper integration of these would help overcome the super-centralization now trying to stand against human freedom13.

According to Wheeler, Wright first designed an ideal gas station in the beginning of the 1920s and later incorporated the design in his project for a model community — the Broadacre City14. In 1958 Wright himself engaged in the realization of a gas station in Cloquet, Minnesota. Set among the conventional dwellings and small-town business establishments of Cloquet, the gas station had a cantilevered copper roof protecting the filling area and was equipped with large service areas including a restaurant, an observation lounge, and a rest area for travellers. On the top of the roof an illuminated pylon stood out on the skyline, making an urban landmark out of the gas station, visible from far away. Each building’s detail had been designed by Wright himself. It was complete, among other things, with planters and ceramic tiles, and cost more to build than ordinary gas stations. However, it was conceived for serial production, and scale economies should have lowered its cost per unit. Wright’s hypotheses regarding gas stations also proved to be prophetic in that many of these structures assume the features of authentic small community centers, for example the previously mentioned Autogrill and Ristoragip in Italy. Autogrill and the Italian Gas Station Italy has a peculiar history in terms of gas stations, for two main reasons. The first is related to the partnership formed after World War II by the biggest food companies and the main oil corporations, a partnership which led to an early ‘implosion’ of the boundaries between restaurants, supermarkets, entertainment facilities, and gas stations15. The second reason is the important role played by Enrico Mattei’s Eni in creating a strong oil industry in Italy and in the commitment of Agip — a petrol company controlled by Eni — to create a filling station network also integrating restaurant and bar facilities. This history began in 1947, with the establishment of the first gas station/restaurant combination to be opened in Italy, built by Mario Pavesi in close proximity to the Novara exit of the Torino-Milano highway, not too distant from the Pavesini biscuit factory and geared towards its promotion. In 1949 a big arch over the highway was built to mark the station, with a hanging aerostat reading “Biscottini di Frank L. Wright, The Future of Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1963), 192-193. Robert C. Wheeler, “Frank Lloyd Wright Filling Station, 1958,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 19, no. 4 (1960), 174-175. 15 George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (London, New Delhi: Pine Forge Press, 1999). 13

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opposite Fig. 100 Food and gasoline on the highway: the Mottagrill Cantagallo on the A1 close to Bologna in a 1960s postcard.

Novara Pavesi” (Pavesi Novara Cookies). Between 1950 and 1952 the building was expanded realizing an auto-grillroom, a deli-restaurant for motorists. The project was entrusted to the architect Angelo Bianchetti, who designed a single store-building overlooked by a huge concrete arch, with the words “Bar-Autogrill-Restaurant Pavesini Biscuits” inscribed on it. For Italian motorists, who at that time would typically have no better option than to eat their own homemade sandwiches while travelling on the highways, a modern and ‘American’ rest station was now provided. With the Novara autogrill started the adventure of the Pavesi, one of the biggest Italian food industries at that time, in the world of highway restaurants. In 1955 the Bergamo autogrill was opened, and three years later those in Lainate and in Ronco Scrivia followed. The land was owned by Pavesi, and the filling stations — which were to be rented to petrol companies — were developed subsequently to the rest area. The entrusted architect was again Angelo Bianchetti, who was accorded the golden award at the ninth Premio nazionale della pubblicità (National Advertisement Prize) for his work on gas stations. The building is at the same time a commercial totem and a regional landmark. In Lainate and Ronco Scrivia the building has a circular plan overlooked by three big arches converging towards a center upon which the Pavesi logo is raised up to 51 meters (167 feet). As in the case of Wright’s gas station in Cloquet, Minnesota, Bianchetti’s project was a total one, controlling the interior and exterior of the building, from graphics to signage, from tools to decorations. Such design creates a corporate image, but also symbolizes the mass motorization and mobility revolution in Italy, as well as the birth of modern marketing and the advent of mass consumption. Later on, the Pavesi company was to make a partnership with the American Esso company, and would import to Italy the bridge-restaurant developed by the Fred Harvey Company, based in Chicago16. The first autogrill to be realized according to this model was opened in Fiorenzuola d’Arda in 1959. In this new generation of autogrill, restaurants provided menus specifically conceived for motorists under the supervision of the Institute of Physiology of the University of Milan and were made of “light, nourishing, healthy and genuine [food], ready at any time, day and night!”17. The Motta company, a competitor of Pavesi and the biggest food company in Italy, was later to enter the competition in 1961 creating a partnership with the British BP and developing the famous Mottagrill in Cantagallo (BO), the biggest in Europe, also called ‘Cantagallo City’ (fig. 100) The architect entrusted with this project, Melchiorre Bega, 16 17

Bridge-restaurants are restaurants built like a bridge over a road, mostly over freeways or motorways. Angelo Bianchetti, “Le oasi in autostrada”, Quattroruote, January 1960, 90.

interpreted the bridge-restaurant as a huge advertising emblem: glazed walls with big sunbreakers (brise soleil), advertising pennons 30 meters high, and a roof shape recalling the letter M, the initial letter of Motta. The complex contained a restaurant, a book-and-souvenir shop, a branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana (a major Italian bank), and of Bologna’s Ufficio del Turismo (the local tourist office). The Mottagrill in Cantagallo became in these years a true landmark, also thanks to engagement of the talented cook Marco Bazzani, who raised the profile of the restaurant to nationwide fame. ‘Andare al Cantagallo’ (‘going to Cantagallo’) was in great fashion also among famous personalities, including Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, and Gregory Peck, making it a serious competitor even for the most famous restaurants of Bologna18. From the beginning of the 1950s, Enrico Mattei’s Agip also invested several resources in the commercial network, which was in charge of conveying the corporate image of the company: architectural models were developed, large investments were made in station-managers’ training, corporate periodicals were created such as “Buon lavoro, Amici!” and “Il Gatto Selvatico”. One of these magazines in 1956 stated: “Rests in the middle of nowhere no longer exist. Beside filling stations have arisen bright rooms, equipped with the most modern facil18

“A Cantagallo lo chef da Oscar”, Variante di Valico, February 2013, 6.

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Fig. 101 Food and gasoline in the city: the Stazione 3 Bis Agip in Città di Castello, Arezzo, in a 1950s postcard.

ities, real residences, open 24 hours a day, in all climates. They are agile and slim structures, bringing to mind a happy season, from trades becoming crowded with new signs, to new homes for people”19. In opposition to Pavesi’s American style, Mattei proposed a local prototype based on a new national identity. After the advent of the autogrill, Agip also entered the market, forming a partnership with Alemagna, a competitor of Motta and Pavesi. The result of this partnership was the autobar, whose austerity was shown by the absence of table service. These were mainly prefabricated buildings assembled at the Nuovo Pignone, a company taken over by Eni in 1954, which housed in a single block both the bar and the petrol pumps. The simplicity of Agip gas stations makes one think of a catholic Eni, devoid of the typically-American redundancies: they display a sort of ideological aesthetics flattering national self-regard. The cultural importance of the autogrill should be understood within the tremendous transformations undergone by Italian society in the post-World War II era. The 1950s are the years of the economy car, the television, and the advent of mass consumption. In 1954 Fiat launched the Seicento, and one year later 126,000 models were registered, despite its price being equal to a one-year blue-collar wage. The economy car transformed 19

Michele Parrella, “Stazioni di servizio crocevia della vita moderna”, Il Gatto Selvatico, June 1956, 12-13.

the social life of florence gas stations

free time and was a symbol of liberty and escapism. In 1954, TV broadcasting also began in Italy, along with the widely enjoyed Caroselli, the famous advertising shorts performed by the best actors of the time. All the companies involved in the construction of autogrills were also largely advertised on television: from the “good, light and nourishing Pavesini” (“Pavesini: buoni, leggeri e nutrienti”), to Alemagna’s ‘cuccagne’20. In these years autogrill became consolidated as one of the major symbols of the so-called ‘Italian economic miracle’ and of the new bourgeois consumerism. Its symbolic importance was demonstrated by many opening ceremonies, which were attended by the highest political and religious authorities. The opening ceremony of the Cantagallo Mottagrill, on the 29th of April 1961, for example, was attended by the undersecretary of the Ministry of Education, Giovanni Elkan, and by the Archbishop of Bologna, Giacomo Lercaro, who even compared it to a small rest stop in Galilee in the time of Jesus. Even the journal Life International, in its edition from September 26th 1960, reported on the autogrill phenomenon: Nowhere in Europe is the new prosperity more spectacularly evident, afloat and ashore, than in Italy. […] Now Italy produces luxuries for home consumption and imports them as well. In Milan […] alone, 350,000 citizens have passports; 10 million radio sets and 1.6 million television sets help Italians spend their leisure time when they are not at the theater, the movies or a football game. Usually they ride to their entertainment, often pausing to enjoy the allurements of an «autogrill», or roadside restaurant. The establishment brightening the night, one of 13 in Italy, offers lunch or dinner for $1.20, a bar and a wide variety of objects for sale including «exclusive» American bags at a little more than $2 each. The Pavesi Biscuit & Cookie Co., which operates the grills, stuffs the pocketbooks, picnic baskets and beach bags that it displays with Pavesi products, some of them imported, others homemade, but all of them silently eloquent reminders of Italy’s new standards of life and living21.

Although the first autogrills took inspiration from some Northern-American examples, the happy alliance between the food and oil industries is a typically-Italian phenomenon that has no equivalent for its dimension in any other country in the world. The biggest highway-restaurant market in Europe is still the Italian one, and Autogrill SpA, the key player that emerged after a long merging and restructuring process in the sector, is today a global player producing 70% of its sales abroad with over 4,800 branches and 51,000 employees. Thanks to the success of this experience — initially developed only in close proximity to the highway network in order to make it autonomous from inhabited areas — the union between gas distribution and food services became a widespread phenomenon in Italy, from the small filling station in the country in partnership with the coffee and pastry shop, to the station with 20 The term ‘cuccagna’ (Cockaigne) means an imaginary place of extreme luxury, and was used in some Caroselli to advertise sweets and other Alemagna products. 21 “Italian Luxury for Export and for those at Home, too”, Life International, September 26, 1960, 17.

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annexed bar/restaurant in the urban peripheries, to that with annexed pizzeria and small supermarket in medium-distance roads (fig. 101). Thanks to prolonged opening hours and excellent accessibility, this secondary distributive network is becoming an important social infrastructure. In order to understand this network, the gas station cannot be interpreted following the bleak vision of ‘non-places’; a structured research on the uses and subjects of these only apparently-unusual small community centers is needed in order to unpack their true nature.

opposite Fig. 102 The McDrive Gas Station in the SW suburbs of Florence: aerial view.

