Creative urbanity : an Italian middle class in the shade of revitalization / Emanuela Guano.

Author
Guano, Emanuela [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
1st edition.
Published/​Created
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017]
Description
242 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks HT178.I82 G83 2017 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Contemporary ethnography [More in this series]
    Summary note
    In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people--educated, middle class--seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the 1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have. -- Provided by publisher.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-233) and index.
    Contents
    • Chronotypes of hope
    • Genoa's magic circle
    • Gentrification without teleologies
    • Cultural bricoleuses
    • Touring the hidden city
    • Utopia with no guarantees.
    ISBN
    • 9780812248784 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
    • 0812248783 ((hardcover ; : alk. paper))
    LCCN
    2016024738
    OCLC
    945950036
    Other standard number
    • 40026692423
    Statement on language in description
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