“They Are Just Trying to Contain Us”: Parkour, Counter-Conducts and the Government of Difference in Turin, Italy. (original) (raw)
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CONTESTED BODIES, CONTESTED CITIES: (POST)MIGRANT YOUTH AND CONTINGENT CITIZENSHIP IN TURIN, ITALY
Urban spaces in contemporary Italy are currently contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are constructed and negotiated. While at a national level widespread xenophobic discourses classify migration as a security and public order problem, and define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italian cities, at a local level the leadership and cultural entrepreneurs of Turin based the city urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness with the aim to attract visitors and capital investments. As the intersection of such discourses shape the manifold ways through which (post)migrant bodies become represented, perceived and addressed in contemporary Turin, this paper will address how such dynamics are negotiated by groups of children of migration between 16 and 21 years old practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin public spaces. The focus on capoeira and parkour, two lifestyle sports which emplace the body in public spaces, enabled this study to highlight how groups of (post)migrant youth used these practices to negotiate spaces and processes of inclusion, and exclusion, in Turin's cityscape. Capoeira and parkour represented meaningful sites of analysis, as practices wrought with contradictions indicative of current trends within Turin's urban politics. Both disciplines are abundantly endorsed by public-private events celebrating Turin's renewal, vibrancy and diversity. However, the participants' spontaneous, and often unrequested, engagement with these disciplines in public spaces often creates frictions and conflicts between them and other members of the public in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used, and by whom. The analysis of the participants' engagement with capoeira and parkour in Turin's regenerating cityscape, enabled to illuminate the shifting meaning of citizenship in the context of research, and articulate it to the reciprocal constitution of bodies, spaces, and power relations in a less-thancoherent assemblage of neoliberal urban regeneration.
2016
The following paper aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary debate between studies on “the physical” (Silk et al., 2015), the urban condition, migration and multicultural/super-diverse societies, by exploring how groups of (post)migrant youth practicing parkour engaged emerging forms of social and spatial restructuring characterizing cities like Turin, Italy. Taking cue from Lefebvre's argument that “space originates from the body” (1991, p. 242) this paper does not aim to address the practices of (post)migrant youth in cities, as merely containers of social practices and relations (Glick Schiller and Caglar, 2011; Schmoll and Semi, 2013), but focuses on the relationship between young men of migrant descent and the city of Turin, thus exploring how participants practices negotiated, and were made part of the process of repositioning and restructuring of their city of settlement. The ethnographic exploration of participants' engagement with parkour in Turin's public s...
Leisure Studies, 2022
The following paper contributes to interdisciplinary debates at the intersection of informal sport/leisure, migration and urban studies. It does so by drawing on an ethnographic research with young men of migrant origins in Turin, Italy, and by addressing the relevance of parkour in the participants’ experiences and negotiations of ‘what it means to (not) belong’ in urban spaces. The focus on parkour provides a unique entry point to address the politics of belonging that unfold in urban spaces as contested sites where competing images of the city, the nation and of who belongs to them converge, clash and overlap. This is particularly relevant, though not limited to the Italian context, where political narratives and realities still legally and socially define the children of migration as alien bodies in the nation, while Turin’s urban leaderships portray youth cultures and multicultural diversity as assets for the city’s symbolic, cultural and financial regeneration. As the intersection of such discourses shapes the manifold ways through which post-migrant urban subjects become essentialised, valorised and pathologised in Turin, the paper’s findings foreground the relevance of informal sports as entry points to (re)consider discussions on citizenship, conviviality and rights (to the city) in contemporary urban contexts.
Urban spaces in contemporary Italy are currently contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are constructed and negotiated. While at a national level widespread xenophobic discourses classify migration as a security and public order problem, and define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italian cities, at a local level the leadership and cultural entrepreneurs of Turin based the city urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness with the aim to attract visitors and capital investments. As the intersection of such discourses shape the manifold ways through which (post)migrant bodies become represented, perceived and addressed in contemporary Turin, this paper will address how such dynamics are negotiated by groups of children of migration between 16 and 21 years old practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin public spaces. The focus on capoeira and parkour, two lifestyle sports which emplace the body in public spaces, enabled this study to highlight how groups of (post)migrant youth used these practices to negotiate spaces and processes of inclusion, and exclusion, in Turin's cityscape. Capoeira and parkour represented meaningful sites of analysis, as practices wrought with contradictions indicative of current trends within Turin's urban politics. Both disciplines are abundantly endorsed by public-private events celebrating Turin's renewal, vibrancy and diversity. However, the participants' spontaneous, and often unrequested, engagement with these disciplines in public spaces often creates frictions and conflicts between them and other members of the public in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used, and by whom. The analysis of the participants' engagement with capoeira and parkour in Turin's regenerating cityscape, enabled to illuminate the shifting meaning of citizenship in the context of research, and articulate it to the reciprocal constitution of bodies, spaces, and power relations in a less-thancoherent assemblage of neoliberal urban regeneration.