The Social Life of Florence Gas Stations My empirical analysis focused on two gas stations in the Southwest periphery of Florence, both of which are owned by TotalErg, an oil company established in 2010 after the merging of the French Total-Italia and the Italian Erg Petroli. They were selected through a survey of gas stations in the Florence area; the selection of case studies was based on a mixture of functions, accessibility, and opening times, as well as their likelihood of becoming spaces for social interaction. In the selected area, there are different types of gas stations, from small establishments in the compact city with 1-2 pumps, to medium-sized stations with bars and restaurants, mainly located in the suburbs, to large Autogrills on the highways. The two medium-sized suburban gas stations selected for our research both have a bar or restaurant, open 24/7. From a social point of view this is probably the most interesting type, since it intercepts a local population in an area with scarce public places. The first station is located on the Viale Nenni, a four-lane urban road lined by the Firenze-Scandicci tramway, constituting the main axis connecting Florence to Scandicci, a big residential neighborhood Southwest of Florence with a population of about 60,000 inhabitants. This gas station is also equipped with a large car-wash service, a parking lot, a McDonald’s and a McDrive (McDonald’s drive thru), the latter two open until 11pm on weekdays, and open 24 hours on weekends. In reporting the results of the analysis I will indicate this case study as the McDrive Gas Station (MDGS) (fig. 102-103). The second case is located on a four-lane urban road that feeds into the Firenze-Pisa-Livorno highway. The gas station is equipped with filling facilities, coffee-pastry shop open 24/7 also with a newsagent, a parking lot, a car-repair service, a car-wash service, and a natural gas station. In reporting the results of the analysis I will indicate this case study as the Pastry Shop Gas Station (PSGS) (fig. 104).

the social life of florence gas stations

Research Methods and Goals This section describes the research questions and aims of the empirical study carried out on the two gas stations, and explains the methods used to answer these questions. The analysis uses a range of tools, from long-term observation, to interviews, to mapping techniques. The research was designed to include the following aspects, which I will present in-depth: • the social life of the gas stations in different times of the day and week; • the spatial and social relationship between the gas stations and their neighborhoods; • the relationships and synergies between the various activities hosted by the gas stations; • the city ‘a la carte’ and urban routines; • the gas stations’ publicness22. The observational work and the interviews were conducted by two groups of students attending the course “Rethinking Non-Places: from Spaces of Alienation to Places for Public Life”. The Social Life of the Gas Station in Different Times of the Day and Week In order to understand and to describe the social life of the gas stations we investigated the following questions23:

22 23

By ‘publicness’ I mean similarity to public spaces. The concept will be defined in detail later on. Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre, How to Study Public Life (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013).

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Fig. 103 Panoramic view of the McDrive Gas Station.

• How many and what kind of people (age, gender, ethnicity) are there in each sub-unit of the gas station in different times of the day and week? • What are they doing? • For how long? This in vivo study of public space has found a growing legitimacy in the theoretical debate on territoriality in recent years. Sack, one of the researchers who fostered this view, defined territoriality as the “attempt by any individual or social group to affect, influence, and control people, phenomena and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographical area”24. The notion of territory understood as a bounded and controlled space has been questioned by highlighting the fluid and changing nature of territorial appropriations25. It became clear that territories, conceived as socially-produced spaces, continuously change both their shape and content. In this case, the gas station and its sub-units are lived by different publics in different times. Therefore, understanding the social life of a gas station means describing how its publics and their performances change in space (sub-units) and in time (daytime, weekdays). We used structured ob-

Robert D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19. On this topic see also Andrea Mubi Brighenti, “On Territorology, Towards a General Science of Territory”, Theory, Culture and Society 27, no. 1 (2010), 52-72. 25 By ‘territorial appropriation’ I mean the use/occupation of public space by some groups who tend to exclude other possible users. On the ‘changing nature’ of the notion of territory see: David Delaney, Territory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Brighenti, “On territorology, Towards a General Science of Territory”; Mattias Kärrholm, “The Temporality of Territorial Production — the Case of Stortorget, Malmö” in Social & Cultural Geography 18, no. 5 (2017), 683-705. 24

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servation methods to understand such variations26. In order to count users and to register their activities, we adopted a ‘time sampling’ technique with a time period of ten minutes. By ‘time sampling’ I mean observation at regular intervals for short periods of time; this approach renders comparable the different measurements27. During the observation, pedestrian movements were also mapped. This quantitative measurement was integrated with more properly ethnographic work, which consisted of participatory observations within the gas station. Short, unstructured conversations were held with managers and customers. We kept these conversations as spontaneous as possible, while trying to direct them towards the areas of interest for the research. Structured observations were carried out in April 2014. We first inspected the area in different moments of the day, noting variations in the use of the gas stations in the morning, afternoon, and evening. We then developed an observation sheet, which covered the various moments of the day, both through the working week and weekends. Altogether, 24 hours of observation were conducted in each petrol station, totaling 48 hours for the two. The stations were divided into sub-units, which were observed separately. The Spatial and Social Relationship between the Gas Station and its Neighborhood The gas stations we surveyed are structures on the road located in urbanized environments. Therefore, they lend themselves to use as neighborhood facilities. One of our goals was to inGehl and Svarre, How to study public life; Bill Gillham, Observation Techniques: Structured to Unstructured (London: Continuum, 2008). 27 Ibid., 14-18. 26

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Fig. 104 The Pastry Shop Gas Station: aerial view.

vestigate the extent to which the gas stations were used by local residents. To accomplish this, we first observed the number of users who reached the gas station on foot. We also tried to establish whether there was a significant percentage of users driving to the gas station and living nearby or going there on a regular basis. While the number of people walking to the station can be easily determined through observation, establishing how many motorists live in the neighborhood requires more in-depth investigations, which were outside the initial scope of this research. Partial data regarding the provenience of users was acquired through unstructured interviews with the gas stations’ attendants, who had some general knowledge of their regular customers. Relationships and Synergies Between the Various Activities Hosted by the Gas Station The gas stations host several activities that can function independently of each other; for example, there may be people who go to the gas station only for petrol, and people who go only for the bar or for the McDonald’s restaurant. However, there may be people who simultaneously use more than one of the services offered by the station: for example they fill up, they wash the car, and then they go to the bar or to McDonald’s for enjoyment. This ‘complex’ usage of the gas station can be done individually or in a group. In the case of a family, for example, one parent can fill up and wash the car, while the other can take the children to McDonald’s. It is important to evaluate these interactions/synergies as they are one of the features of public spaces. The evaluation was done through direct observation by estimating the percentage of people, or groups of people, simultaneously using two or more of the services offered by the station.

the social life of florence gas stations

City ‘a la Carte’ and Urban Routines The contemporary city is characterized by a widespread and pervasive use of the car. Robert Fishman effectively defined it ‘city a la carte’28. In fact, thanks to the freedom of movement made possible by the car, people can decide their routes and their stops in the same way as they order food in a restaurant. That being said, the stop at the gas station is normally just one of the stops along a more articulate individual (or group) journey. Urban sociologists use the term ‘urban routine’ to indicate those systems of moves/stops that become a regular occurrence in people’s daily lives29. During the anthropological phase of the fieldwork we investigated the urban routines of the users of gas stations. Gas Station’s Publicness In terms of ownership, gas stations are obviously private spaces. However, they offer public services and raise no particular restrictions to access. So the problem of how to evaluate their publicness is being raised, which is far from trivial. The traditional dichotomous distinction between public and private space is simplistic and largely outdated. Kohn argues that there are several hybrid forms of public/private spaces and that the “progressive blurring of the boundaries makes it necessary to develop a flexible definition of public space”30. Marcuse identifies six legal forms of space which depend on the public/private nature of three distinct variables: ownership, function, and use31. Petrol stations equipped with coffee shops/restaurants open 24/7 clearly fall into Marcuse’s category of ‘private ownership/private function/ public use’. Shopping malls as well as many other private facilities also belong to this category. However, while literature on shopping malls is quite extensive, given their relevance in the urban structure and in everyday life, petrol stations have never been studied as socially relevant artifacts32. But the problem is more general; research attempting to define and measRobert Fishman, “Megalopolis Unbound”, The Wilson Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1990), 24-45. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (London: Routeledge, 1992). 30 Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2004), 8. 31 Peter Marcuse, “The ‘threat of terrorism’ and the right to the city”, Fordham Urban Law Journal 32, no. 4 (2004), 101-119: “One might thus conceive of six legal forms of ownership of public space. Here I provide a typical example of each of the six legal forms of ownership of public space: • Public ownership, public function, public use (streets); • Public ownership, public function, administrative use (city halls); • Public ownership, private function, private use (space leased to commercial establishments); • Private ownership, public function, public use (airports, gated communities, zoning bonus private plazas, community benefit facilities); • Private ownership, private function, public use (cafes, places of public accommodations); • Private ownership, private use (homes)”. 32 Vanessa Parlette and Deborah Cowen, “Dead Malls: Suburban Activism, Local Spaces, Global Logistics”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 4 (2011), 794-811; Lynn A. Staeheli and Don Mitchell, “USA’s Destiny? Regulating Space and Creating Community in American Shopping Malls”, Urban Studies 43, no. 5/6 (2006), 977-992; Daniel Miller et al., Shopping, Place and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998); Nancy Backes, 28 29

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ure urban-space-publicness is very scarce and applies to situations that are quite different from the context of our research. Van Melik developed a model to measure publicness, which is visually represented by a cobweb diagram33. It is designed for themed/secured urban spaces and has six rays, each corresponding to a ‘dimension’ of publicness, and three concentric circles, each corresponding to a measurement level (high, medium, low). Three of the six rays/dimensions are dedicated to secured public spaces (surveillance, restraints/loitering and regulation), and three to themed public places (events, fun shopping, pavement cafes). Giving a high/average/low score to each axis/ray, cobweb figures are produced that demonstrate graphically the degrees of securedness and themedness34. Németh and Schmidt developed a model in which publicness is defined and measured in relation to three axes: ownership, management, and uses/users35. Both aforementioned models are deficient, since they do not take into account the design and localization of the spaces which they intend to assess. This bias is particularly relevant to our case. As I demonstrated in the historical section of this chapter, the social significance of contemporary hybrid public/private spaces, such as gas stations and shopping malls, is largely determined by their location on, or close proximity to, the road and highway network. Although designed for the measurement of publicness in urban waterfronts — which, obviously, are spaces that are quite different from gas stations — the star model conceived by Varna and Tiesdell is better suited to our purpose, and adopts criteria which, overall, appear to us more balanced36. In fact, in contrast to the aforementioned models developed by Van Melik and by Németh and Schmidt, it introduces parameters which measure centrality, access, and possibilities for active and passive engagement with the site. Importantly, all measurement models of publicness found in literature, including that of Varna and Tiesdell, which I actually used, are inductive models which study public space as something external to people. The assessment is done by the researcher and is based on the attribution of a value to each of the valuation parameters. Since this process

“Reading the Shopping Mall City”, Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (1997), 1-17; Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall” in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill&Wang, 1992), 3-30. 33 Rianne Van Melik, Irina Van Aalst and Jan Van Weesep, “Fear and Fantasy in the Public Domain: The Development of Secured and Themed Urban Space”, Journal of Urban Design 12, no. 1 (2007), 25-42. 34 Van Melik’s spatial ‘securedness’ depends on the surveillance and control of space. The concept of ‘themedness’ is related to the commodification of space. Its meaning comes from ‘theme parks’, such as Disneyland. 35 Jeremy Németh and Stephen Schmidt, “The Privatization of Public Space: Modeling and Measuring Publicness”, Environment & Planning: Planning & Design 38 (2011), 5-23. 36 George Varna and Steve Tiesdell, “Assessing the Publicness of Public Space: The Star Model of Publicness”, Journal of Urban Design 15, no. 4 (2010), 575-598.

