Creative urbanity : an Italian middle class in the shade of revitalization
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Creative urbanity : an Italian middle class in the shade of revitalization
(Contemporary ethnography series)
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2017
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [211]-233) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Chronotopes of Hope
Chapter 2. Genoa's Magic Circle
Chapter 3. Gentrification Without Teleologies
Chapter 4. Cultural Bricoleuses
Chapter 5. Touring the Hidden City
Chapter 6. Utopia with No Guarantees
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"