Parkour, Counter-Conducts and the Government of Difference in Post-industrial Turin
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2018
The following paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the unfolding politics of belonging and exclusion taking place in Turin's regenerating cityscape as a way to illuminate the paradoxes, tensions and daily negotiations of emerging forms of social and spatial restructuring in the post-industrial city. In developing this analysis, we engage with an integrated methodological approach that privileges the voices and experiences of about 30 young men, mostly of migrant origins and aged 16-21, practicing parkour in the city's public spaces. In addressing these issues, we focus on the participants' engagement with one of the symbols of Turin's (multi)cultural, community-oriented and creative renewal, the post-industrial urban park of Parco Dora in order to unpack the processes of inclusion/exclusion and the conduct of conduct (Rose 2000) enacted in the creation, management and use of the city's regenerating areas. Our discussion of the participants' ambivalent and contested practices in Turin's cityscape enabled us to address how these young men re-inscribe tensions, instabilities and fault-lines relational to the " selective story-telling " (Vanolo 2015, 2) characterizing Turin's narratives of consensual transformation, post-industrial renaissance and (multi)cultural vitality. In particular, by engaging with the participants' bodily and spatial negotiations in Turin's public spaces through the lens of counter-conduct (Foucault 2007[1978]), we highlight the significance of recognising and examining partial, but productive forms of urban contestation within contemporary, pacified scenarios of urban regeneration.
2010
The last half century has been a time of unprecedented global urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization. In a matter of decades, countries that were mostly rural have become mostly urban. At the same time, the number of electoral democracies has doubled, increasing from one third to two thirds of the world's sovereign states. In many regions of the world, the growth of cities and the invention of democracy has also coincided with the institutionalization of neoliberalism as an organization of state and a rationality of privatization and dispossession. These processes of urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization are deeply related. Although their combinations are intensely local in combustion, they produce a remarkably similar condition worldwide: enormous numbers-soon approaching a majority-of the world's population now live in impoverished urban peripheries in conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban centers that benefit from their services and their poverty. Yet these conditions also generate a characteristic response: precisely in the urban peripheries, residents come to understand their basic needs in terms of their inhabiting the city, suffering it, building their daily lives in it, making its landscape, history, and politics a place for themselves. The many meanings of this making often coalesce into a sense that they have a right to the city. This transformation of need into right has made cities a strategic arena for the development of new and insurgent Holston 2 citizenships. By citizenship I mean membership in a political association or community that articulates a relation, not a dichotomy, between structures of power and social lives. By insurgent urban citizenship, I refer to the political transformation that occurs when the conviction of having a right to the city turns residents into active citizens who mobilize their demands through residentially-based organizations that confront entrenched national regimes of citizen inequality. Not all urban peripheries produce this kind of insurgence of city against state. But enough do to qualify this collision of urban and national, local and imperial, insurgent and entrenched citizenships as a global category of conflict. The results of these processes in Latin America, Southern Africa, India, and elsewhere have been contradictory. If democratization would seem to hold special promise for more egalitarian citizenships, and thus for greater citizen justice and dignity, in practice most democracies experience tremendous conflict among citizens as principle collides with prejudice over the terms of national membership and the distribution of rights. If cities have historically been the locus of citizenship's expansion, contemporary peripheral urbanization creates especially volatile conditions, as city regions become crowded with marginalized citizens and noncitizens who contest their exclusions. Thus the insurgence of urban democratic citizenships in recent decades has disrupted established formulas of rule and privilege in the most diverse societies worldwide. Yet the result is an entanglement of democracy with its counters, in which new kinds of urban citizens arise to expand democratic citizenships and new forms of urban violence, inequality, impunity, and dispossession erode them. Today, I want to emphasize that this insurgent right to the city confronts the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; in other words, that its conflicts Holston 3 are clashes of citizenship and not merely idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. I want to emphasize that although brutal political economies of labor, land, and law segregate the urban poor into peripheries and reduce them to a "bare life" of servility, the very same structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life worthy of citizens. The incitement that I am talking about takes place in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape around the construction of residence in remote urban peripheries. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen's dignity. Accordingly, its demands for a new formulation of citizenship get conceived in terms of housing, property, plumbing, daycare, security, and other aspects of residential life. Its leaders are the "barely citizens" of the entrenched regime: women, manual laborers, squatters, the functionally literate, immigrants and, above all, those in families with a precarious stake in residential property, with a legal or illegal toehold to a houselot somewhere far from elite centers. These are the agents who, in the process of building and defending their residential spaces, not only construct a vast new city but, on that basis, also propose a city with a different order of citizenship.
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Social Inclusion, 2019
This article aims to highlight the emergence of urban citizenship spaces in two European cities-Milan, Italy, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands-where marginality and social exclusion are faced and coped with through social participation, appropriation of space, and the construction of a peculiar place-based sense of belonging. To do so, the article will present the results of comparative research conducted in Milan and Rotterdam by means of 60 semi-structured interviews (30 in each city) with inhabitants of peculiar neighbourhoods in the two cities. The analysis will adopt an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989), paying attention to the intersection between personal characteristics and spatial features to highlight the processes occurring at the crossroads between the social and spatial categories. In particular, this work will present two examples, one from each city involved in the research, in which urban citizenship practices are enacted and create a Lefebvrian space of representation where dominant discourses and narratives are overcome and overturned by people otherwise excluded from dominant spaces and mainstream forms of urban citizenship. A comparison of the fieldwork from the two cities shows how in both cases, subaltern and/or marginalised groups (women, the poor, and migrants in particular) manage to appropriate interstitial spaces within the city where they can find room for expression and well-being and for the performance of urban citizenship practices. At the same time, though, external (political and economic) factors can transform those spaces of representation into self-constraining places which can expose these marginal groups to further vulnerability.
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