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is largely subjective, I tried to give adequate reasons for the values that I assigned. However, I argue that this bias is also offset by my having used a number of complementary research methodologies (historical framing, structured observation, ethnographic observation). Research Findings The Social Life of the Gas Stations in Different Times of the Day and Week The structured observation of the two gas stations clearly shows that their social life and their publics significantly change across time, both throughout the day and during different days of the week (working days/weekends). So we can discuss multiple productions of space, which change both in space (parts of the gas station experiencing activity) and in time. At the MDGS mornings are quite calm on weekdays, but quite crowded on weekends. People’s activities, however, are mostly confined to car maintenance, and social interactions are scarce. Lunchtime instead seems to be one of the most socially interesting periods in any day of the week. People appear to be very mixed in terms of group-size (from large groups arriving in several cars, to families, to individual users), ethnic backgrounds, and social classes (evaluated on the basis of the kinds of vehicles driven). The late afternoon is markedly different from the lunch hours. Traffic diminishes, and a different type of user appears. On Saturday afternoons, we observed several groups of at least 4 teenagers arriving on foot. The clients were generally young, from 16 to 20 years old, and there were few families. The early-evening is one of the busiest times, with the McDonald’s restaurant filling up at around 6.30pm and the car wash in full function until dark. In general, the dinnertime atmosphere around the restaurant is different from lunchtime, as there are fewer families and elderly people, but more young and middle-aged people without children. In the evening, McDonald’s becomes a meeting point for local teenagers. We observed many that did not enter, but used the parking lot as a meeting place. There were also older people using the lot as a social area. For example, some 30-year-old males gathered around the modified car of another, examining it while eating their hamburgers. Analogous space-time variations of social life were registered at the PSGS. This space is particularly active during nighttime, especially on weekends. The pastry shop is a true landmark for younger people. On weekends it is largely used as a place both to start the night (before going to the disco, to the movie theatre or to amusement centers) and to end the night (e.g. having a pastry after the disco in the early morning). Even on a Monday night many young people, up to 40 years old, were observed standing in front of the pastry shop, drinking, and talking in a relaxed manner. Reviews posted by this gas station’s customers on social networks, confirm its relevance for this kind of public. After all, as one of its night customers ar-

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gued, the TE Pastry Shop is “the only place open at night in the Isolotto neighborhood”. Compared to the MDGS, however, the PSGS appears to be more physically disconnected from the neighborhood, and not one single person was observed walking to it.

opposite Fig. 105-106 Youngsters meeting and talking at the McDrive Gas Station.

The Spatial and Social Relationship between the Gas Station and its Neighborhood Going beyond our expectations, both gas stations were determined as having a relatively strong social connection to their surroundings. Most of the clients of McDonald’s are local, and go there often. This was clearly stated by an attendant who said: “most of the clients are from the neighborhood, we know many of them by name — there are few tourists here”37. Although they mostly come by car, since coming on foot is not very convenient, we were surprised to observe several groups of teenagers walking there from their neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. The station is located in a very dispersed area, and there are very few inhabitants in the space of at least two hundred meters. In the case of the PSGS we should distinguish between its spatial and social relationship to the neighborhood. The station is, in fact, quite physically disconnected from the neighborhood, being located on a thoroughfare on one of its edges, and being almost impossible to access by foot. However, its social relationship to the neighborhood appears to be strong, especially for younger people. Also, as one of its night users observed, the gas station is “the only place open at night in all the neighborhood of Isolotto”38. Relationships and Synergies between the Various Activities Hosted by the Gas Station As we started our empirical analysis we expected to find strong synergies between the food and gas industries. Instead we found that both in the MDGS and in the PSGS people using the gas station for car-related activities tend to be distinct from people using it for food-related activities. Only a small number of users take advantage of both functions. These findings surprised us and are in a sense counter-intuitive. However, a deeper analysis reveals that strong synergies between food and gas still exist. For example, although at the PSGS most of the pastry shop’s customers don’t refill their car, they take great advantage of the oil company’s parking areas and cantilever. Its location under the cantilever makes the pastry shop enormously more usable: it is always safe and illuminated, offers cover from the rain, and it is always easy to park there. This explains why the gas station filling cantilever tends to become, in certain moments, an outer extension of the venue.

37 38

Discussion with a woman working at McDonald’s in the afternoon of Thursday 10 April 2014. Discussion with young man, a client of the gas station’s coffee shop, in the night of Tuesday 29 April 2014.

Also, the pastry shop gains a lot in terms of visibility, especially at night, thanks to the oil company’s visual signs. At the MDGS the situation is quite different. The McDonald’s restaurant in fact tends to be an enclave: it has its own outer space equipped with tables, but this is accessible only from the inside of the venue. However, in the MDGS some outer social spaces are spontaneously created as well, independently from the McDonald’s restaurant. The most evident is the scooter parking area in front of McDonald’s, which transforms into a meeting place for teens, who then stay there, blocking foot and car traffic. At various times, different areas of the parking lot are also used for social activities, particularly in the evening (fig. 105106). City a la Carte and Urban Routines The gas stations evidently play a different role in people’s routines on weekdays than they do on weekends. On weekdays at the MDGS we saw many small groups of people who were obviously taking their lunch break there. The most conspicuous was a group of about 25 firefighters, all dressed in fluorescent orange, and making a lot of noise. Interestingly, individual users were almost absent. On weekends the picture is much richer. In the late afternoon we noticed many parents coming with their children, mostly male, after football or other sporting activities. At night, a worker told us, many people that stop there are on their way out for other destinations. Our observations of clothes and other signs confirmed this. The employee also said that after the clubs close, many people pass through the drive thru on their way home. We saw two women, approximately aged 30, obviously dressed to go out, arrive at about 10pm, on their way into Florence. We spoke with a 17-year-old from Calenzano, who had been waiting there for at least 30 minutes before his friends arrived.

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Fig. 107 Children with their parents at the McDrive Gas Station.

When they arrived, the group remained outside, saying that they had no intention of going to McDonald’s, but would go somewhere else. So, the parking lot area is both a social space for them, as well as a departure point for whatever other activities they had planned for the evening. The situation is not too different at the PSGS, which is also frequently used by young people during their nightlife routines, especially on weekends (fig. 107).

opposite Fig. 108 The Pastry Shop Gas Station: outer spaces.

Publicness The variety of uses visible at the gas stations can lead one to conclude that the exterior spaces here are essentially public spaces in terms of active control. There is nobody there to stop you from doing whatever you want. The space is accessible to all, and used by a wide range of people. The constant presence of others and the tight spaces make these environments safe and controlled. Still, there are no rules to which you must conform, other than the general ones that govern you in any place. We could say that these gas stations, and particularly the areas around McDonald’s and the pastry shop, are automatically policed by the large amounts of users that pass through. In that sense, they are very public — the high number of users at key times is typical of an urban public space. However, in contrast to other more traditional urban spaces which have an almost continuous presence of people, social life at the two gas stations investigated lights up, especially

the social life of florence gas stations

at certain times: at lunchtime — in the afternoon, and at night — particularly on weekends. Some of the other areas are less frequented, and hidden by buildings, but we observed no illicit users taking advantage of the privacy. In order to make our analysis more specific and to provide a measurement of publicness we applied Varna and Tiesdell’s model39. This model consists of five dimensions whose values range from one (low publicness) to five (high publicness). The lowest score, according to this model, is five (lowest score in all variables), and the highest one is twenty-five (highest score in all variables). The first variable to be considered is ownership. The model attributes three points to situations like ours. The criterion is: 5 points in case of public ownership; 3 points in case of public/private partnership, transit interchange, retail premise; 1 point in case of private ownership. The second variable is control. The two opposites considered by the model are the ‘big father’ situation, protecting the freedoms and liberties of citizens (five points), and the ‘big brother’ situation, protecting the interests of the powerful (one point). The first features no visible/overt control, no CCTV cameras evident, and regulations are enacted only in the interests of the community. The second is characterized by highly visible expressions of control presence (especially of security guards), many CCTV cameras are evident, 39

Varna and Tiesdell, “Assessing the Publicness of Public Space: The Star Model of Publicness”.

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and regulations are enacted in a narrower private interest. In the two gas stations we examined there is no visible/overt control, no particular regulations are enacted in the private interest (such as in many shopping malls), and there are just a few scarcely-visible CCTV cameras. Therefore, we give four points to this parameter. The third variable is civility. In this case a high level of publicness depends on the space being well kept and cared for, and on being provided with basic facilities such as toilets, shelters, food vendors, seats, and lighting. As I already discussed, in the PSGS the space in front of the pastry shop is very well equipped: it is sheltered, it has toilets, it has food, it has some seating available outside, and it is very well-lit (fig. 108). The area in front of McDonald’s in the MDGS is also well equipped, but it is more similar to an enclave and therefore it is less public. Both gas stations are also very well kept and maintained. We give five points to the PSGS and four points to the MDGS. The fourth variable is physical configuration. A high score is determined by centrality/ connectedness, by visual permeability, and by the absence of thresholds and gateways. Centrality is defined in terms of good location “within the overall movement network”, whereas being visually permeable means having “strong visual connections with the external (surrounding) public realm”40. Both gas stations are highly central within the overall movement network, have a strong visual connection with the surroundings, and have no thresholds or gateways limiting access to them. We could argue that these facilities are isolated, but in our minds this holds true only for a pedestrian, not for a driver, like the majority of their users. We give five points to the variable ‘physical configuration’. The fifth and last variable is animation, measured in terms of opportunities for active and passive engagement, and of opportunities for discovery and display. According to the model, opportunities for passive engagement are determined by the existence of an interest in watching other people, and by the presence of multiple and varied places to sit. Opportunities for active engagement are considered to be provided if there is a high density of active architectural frontages (with shops, restaurants, and similar), and diversity of events and activities occurring spontaneously or through programming. Finally, opportunities for discovery and display are provided by loose, adaptable spaces, which can be used in multiple ways. On this variable our gas stations are weak. There are no particular events being held in them, apart from the aperitif events organized at the pastry shop, the density of active frontages is not high, and there are not too many seating opportunities. Also, space is not particularly adaptable: we never observed people playing football or en-

Ibid., 591.

the social life of florence gas stations

gaging in other such activities. However, gas stations offer interesting opportunities for people-watching, since there is a continuous flow of many kinds of users. I cautiously give one point to this variable. Finally, the MDGS scores 17 points, and the PSGS scores 18 points out of 25 in terms of publicness. With all the limits already highlighted in the methodological section, the application of Varna and Tiesdell’s model is quite useful in determining gas stations’ strengths and weaknesses. The strengths of the two gas stations which we investigated are that they offer important facilities (food, toilets, light, shelters, and places to sit), that they are safe and controlled, well maintained, highly visible and accessible, and they pose no particular restrictions to what people can do. Their weakness is that they present no sufficient incentives to engaging in a range of different activities. Conclusions In this chapter I tried to demonstrate that gas stations are central spaces in contemporary cities. I approached the topic by reviewing the main positions on gas stations, from the pessimistic views which equate them to non-places, to the enthusiastic ones which glorify their value in relation to street cultures. I then commenced my examination of the main causes that give gas stations their prominence. These causes are mainly related to transformations induced by the car on cities, and hold equally true in all countries. Such transformations led F.L. Wright to the visionary proposal for a gas station conceived as a dispersed community center within the Broadacre City. Beyond these causes there are historical and economic reasons that make the social function of gas stations generally more important in Italy than in other countries. These reasons, examined in the chapter’s third section, are related to the partnership formed after WWII by the food and oil industries. This partnership started with the autogrill in close relation to the highway network. Later on — thanks to the smaller and more dispersed stations realized first by Agip and then by all the other oil industries — the marriage of food and gasoline had widespread diffusion. The ‘implosion’ of the gas station into the restaurant/coffee shop together with its high accessibility made the gas station the place of numerous social interactions. After having supported the hypothesis of the centrality of gas stations within social contemporary life through historical analysis, I started to ascertain this through fieldwork. Two gas stations in the periphery of Florence that looked promising were chosen, and various analytical and observational tools were applied to them. In both cases the initial hypothesis was confirmed. Both the gas station with McDonald’s annexed and the one with a pastry shop are true social landmarks for the inhabitants of the areas. Their function goes well beyond the temporary and transient stop, contributing to their neighborhoods’ identities and being at the

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core of stable and continuing interactions, especially for younger generations. Of course, we can’t expect gas stations to be the equivalent to pedestrian squares located in the historic city center. Their social activity is not as continuous, and is intense only during particular times of the day and of the week. Nevertheless, four out of five of the criteria established by Varna and Tiesdell’s model are largely satisfied, and this explains why gas stations are socially active. The application of that model also highlights their main weakness, which comes from the restricted range of activities possible in them. Finally, gas stations succeed because of services which generate public exchange, but their staying power is limited. However, in a city which is more and more complex and diverse, gas stations can play an important role, and this role should be clearly recognized by planners, designers and politicians. The policy implications of this analysis are clear and important. It is necessary to go beyond the dominant idea that gas stations are alienating spaces, or at best nothing more than technical artifacts. They are complex structures and as such they need to be designed with their social function in contemporary life in mind. If we understand the potential of gas stations, they can surely become great places for public life, even more so than they already are, and positively contribute to the provision of services in suburban areas. In Italy, the planning of gas stations is entrusted to the Piani per la distribuzione dei carburanti (fuel supply plans). These sector plans are almost exclusively concerned with providing a number of gas stations that is tailored to the needs of motorized traffic41. In these plans, the possible social role of gas stations is never considered. In light of the analysis carried out in this chapter, I believe that these plans should identify those service stations which, because of their location, could act as small community centers on the periphery. These of course should be planned and designed accordingly. One of the main goals for these spaces should be the expansion of socially relevant functions, both public and private. Another goal should be to increase their ‘staying power’; designing some of their open spaces so to make them more similar to urban squares. Finally, we should try to create, whenever possible, better connections between service stations and their surroundings. But the implications of our research go far beyond these issues. Rethinking gas stations is part of a wider process of rethinking public life and public spaces in contemporary human settlements. Although cities underwent radical transformations over the last century, our way of looking at urban life is still closely related to traditional public spaces such

Sector plans are plans that address specific aspects such as mobility, waste management and the like.

the social life of florence gas stations

as squares and streets. I provide a background and conceptual positioning for the argument of gas stations as public spaces, and a method for their empirical investigation. These can be applied usefully to the study of other spaces which also play an important role in contemporary life but which have been scarcely investigated so far. I argue that developing new research in this direction is vital for overcoming still-dominant urban paradigms, and for creating the cultural and cognitive conditions for more finely-tuned governance of contemporary human settlements. I will further develop these topics in the upcoming conclusion, which draws from the findings of the work of deconstructing/reconstructing the idea of the city carried out in this book.

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conclusion: rethinking the city from the periphery

Space is produced in complex ways; it comes from the interaction of cultural and media representations of places, social dynamics leading to space appropriations, and public/private processes resulting in the construction of the built-spatial environment. In this research I tried to deal with such complexities, analyzing the diverse dynamics that contributed to the production of space in Tuscany in the last one hundred and fifty years. A point that emerges from the present research is the historical rootedness of current spatial policies in urban planning, architectural heritage conservation, and landscape protection. As I demonstrated, a line of continuity connects current ways of conceiving and producing space with those of nineteenth-century cultural, economic, and political elites. In light of the tremendous societal, political, and economic changes that occurred over this extended period, such continuity is, to say the least, surprising. Nonetheless, Lefebvre’s interpretive scheme, based on the so-called ‘triad’ (of perceived, conceived, and lived space) gains strength when applied to a long period of time. In fact, continuity in spatial policy-making in Tuscany comes from the persistence of narrations and representations of space. Today, as in the past, these are at the core of the ideology of Tuscan ruling elites. This ideology retained its relevance over the years, continuing even today to produce its effects. The most important of these effects consists in the delimiting, albeit in ways which are questionable from a social standpoint, of the range of possible policy options. The following point that emerges from my research should be emphasized: hegemonic narrations/representations of space in fact play a major role in the shaping of the spatial policy agenda. In light of the conclusions reached through the analysis conducted in this study, it can be reasonably suggested that the cornerstone of the production of space in Tuscany consists of its cultural and symbolic influences. There seems to be a causal relationship between the representations of space and its physical construction. This has significant implications on planning theory. With the exception of a few isolated efforts, urban planners have always Fig. 109 Another urban aesthetics is possible. Bruegel contrasted the beauty of the landscape and of the architecture to the vernacular character of the society that inhabited it. Children’s Games 1560, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

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neglected, both in research and in professional practice, the cultural and symbolic dimensions related to the production of space. The line of continuity that has characterized spatial policy-making in Tuscany in the last one hundred and fifty years shows that it is not possible to reformulate the policy agenda if actions are not taken on the cultural and symbolic level. In terms of technical knowledge and professional expertise, this implies the acquisition and use of techniques such as critical discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, and deconstructionism, to name just a few. This also requires the use of diverse types of texts, such as literary works, journalistic texts, movies, and urban planning documents. As we have seen, the way the city, country, and suburbs are conceived today does not vary greatly from how they were conceived by the landed gentry and the Anglo-Florentines in the nineteenth century. It was then, and still is now, an ideological way of conceptualizing the Tuscan space. These representations distort and alter the reality. They create a worldview that benefits the pursuit of certain interests, and which perpetuates particular situations of privilege and spatial injustice. In the words of Mannheim: Those who are satisfied with the existing order of things are only too likely to set up the chance situation of the moment as absolute and eternal in order to have something stable to hold on to and to minimize the hazardousness of life. This cannot be done, however, without resorting to all sorts of romantic notions and myths1.

The work conducted in this book, I believe, can also lead to a rethinking of the city both in terms of what it actually is today, and in ontological terms, that is, for its intrinsic characteristics. In fact, if on the one hand the physical city has undoubtedly changed, on the other the ‘imagined’ city is surprisingly stable. Wachsmuth argues that the concept of the city is an ideological device2. In making this assumption he highlights the contradiction between the inadequacy of the traditional concept of the city to describe contemporary urbanization and the tenacity of this same concept, that is, its persistence and pervasiveness within technical, political and media discourse. According to Wachsmuth the traditional concept of the city is summarized in three main tropes: the city-country opposition, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type. It is quite evident that in contemporary urbanization the city/country opposition makes no sense. And yet, the idea of the city as a self-contained system which

1 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936), 78. 2 David Wachsmuth, “City as Ideology: Reconciling the Explosion of the City Form with the Tenacity of the City Concept”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2014), 75-90.

conclusion: rethinking the city from the periphery

is clearly separated from the countryside continues to dominate the debate and policies, as we have seen in the chapter titled “From Polycentrism to the Dispersed Centrality”. Lefebvre taught us that all forms of social conflict project themselves into physical space. Therefore, the discourse on space is an essential part of political and social debate and controversies. In this research I deconstructed dominant spatial narratives in Tuscany and proposed an alternative representation of Tuscan spaces that I consider to be more truthful and less ideological. I believe this is a prerequisite in our move towards becoming capable of producing spatial configurations that are socially more equitable. The myth of Tuscany, with both its utopian narratives (related to the countryside and to historic city centers) and its dystopian narratives (peripheries and suburbs), is very seductive and attractive. However, it also serves to perpetuate a state of spatial injustice, if not of symbolic violence, against the large sections of the population that live in the suburbs. Although ideological spatial narratives inevitably exist in all cultures, in Tuscany they are particularly strong and historically rooted, which is why it is an ideal setting in which to study the link between urban/rural ideologies and the production of space. In the first four chapters I described the diverse tools used to produce Tuscan space and highlighted the historical continuity of spatial policies in the region. These devices operate on different levels: from the narrative to the architectural, regulatory, and bureaucratic. Taken together, they constitute a handbook of landscape purification. In the urban/rural space so produced some parts are mythicized and purified, while others are demonized, stigmatized and substantially neglected. The beautiful Tuscan landscape is the product of a longstanding conservatism. Such a high-quality environment is certainly a common good that everyone can enjoy, albeit to varying degrees. Yet, this purified landscape is also an oligarchic commodity accessible only by the wealthy. In any case, the more negative effects of Tuscan spatial narratives come from the ‘dystopian lens’ through which the peripheries and suburbs are observed. These narratives prevent us from appreciating the many qualities of suburban areas, even though they constitute the spaces in which most people live with satisfaction. In some cases, they reflect a form of ‘stigma’ and of symbolic violence against the people who live there. These narratives have also prevented us from developing appropriate planning and architectural policies for the periphery and for suburban areas. The fact is, that to improve the periphery we must get rid of this persistent urban ideology. Tuscan spatial ideology equates the beauty/ugliness of the landscape to the virtue/depravity of the society that produced it. This correspondence is visually represented in the ‘Allegory of Good and Bad Government’, the fresco series painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palaz-

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zo Pubblico of Siena in 1338-39. In these frescoes the ‘Good Government’ is represented by a beautiful and well maintained landscape and the ‘Bad Government’ by an abandoned and ugly one. But in reality, the beautiful Tuscan countryside was produced by a feudal society that was profoundly unjust and unequal. In addition, many of the purified urban spaces of Tuscan historic centers consist of the architectural output of eighteenth — and early twentieth — century nationalism. Contrastingly, in sixteenth-century Flanders, Bruegel created urban landscapes which were opposed in nature to the rich everyday life of the society which inhabited them. In some ways, contemporary suburban aesthetics is more similar to Bruegel’s aesthetics than to Lorenzetti’s. In fact, in the suburbs the visual qualities of architecture and urban spaces are, on average, constructed with far less attention to attractiveness than in old city centers. As we have seen, however, this does not prevent these spaces from enjoying a high level of social activity. It can be said that the purified Tuscan countryside and old city centers are mainly perceived and conceived spaces, in the sense of Lefebvre, and that peripheries are mainly the realm of lived space. The value of such space mainly comes from the bodies that inhabit and appropriate it. In the suburbs, physical space is little more than an empty vessel to be filled, unbiased towards its inhabitants. In this sense, it is also a more open and democratic space than those of old city centers. Its diverse publics, indeed, may freely use it without producing the media reactions that almost always eventuate in old city centers as a result of space appropriations by, for example, ethnic minority groups. Marco Romano considers one of the main aspects of the aesthetics of European cities to be the fact that they all have the same collective facilities: public buildings, churches, theaters, building for sports, and so on3. There is no doubt that collective buildings are also a central part of what we might call (extending Romano’s reasoning to the suburbs) ‘the aesthetics of the periphery’, in Italy and the rest of the world. Here, however, there are two main differences between these cities and those of the past: the first is that these buildings are dispersed, instead of inserted into compact urban fabric as they once were; the second is that they are now private rather than public. The dominant urban and architectural debate, pervaded with the ideology of the city, does not consider these features to be compatible with the notion of urbanity, but deems urban fragmentation and the mingling of urban and rural as a problem to be fought, and regards private collective spaces (such as shopping malls, multiplexes, and service stations) as non-places, that is, spaces where it is impossible to have authentic social interactions. 3

Marco Romano, L’estetica della città europea (Torino: Einaudi, 1993).

conclusion: rethinking the city from the periphery

On the contrary, after many years of fieldwork, I contend that such spaces have gained enormous social importance. Shopping malls are used as hangouts and host a range of activities for children and young people, but also for the elderly and people of all ages. These include exhibitions, concerts, conferences and childhood initiatives, to name but a few. Suburban multiplex movie theaters are favorite haunts for families, and even more so for adolescents/ teenagers, and heat up, especially at night, with a warm and lively atmosphere. As we have seen in the last chapter, even gas stations, which in the social imaginary have become synonymous with the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;non-place, under certain circumstances become significant social and meeting places. Therefore, a new suburban aesthetics must be based also on these facilities. However, for this to be achieved in a fully satisfactory manner, we need a regulatory system that directs the interest of private operators even more towards collective goals, and to design skills that largely have yet to be developed. What I contend is that such regulatory and design skills can only result from a change in our perception of these spaces and from their hybridization with other functions, including public ones. But above all, this requires the investment of public resources. At the same time, the ideology of sprawl, i.e. the a priori condemnation of all dispersed urban forms, has prevented us from seizing the potential of these settlements. Although some interesting design solutions have been developed in different countries, their ability to be translated into policies appears to be very limited. For this reason, the deconstruction of the enduring urban/rural myth appears to be of vital importance today. In conclusion, I belive that the significance of this study extends well beyond Tuscany. In fact, it defines a method for studying the complex interdependencies between cultural, material, and social production of space. This method can be applied, once suitably adapted, in any other context. The research also highlights the importance of history and of hegemonic spatial narratives inherited from the past in shaping current urban policies. This aspect is largely neglected by historical urban research and deserves, in the light of our findings, to be further investigated also in other contexts. It is very likely that in Tuscany the aforementioned narratives play a role which may necessarily be more influential than that of other places. However, there is no doubt that the idealization of the old city is a widespread phenomenon. Since its main effect is that of maintaining the status quo, it is, as argued by Wachsmuth, an ideological device. The exceptional strength and abundance of cultural production on Tuscan spaces makes Tuscany a highly relevant case study on this topic. In fact, here it is possible to grasp better than elsewhere the relationship between cultural and material production of space. Once such a relationship is clearly understood, the same study method can be applied also in contexts in which it is not as evident. Although a significant part of this book has been devoted to the deconstruction of the urban/

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rural myth, it is important to stress that it is also the result of many years of empirical research on peripheries. The deconstruction of the ‘utopian lens’ we use to look at the old city and at the bel paesaggio has necessitated the adoption of a historical perspective. On the contrary, the deconstruction of the ‘dystopian lens’ we use to look at the suburbs is the result of over twelve years of investigations during which I walked with students almost every corner of the periphery of Florence, conducting hundreds of interviews and studying in depth both the social life and the built environment. I contend that this work in the field is essential to the success of urban planning. In fact, it allows us to unveil and to understand situations that are often unknown to urban planners: situations in which lived space can potentially also be an optimum physical space. Unfortunately, up to now the study of social life in the suburbs was neglected by planners. Most scholars, from Gehl to Jacobs to Whyte, preferred to focus on traditional urban centers. Again, I believe that the research findings presented in this book on the social life in peripheries and in their alleged ‘non places’ such as gas stations could be just the beginning of a broader research aimed at profoundly changing our perception of contemporary cities and our approaches to their regulation and design.

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glossary

Abstract space and lived space Terms deriving from Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space. Abstract space is conceived by dominant groups in capitalist society and produced by urban planners in such forms as peripheries and modernist housing projects. It is hierarchical, fragmented by/for commodification, and made homogeneous for easy use/exchange. It is the antithesis of lived space, in which ordinary people carry out daily life and which is a space of subjectivity, in which the individual makes sense of his or her environment, imagination, and feeling. (See also: “everyday life”). Accademia dei Georgofili An important Florentine historical institution, founded in 1743, which promotes the advancement of the agricultural sciences, the conservation of agricultural lands and the overall development of the rural environment. It also boasts a rich archive of important resources and documents on the history of agriculture. The Accademia dei Georgofili was particularly active and highly influential between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the fall of the Fascist regime. Aesthetics of purification A kind of aesthetics, deriving from Bourdieu’s work in his book Distinction on the concept of taste, cultivated by the ruling class who seek to conceal that which they perceive as vulgar and plebeian with what they consider to be pure and in accordance with their refined taste. In Distinction, Bourdieu describes the ability of those with a high volume of cultural capital – such as education, which has the power to promote social mobility beyond financial means – to perpetuate a ‘dominant’ culturally accepted form of taste. Those with a lower volume of cultural capital tend to accept this concept of taste and accordingly, the distinction between high and low culture as inevitable and natural, and thus accept their economic, social and cultural status. (See also: “cultural hegemony”). Arcipelago metropolitano or metropolitan archipelago A new metaphorical term introduced by Francesco Indovina that partially moves away from the negative connotations derived by “urban sprawl”. The metropolitan archipelago is different to urban sprawl in that it consists in a regional territory that is organized in small, specialized centers that work together within a city network to form a greater whole. The urbanization trends involve the relocation of essential services (administrative, economic, research, cultural) to suburbs, which previously had only been available within traditional cities. (See also: “dispersed centrality”).

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Autogrill A special kind of service station situated along highways in Italy where car drivers can stop to eat and buy food and other goods. The first autogrill was built by Mario Pavesi in 1947 during the economic boom and the advent of the highway network and mass motorization, as a new place of consumption specifically designated for automobilists. ‘Autogrill’ is also the name of the main Italian highway food service company. Cabrei The documents that together made up the inventory of a noble estate: maps, and lists regarding property, rights and servants. Campagna urbanizzata A concept that describes urban sprawl in the Tuscan countryside. Giacomo Beccattini coined this term when analyzing the industrialization process of Tuscany in the 1960s in which small urban centers began to populate the countryside. (See also: “città diffusa”). Città diffusa Città diffusa is one of the terms used in Italy which designates urban sprawl. It was coined by Francesco Indovina in the 1980s and was mainly used by him to refer to dispersed urbanization in the Veneto region. It describes the urban phenomenon caused by the rapid and disorderly growth and expansion of a city. It manifests in the outskirts and is characterized by low-density urbanization. Whereas American sprawl is mostly the result of planning choices, the città diffusa derives from the incremental growth of small historical settlements scattered throughout the territory. City à la carte A term coined by Robert Fishman describing the way the contemporary city is measured and viewed in terms of the daily routes taken by people in their cars to get to services, which is similar to the way people order food at a restaurant. In the words of Fishman: “The pattern formed by these destinations represents the city for that particular family or individual. The more varied one’s destinations, the richer and more diverse one’s ‘personal’ city”1. (See also: “urban routines”). Cultural hegemony A concept developed by the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, referring to the domination of society by the ruling class who impose their prevailing worldview – their beliefs, values and normative ideas – on society. Cultural hegemony is achieved when the ruling class’s worldview becomes the universally valid ideology accepted by the masses, which justifies the social, political and economic status quo as legitimate and inevitable, and beneficial for everyone, even though it may only benefit the ruling class. (See also: “subaltern” and “aesthetics of purification”). 1

Fishman, “Megalopolis Unbound”, 38.

glossary

Diffused city See “città diffusa”. Dispersed centrality or isotropic center An integrated system of interconnected elements that can be accessed from any part of the territory. (See also: “metropolitan archipelago” and “isotropic space”). Ethnocentrism The tendency to view other ethnic groups or cultures from the detached perspective of one’s own culture, as if they were curious expressions of geography and nature. This view is particularly apparent in representations by the Tuscan landed gentry of the region’s peasants and their living conditions, which were depicted in the aforementioned manner, without truly understanding the real conditions in which they lived. Everyday life A term used by the Marxist French philosopher Henri Lefevbre, which, in short, describes the space in which all aspects of life – natural, physiological and social – occur. Lefebvre claimed that in the capitalist system everyday life was neglected and technology and production were prioritized, so much so that capitalism was transforming everyday life into mere consumption. He believed that individuals’ autocritique of mundane everyday realities juxtaposed with societal promises of free time and leisure could lead them to revolutionize their everyday lives, impeding the continual impoverishment due to capitalism of the quality of everyday life and real self-expression. (See also: “abstract space and lived space”). Fantasy restoration A type of restoration, particularly promoted by Viollet-le-Duc during the nineteenth century, whose purpose was not to preserve but to recreate – often inaccurately and with great imagination – the atmosphere, style and architectural language of a given era. This concept of restoration essentially produced false copies aimed at forming the identity of communities through the distortion of their idea of the past. (See also: “imagined communities” and “identitarian narrative”). Ghibelline A member of one of the two main conflicting political parties in medieval Florence (and northern Italy) who were sympathetic to the Holy Roman emperor, as opposed to the Guelfs who sided with the papacy. Giostra del Saracino or Joust of the Saracen A biannual jousting tournament held in Arezzo, during which jousters from the four districts of the historic city center must attempt to hit a metal puppet depicting the moro, which is a figure of a black man. Although it is said to have originated during the Middle Ages it became a tradition during the seventeenth century, which eventually died out towards the eighteenth century. It was brought back in the 1930s under Fascism as a historical re-enactment for the diffusion of its political values.

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Glottology The history or science of language. Gothic revival An artistic and architectural movement that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, characterized by the renewed popularity of the Gothic style. Hyperreality A postmodernist concept that refers to a condition in which reality is indistinguishably blended with a simulation of reality. Jean Baudrillard first coined this term in his book Simulacra and Simulation in which he describes hyperreality as the final stage of simulation, where a sign or image has no reference to reality, but is essentially a simulation of itself. Another famous theorist of hyperreality is Italian author Umberto Eco who proposed that hyperreality is the result of a desire to create something better than reality so that it may be consumed as real. Identitarian narrative A representation of a particular situation in such a way as to conform to or reflect a predominant set of political values with the power to affirm an individual’s social identity. Identitarian narratives have the ability not only to create a sense of unity within society but also to systematically exclude others to which such narratives are not directed, denying them certain opportunities that are normally available to other members of society. Identitarian narratives are often deeply entrenched in the conception of a homogeneous national community, for example in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, gender and sexual identity, physical and mental ability, religion and customs. During the Fascist regime, such patriotic sentiment was greatly encouraged in order to instill within citizens a sense of loyalty to the nation, which later was to manifest itself in exclusionary values such as anti-Semitism and racism. (See also: “imagined communities”). Imagined communities Groups of individuals who perceive themselves to be in communion with each other due to the diffusion of cultural products and their shared identitarian narratives. Benedict Anderson coined this term in his book Imagined Communities in which he identifies nations to be socially constructed communities composed of members with an ‘imagined’ mutual sense of their affinity and shared identity, even though they may never actually meet each (or even most) of their fellow members. (See also: “identitarian narrative”). In style restoration See “fantasy restoration”. Isotropic space Exhibiting properties with identical values when measured in all directions. (See also: “dispersed centrality” and “metropolitan archipelago”).

glossary

Italian miracle The period of strong economic growth and technological development in Italy after WWII and up until the late 1960s. Lived space See “abstract space and lived space”. Metropolitan archipelago See “arcipelago metropolitano”. Mezzadria See “sharecropping system and sharecropper”. Middle landscapes A landscape characterized by urban sprawl, somewhere between the city and the countryside. Non-place A term coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to mean a transient space that does not hold enough significance for people to be regarded as a ‘place’. While an ‘anthropological place’ empowers individuals’ identity and relationships, and is rich in history, a non-place on the other hand is not a meeting place and does not establish any relationship with a group. Examples of non-places could be motorways, hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls, although the perception of a place or non-place is considered strictly subjective. Pezzola A piece of fabric resembling a handkerchief that peasant women used to wear on their heads. Polycentrism The organization of a region around several political, social or financial centers. Recovery restoration See “fantasy restoration”. Restauro di fantastia or restauro di ripristino or restauro in stile See “fantasy restoration”. Risorgimento The political and social movement in nineteenth-century Italy during which the separate states of Italy were unified into one state, the Kingdom of Italy. Sharecropping system and sharecropper (mezzadria) A system of farming in which the tenant farmer, or sharecropper, is provided with seed, tools, food, living quarters and an agreed share of the crops in exchange for working the land.

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Simulacrum A distorted copy or image of something with little remaining of the original. This term derives its meaning from Jean Baudrillard’s book entitled Simulacra and Simulation, in which he describes the simulacrum as the final stage of simulation, where the sign or image is devoid of any reference whatsoever to the original. (See also: “hyperreality”). Spatial injustice The concept of spatial injustice links together justice and space. The organization of space reflects that of society, as well as the structure of social relations. Consequently, both justice and injustice are legible in the organization of space. Subaltern A term coined by Antonio Gramsci in his work on cultural hegemony, which identifies the groups in society, such as peasants and workers, that are excluded and oppressed by the ruling classes and thus denied a voice. (See also: “cultural hegemony”). Territoriality A term that describes the nonverbal communication used by people to express ownership or occupancy of space. Urbanized countryside See “campagna urbanizzata”. Urban routines The regular system of stopping and going in order to get to essential services in the daily life of people, as described by urban sociologists such as Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor. (See also: “city à la carte”). Urban sprawl See “città diffusa”.

index

Page numbers including relevant images are shown in italics. A abstract space 11, 20, 35, 47-9, 71, 167, 169, 171 Abyssinia 66 Accademia dei Georgofili 10, 21, 23, 167 access — car 129, 140-1, 144, 148-9 access — foot traffic 129, 140, 144, 148-9 advertising/branding 15, 69, 127, 133-5 aesthetics of purification/concealment 10-2, 20-1, 23-5, 29-31, 35, 48-9, 51, 66-7, 69, 73-6, 79-80, 82-5, 87, 155-6, 167, 169 Africa/African 22, 113 Agip 131, 133-4, 149 agrarian class 10, 19 agricultural land/landscape/countryside 9-11, 15, 17, 20, 25, 31, 36, 39, 40-1, 51, 69, 74-5, 79, 89, 92-3, 96, 98, 155, 158, 167-8 agriculture 21, 27, 45, 94, 99, 167 airports 119, 141, 171 Alemagna 134-5 alluvial land 36-7 Anderson, Benedict 53, 65, 170 Anglo-Saxon culture and influence 10, 98 anthropology 11, 25, 29, 119, 126 anti-Semitism 170 anticlericalism 65 Apennine Mountains 92, 96 architectural heritage conservation 153 architecture, British 53

architecture, European 53, 66-7 architecture, North American 53 architecture, vernacular 125, 127-8, 153 arcipelago metropolitano/metropolitan archipelago 92, 94, 100-4, 167, 169, 171 Arezzo 20, 54, 63-7, 134, 170 fantasy restoration 63-4, 66-7 Piazza Vasari 64 aristocracy 47 Arno, plain 43 Asor Rosa, Alberto 18, 34-5, 37, 4-1, 45-6 Augé, Marc 12, 119, 126-7, 171 autobar 134 autogrill 126-7, 132, 134-5, 149, 168 Autogrill 125-8, 131-2, 135-6, 168 B Baccani, Gaetano 54-6, 64-5 Backes, Nancy 141 Bagnasco, Arnaldo 28, 97 Banca Commerciale Italiana 133 Bandinelli, Bianchi 46 Bandita di Pratolino 26 Barbacci, Alfredo 43 Barcelona 128 Bardot, Brigitte 133 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 18 Batistoni, Gianni 24

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Baudrillard, Jean 30, 48-9, 170, 172 Bazzani, Marco 133 Becattini, Giacomo 17, 28-9, 96-7, 168 Bega, Melchiorre 132 bel paesaggio 89, 158 Ben-Joseph, Eran 127 Bergamo 132 Berlinguer ti voglio bene (Berlinguer, I love you - movie) 27 Bermingham, Ann 23 Bernardi, Sandro 15 Bertano, Stefania 55 Bertolucci, Bernardo 42 Bertolucci, Giuseppe 27 Bianchetti, Angelo 132 Biasutti, Renato 23-4 Bible/Jesus 135 Billocardi, Bonaventura 51 Bloom, Nicholas Dagen 109 Boggiano, Augusto 45 Bohigas, Oriol 128 Bologna 132-3, 135 Ufficio del turismo 133 Bologni, Maurizio 15 Bonsignori, Stefano 51 Borsi, Franco 66 Boston: Boston Central Artery 129 North End 89 boundaries, spatial 32, 90, 131, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 167 BP (British Petroleum) 132 brick, exposed 60, 63-4 bridge-restaurant 132-3 Brigata dei Monumenti 64 Brighenti, Andrea Mubi 138 British settlers 18, 35, 47, 69, 83, 154 Broadacre City 33, 94, 99, 130-1, 149 Brodo, Linda 27 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 152-3, 156 Bruegmann, Robert 32

Brugnolo, Stefano 27 Brunelleschi, Filippo 58 Buddhist ceremonies 114-5 building preservation 51 building materials 30, 62, 69, 78-80, 82-4 buildings, commercial 37, 93, 100, 107, 12551, 156 buildings, congruity/incongruity 76-8, 83, 85 buildings, decay 20-1, 64, 78, 82 buildings, residential 20-1, 24, 29, 64, 69, 75, 82-5, 90, 93, 97, 107, 114 buildings, temporary 21, 64, 84, 109 bureaucracy 11, 71, 76, 109, 155 Buscioni, Maria Cristina 59, 66 business, catering 125-51 C cabrei 23, 168 Calenzano 145 campagna urbanizzata/urbanized countryside 28, 168, 172 Cantagallo 132-3, 135 capitalism 167, 169 Capponi, Gino 74 car 12, 32-3, 88, 124-30, 134-6, 140-1, 1435, 149, 168 car culture 125-7 car, advent of 12, 88, 125, 128-9 Carnival 122 Caroselli 135 Castellazzi, Giuseppe 58 Castells, Manuel 92 Castellucci, Giuseppe 54, 63, 65-6, 72-3 Catholicism 53, 134 Chianti, mountains 92 Chiantishire 15 Chiarone (river) 37 Chicago 132 children 107-9, 119-22, 140, 143, 145-6, 157 Chinese New Year 116 Christaller 88

index

churches/cathedrals/places of worship 48, 509, 63-4, 67, 74, 84, 100, 107, 109, 114, 117-8, 156 cinema/movie theater/multi-theater 31, 93, 130, 157 città diffusa; see diffused city city: ‘à la carte’ 137, 141, 145, 168, 172 growth 12, 43, 91-2, 97, 102-3, 130, 168 city/country distinction/opposition 15, 30-2, 35, 45, 87, 92-3, 95-6, 98-9, 99, 154-5 city/periphery distinction/opposition 9, 12, 31, 35, 40, 92, 104 new/old distinction 9-10, 12 Clark, Timothy J. 23 class distinction 21, 23, 143, 167, 172 class-centric 23 Cloquet, Minnesota 131-2 cobweb diagram 142 Cohen 141, 172 Cologne 53 colonialism 11, 22-3, 66 commerce/business 29, 30-1, 78, 100, 101103, 106-7, 129-33, 141 community 18, 29-30, 33, 39, 67, 84, 107, 109, 114-5, 119, 130-1, 136, 147, 149-50, 169-70 Comunità delle Piagge 84, 112-4, 117, 122-3 conflict/controversy 9, 12-3, 15, 19, 25, 27, 45, 71, 109, 155 conservatism 37, 155 construction/building 20, 29-30, 42-3, 57-9, 64, 77-8, 109, 131-3, 135, 153 consumerism 32, 35, 47, 119, 127, 135 Coop, shopping mall 33, 109, 122-3, Cowen, Deborah 141 Crawford, Margaret 142 cuccagna 135 cultural hegemony 10, 15, 23-4, 54, 153, 167, 169, 172 cultural production 10, 15, 18, 23, 35, 47, 65, 170

D D’Annunzio, Gabriele 64 Dallington, Robert 19 De Fabris, Emilio 58 De Meulder, Bruno 99 De Rita, Giuseppe 97 De Sanctis, Francesco 74 Del Castagno, Andrea 56 Delaney, David 138 depopulation 95 Descartes, René 70 Desideri, Paolo 126 Detti, Edoardo 43 Dezzi Bardeschi, Marco 51, 53 diffused city/urban sprawl/città diffusa 11-2, 28, 69, 86-7, 90, 94-9, 99-105, 130, 157, 1678, 172 Disneyfication 10, 107 dispersed centrality/isotropic center 12, 32, 845, 87, 91, 105-6, 154, 168-9 diversity, ethnic 114 diversity, religious 114 Don Santoro 114 E Eco, Umberto 30, 170 ecological-environmental system (construction and landscape) 77, 79 economic change 17, 28, 67, 153 edge city, global region 92 edgeless city 92 elderly 110, 119, 157 elites 9, 17, 18, 21, 65, 119, 153, 155 Elkan, Giovanni 135 Ellin, Nan 98 emancipation 29 English Cemetery 18-9 Eni 131, 134 Erg Petroli 136 Esso 132 ethnocentrism 11, 22-4, 169

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ethnographic/ethnography 11, 22, 139, 143 Etruscan 37 events 112-3, 115-7, 119-23, 148, 157 everyday life 11, 70-1, 73, 75-6, 80, 84, 99, 119, 126-8, 141, 167, 169 Ewing, Reid H. 90 exopolis 92 exploitation 19, 28, 75 F facade/frontage 20-1, 37, 56, 58-9, 62-4, 74 factories 29, 97, 131 family 29, 140, 168, 145-6, 157 fantasy restoration 11, 51, 54, 59, 63-4, 66, 72-3, 169, 171-2 fantasy restoration and nationalism 51, 54 farming 25, 106, 172 Fascism 10, 11, 17, 19-21, 24, 28, 31, 35, 51, 54, 64, 66-7, 73-5, 114, 167, 170 Fattori, Giovanni 22 festivals 24-5, 67, 114 feudalism 10, 15, 19, 21, 25-6, 28, 75, 156 Fiat 134 Fiat Seicento 134 fief 23 Fiesole 16-7, 36 figure-ground representation 91-2, 96 Fiorenzuola dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arda 132 Fishman, Robert 130, 141, 168 Flanders 156 Florence: Campanile 55 fantasy restoration 54, 64, 66, 72-3 Filipino community 114 Florence Metropolitan Park 104-5 ghetto 56 Giotto, bell tower 55 Loggia del Bigallo, Piazza Duomo 58 peripheries, everyday life 109, 112-3 Piazza del Duomo 53, 54-5, 58, 64-5 Piazza Ilaria Alpi e Miran Hvrovatin 113

Piazza Indipendenza 114 Piazza Stazione 56, 58 Piazza Vittorio Emanuele/della Repubblica 56 Piazzale Michelangelo 44-5 San Lorenzo, 58, 74 Santa Croce, 56-7, 74 Santa Maria del Fiore/il Duomo 48, 51, 54-6, 58, 64, 74, 84, 100, 114 Santa Maria Novella 52, 56, 58 Sri Lankan community 144-5 University of Florence 17, 75 Via degli Avelli 58 Via dei Calzaiuoli 100 Viale Nenni 136 folklore 24 Fordism 97 Foscolo, Ugo 74 Franchi, Alessandro 59 Fred Harvey Company 132 Freud 66 G Gaggio, Dario 26 Galilee 135 Gardiner, Michael E. 71 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 61, 65 gas stations 12, 31, 93, 107, 119, 125-8, 13049, 157-8 architectural style 131-4, 144, 148 as landmark 131, 133, 149 as non-place 127-8, 149, 158 social role 107, 119, 125-6, 130, 136-8, 140-1, 143-6, 148-50, 157 Gehl, Jan 137, 139 generic city 94 Ghibelline 65, 169 Gibelli, Maria C. 104 Gillham, Bill 139 Ginori Lisci, Leonardo 23 Giornale Agrario Toscano 21

index

Giostra del Saracino 65-6, 69, 170 Giovannoni, Giulio 109 global context scale 77 global context scale, buildings and landscapes glottology 25, 170 Gothic revival 53, 56, 58, 64, 170 Gramsci, Antonio 24, 169, 172 grands ensembles 71 Gregoretti, Ugo 127 Gruen, Victor 33 Guelf 169 H Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 23, 129 Hegel, Georg W.F. 71 heritage 20, 46, 153 highway/motorway 102, 119, 126-7, 130-132, 135-6, 142, 149, 168, 171 hill/plain distinction 9, 20, 36-7, 43, 47, 49, 75-6 historic center 9-11, 18, 20, 31-2, 36, 38, 46-7, 51, 56, 58, 63-4, 66-7, 69, 74, 89-90, 92-3, 95, 106-7, 109, 114, 119, 126, 130, 150, 155-8, 170 historical-identitarian system (construction and landscape) 78, 83 House of Dante, Casa di Dante 66, 72, 74 House of Petrarch, Casa del Petrarca 64 Howard, Ebenezer 47 Hroch, Miroslav 67 Hugo, Victor 53 hyperreality 10-11, 30, 48-9, 83, 170, 172 I identitarian narrative 66-7, 169-71 identity 11-2, 15, 35, 37, 40, 50, 58, 64-5, 67, 69, 74, 95, 149, 169, 170-1 ethnic 12, 67, 114, 170 historical 77 national 11, 50, 53-4, 58, 64, 67, 74, 134, 170-1 regional 11, 58, 63-4, 69, 74, 95 religious 12, 67, 114, 170

image, artificial/idealized 10-12, 15, 21, 31, 345, 40-1, 47, 49, 51, 54, 58, 67, 74-5, 87 imagined communities 53, 65-6, 169-70 immigration 30 INA-Casa 43-5 Indovina,Francesco31,92,94,98,99-105,167-8 industrialization 17-8, 29, 47, 53, 75, 97, 168 informational city 92 infrastructure 31, 93, 97, 102-3, 101-7, 119, 124, 126-8, 130 Ingersoll, Richard 32, 99, 128 Institute of Physiology of the University of Milan 132 interviews 26, 137, 139, 144, 158 Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty — movie) 42 Ipercoop 104-5, 120-1 Isolotto 111, 144 isotropic space 70, 99-106, 169, 171 Istituto Regionale di Programmazione Economica della Toscana (IRPET) 97 Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice 31 Italian miracle/economic boom 30, 134-5, 168, 171 J Jacobs, Jane 89, 109, 158 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff 127 Jencks, Charles 109 K Kärrholm, Mattias 138 Koetter, Fred 107 Kohn, Margaret 141 Koolhaas, Ram 94, 98 Kunstler, James H. 127 L La Repubblica 37, 45 Ladispoli 37 Lainate 132 Lambruschini, Raffaello 21

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Lang, Robert E. 92 landed gentry 10, 15, 19, 21, 35, 75, 80, 154, 169 landowners 18, 64, 82 landscape, congruity/incongruity 76-8 landscape protection/preservation/conservation 10-11, 17, 45, 47, 51, 75, 77, 98, 153 landscape semiotics 77-8, 80 Lasanksy, Medina 19-20, 31, 64, 67, 73,-4 Latouche, Serge 112 Lazio 37, 40 Le Corbusier 47, 71 Le Piagge 84, 112-4, 122-3 Ledda, Gavino 25-7 Lefebvre, Henri 11, 19-20, 35, 37, 48-9, 70-1, 79, 82, 88, 153, 155-6, 167, 169 leisure 100, 102, 107, 135, 169 Lercaro, Giacomo, Archbishop of Bologna 135 Lewis, Michael J. 53 Life International 135 lived space 11, 71, 153, 156, 167, 169, 171 living conditions 17, 21, 23, 25-7 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 41, 63, 155 Lorenzetti, frescoes 41, 63, 155-6 Los Angeles 94 Lynch, Kevin 38 M Maccari, Leopoldo 59 Macchiaioli 23 Mangoni, Giuseppe 56 Mannheim, Karl 154 Manuel, Frank & Fritzie Manuel 43 Marcuse, Peter 141 Maremma amara (Bitter Maremma) 26 Mariani, Riccardo 90 Marxism 53, 169 Mattei, Enrico 131, 133-4 Mayes, Frances 14-5 McDonald’s 93, 119, 136, 140, 143-6, 148-9

MDGS — ‘McDrive Gas Station’ 136-9, 143-9 Medici 25 meeting-point, hub 62, 100, 224, 143 metropolitan archipelago, see ‘arcipelago metropolitano’ mezzadri/sharecroppers 10, 15, 17-9, 21, 30, 75, 172 Michelucci, Giovanni 44-5 Middle Ages, medieval 20, 37, 53-4, 58, 625, 67, 90, 169, 170 Middle East 87 middle landscapes 98, 171 Miller, Daniel 141 Milan, Piazza del Duomo 56 minorities 20, 156 Mitchell, Don 141 modernist failure myth 109 modernization 40, 53-5, 65 monad 23, 25-6 Montalto 37 morality 27, 41, 74-5, 80, 155-6 Moran, Joe 119 Morandi, Maurizio 107 moro 69, 170 Motta 132-4 Mottagrill 132-3, 135 Municipality of Florence 45 museumization 31, 35, 47, 51 Mussini, Luigi 59 Mussolini Cup 67 N nationalism 53-4, 65, 67, 156, 170-1 Nazi Germany 66-7 Németh, Jeremy 142 neoclassical 56 neo-Gothic 53, 58-9, 62 neo-medieval 53 New York 129 Newman, Oscar 109

index

Nicholson-Smith, Donald 37 nightlife 111, 143-6 non-place 12, 119, 125-8, 157-8, 171 Norme per il governo del territorio 45 Novara 131-2 Nuovo Pignone 134 Nuremberg 66-7 O oligarchy/oligarchic 155 Olympia (movie) 67 OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) 98 oppression 9, 17, 27 oral histories 25 outlets 31, 93 P Padre padrone (book & movie) 25-7 Palazzeschi, Aldo 36, 43, 49, 75-6 Pampaloni, Lorenza 46 Papal State 65 Paris: Haussmann’s proletarian locales 23 Notre-Dame 53 squares and avenues 65 parking lots 31-3, 93, 107, 127, 136, 146 Parlette, Vanessa 141 Parrella, Michele 134 Partini, Giuseppe 54, 59, 61-3, 65, 66-7 partnership, food + oil industries 131, 135, 144, 149 patriotism 53, 66, 170 Pavesi (autogrill) 132, 134-5 Pavesi, Mario 131, 168 Pavesini 131, 135 peasants 10, 15, 17, 19-26, 745, 82-3, 169, 172 Peck, Gregory 133 Person, James 19 Petrarch 64, 66 pezzola 18, 171

Piani per la distribuzione dei carburanti 150 Piano d’indirizzo territoriale 96 Piano territoriale di coordinamento 95 Pianta della Catena 86-7, 90 Piombino 96 Pisa 56, 92, 136 Piazza dei Miracoli 56 Pistoia 28, 92 planning/planners 12, 45, 49, 69, 73, 85, 89-90, 95, 97-98, 101-6, 119, 130, 150, 153-5, 167-8 poetry 24 Poggi, Giuseppe 90 policies 11-12, 17-8, 21, 35-7, 43, 45, 47-9, 51, 67, 69, 73-4, 76, 79-80, 85, 88-9, 91, 95, 98, 101, 114, 119, 130, 150, 153-5, 157 policies, city/car 129 polycentrism 12, 32, 84-5, 87-8, 90-1, 93-6, 105, 154, 171 economic 93-6 urban 12, 93-6 popular culture 24 population 44, 47, 90-1, 100, 155; see also residents/citizens post-metropolis 92 post-suburbia 92 postcards 22, 36, 65, 69, 72-4 poverty 25, 27, 75, 84 Prague 53 Prato 27-8, 45, 92, 116 Chinese New Year celebrations 116 prejudice, social 114 Premio nazionale della pubblicità 132 proximity context scale 77, 80-1 PSGS — ‘Pastry Shop Gas Station’ 136, 140, 143-4 public spaces 92-3, 102-3, 105-7, 110-11,114, 119, 125, 130, 137-8, 141-2, 150-1, 156 publicness 137, 141-2, 146-9 securedness 142 themedness 142

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Q Quaroni, L. 99 Quartulli, Angelamaria 55 R racism 64, 66-7, 170 recovery restoration 53, 169, 171 Regional Councilor for Urbanism 46 Regione Autonoma della Sardegna 76 Renaissance, architecture 37 representation, photographic 12, 20-1, 23, 75, 109 residential zones/neighborhoods 93, 109-12, 119, 129-30, 136-7 residents/citizens 48-9, 93, 96, 100, 109, 114, 129, 135-6, 140, 149, 155 restauro di fantasia 53, 169, 172 restauro di ripristino 53, 169, 172 restauro in stile 53, 169, 172 restoration 51, 53-4, 56, 58-9, 64, 169, 171 reverse city 92, 99 Riefenstahl, Leni 66-7 Risorgimento 11, 51, 65-6, 73-4, 114, 172 Ristoragip 128, 131 Ritzer, George 107, 131 Ro.Go.Pa.G. (movie) 127 Ro.Go.Pa.G., Il pollo ruspante (movie segment) 127 Romano, Marco 156 Ronco Scrivia 132 Rosai, Ottone 23, 75 Ross, Silvia 15 Rosselli, Francesco 86-7 Rowe, Colin 107 rulers, ruling classes 15, 21, 24-5, 41, 53, 69, 74-5, 153, 167, 169, 172 Ruskin 53 S Sack, Robert D. 138 Sadler, David 92

safety/security 109, 144, 146-7, 149 Salzano, Edoardo 104 Sanminiatelli, Bino 23, 25 Sardinia 25-7 Sarrocchi, Tito 59 Savioli, Leonardo 46 Scandicci 109-10, 114, 118, 136 San Luca al Vingone 114, 118 Vingone 109 Schmidt, Stephen 142 Scott, Allen J. 92 Secchi, Bernardo 20, 31, 99 Segal, Rafi 99 semiotics 23, 40, 154 Sesto 92 Sesto Fiorentino 24, 104-5, 120-1 settlements 12, 47, 49, 85, 87-8, 92-3, 96-7, 98, 105, 130, 150-1, 157 sharecroppers; see mezzadri shopping malls 12, 31-3, 93, 102-4, 107, 114, 119-23, 130, 141-2, 157, 171 Siena 22, 41, 54, 59-63, 65, 67, 101, 106, 156 Duomo 59, 67 fantasy restoration 54, 59 Jewish ghetto 60 Monte dei Paschi 62-3 Palazzo Pubblico 41, 59, 62-3, 155-6 Piazza del Campo 62 Piazza/Palazzo Salimbeni 62-3 Via Cassia 106 Via dei Banchi 106 Sieverts, Thomas 32, 87, 92, 99, 104-5 simulacrum 10-11, 35, 47-9, 170, 172 Sinatra, Frank 133 sistematizzazione 55 Smith, Graham 65 Snowden, Frank 17, 19 social alienation 33, 70-1, 73, 119, 127, 150 social change 17, 67 social/public housing 12, 70, 109, 111-4 social life 12, 19, 73, 93, 99, 101, 107, 109-

index

14, 119-21, 125-6, 128, 136, 143-6 Società dei Territorialisti 31, 39 Soja, Edward W. 92 Sorelle Materassi (Materassi Sisters — book) 36, 75 Sorgane 44, 46 Sorkin, Michael 142 space: and time 71, 126 engagement with/uses of 29, 54, 69-71, 73, 75-6, 82-4, 93, 98, 99, 140, 142-6, 148-50, 153, 156 perception of 9, 11, 21, 24-5, 35, 157-8 private 141, 153, 156-7 production of 11, 37, 70, 80, 87-9 public 12, 128-9, 136, 153 representations 10, 12, 19, 30, 153-5 spatial injustice/violence 9-10, 19, 154-5, 172 spatial narratives 11, 15, 18, 20, 35, 43, 87, 89, 153, 155, 157 cinematic 11, 15, 18, 21, 27, 41-3 iconographic 11, 21, 41, 75, 83 journalistic 11, 15, 18, 37, 40-3, 69, 154 literary 11, 15, 18, 21, 41-43, 69, 74-5 political 18, 154 spiritual life 12, 114-5, 117-8 sports facilities 31, 93, 107, 114, 130, 156 Staeheli, Lynn A. 141 status quo 10-11, 75, 157, 169 subaltern 18, 22-5, 27, 36, 169, 172 supermodernity 119, 126 Svarre, Birgitte 137, 139 T Tarquinia 37 Taylor, Laurie 141, 172 Teaford, Jon 92 technopolis 92 television 134-5 territoriality 138, 172 Tiesdell, Steve 142, 147-50 Tinti, Mario 23

Togni, Giuseppe 45 Toscana felix 34-5, 37, 40-1 Total-Italia 136 TotalErg 136 tourism 12, 30, 35, 37, 47-8, 51, 64, 84, 93, 956, 107, 114 town squares 44, 51, 54-6, 58, 62, 64-5, 104, 106-7, 114, 126, 150 traffic 101, 107, 129, 150 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will — movie) 66-7 Tulum, Hande 109 Tuscan myth 9-10, 18, 31, 35-7, 40-1, 49, 75 Tuscany: academic discourse on 9-10, 75 media discourse on 42-3, 69, 75 political discourse on 69, 75 commodification of 51, 69 dystopian 9-10, 12, 18, 34-5, 37, 40-3, 45, 479, 75-6, 89-90, 155, 158 international imaginary 15, 18, 21, 46, 73 Regional Administration Council 45, 96 social imaginary 9, 21, 27, 46 utopian 9-11, 18, 34-5, 37, 40-3, 45, 47-9, 69, 75-6, 89-90, 155, 158 Tyrrhenian coast 36, 96 U Uccello, Paolo 56 Umbach, Fritz 109 Unification 54, 65-6, 172; see also Risorgimento University of Berkeley 84 urban crisis 129 urban culture 12 urban routines 137, 141, 145, 168, 172 urban sprawl; see diffused city urbanism 9, 17, 128 urbanization 28, 47, 75, 87, 91-3, 95-9, 99-100, 106, 154, 168 use-state-function system (construction and landscape) 81

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V Val d’Orcia 40 Val di Cornia 96 Vale, Lawrence 109 Van Aalst, Irina 142 Van Melik, Rianne 142 Van Weesep, Jan 142 Varna, George 142, 147-50 Vasari 58, 64 Vassallo 53 Venice 31, 99 Biennale 67 Verbakel, Els 99 Victoria, Queen of England 16 Viganò, Paola 92, 99-105 Villari, Pasquale 74 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 53, 169 visual-perceptive system (construction and landscape) 78 Vittorini, Marcello 45 Vittorio Emanuele II 65 Viviani della Robbia, Enrica 25 W Wachsmuth, David 154, 157 Waldheim, Charles 106 Wells, H.G. 99 Wheeler, Robert C. 131 Whyte 158 Williams, Raymond 18 Wright, Frank Lloyd 33, 47, 94, 99, 130-2, 149 WWI, post 11, 17 WWII, post 11-2, 25, 28, 31, 45, 47, 69, 73, 96, 127, 131, 134, 149, 171 Y youths/youth culture 111, 119, 125, 144-5, 157

Z Zambenedetti, Alberto 15 Zanuttini, Paola 41 Zwischenstadt 92, 99

Finito di stampare per conto di didapress Dipartimento di Architettura UniversitĂ degli Studi di Firenze Ottobre 2017

Critical

CTS Tuscan

Studies

Although Tuscany is frequently depicted in movies, postcards, magazines and advertisements, a large part of the region is almost never represented – that of the peripheries and suburban sprawl. Most Tuscans reside in these areas, far from the refined land- and cityscapes of the old towns and hilly countryside. Despite its relevance, suburban Tuscany is largely neglected both by politicians and scholars. The myth of historic centers and of the Tuscan countryside, now purified and museumized, characterizes this alternate space as a dystopian world, even though it can be argued to be the most lively and dynamic part of the region, where new forms of urbanity are being developed. These aspects, however, still have to be discovered and conveyed. In order to better understand and govern the new city, it is necessary to challenge and dismantle the ideology of the old city. This book is the fruit of thirteen years of empirical work on Tuscan peripheries and of more than five years of analysis on the negative effects produced by the myth of Tuscany on regional policy-making. The first four chapters of the volume deconstruct the discourse on space in Tuscany from four different disciplinary angles. The next three chapters reformulate the concept of the city, starting from a long-term empirical work on the social life and built environment of the Florence peripheries. “Giulio Giovannoni has produced an exceptional study of the other Florence, the one where the Florentines really live. Such a study is important not just for local reasons, but also for its transversal scientific and social value”. Richard Ingersoll | Syracuse University in Florence

“This book is a provocative reconceptualization of the Tuscan built environment and landscape. In addition to challenging age-old perceptions, it suggests new ways of thinking about city, suburb and countryside with important implications for understanding the in-between landscapes that now characterize most urban areas”. Margaret Crawford | University of California at Berkeley

Giulio Giovannoni, PhD., is an architect and researcher in Urban and Regional Planning who has worked since 2005 in the Department of Architecture, University of Florence. He teaches the courses “Urban Design”, “Rethinking Non-Places”, and “Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Urban Space”. He is a former research fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2007-2009), and a former visiting scholar at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley (2013-2014) and at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (2006). His research focuses on three main topics, which he considers to be strictly interrelated: contemporary Tuscan cultural and landscape history, public life and urban design in peripheries, and public life and urban design of ‘non-places’. He is the author of three books and of various scholarly articles.

ISBN 978-88-9608-093-1

€ 30,00