A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: Amodio - Multiethnic urban landscapes (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The arrival, mostly clandestine, of non-European immigrants in Italy has 
been progressively increasing in recent decades, especially in the 
southern regions, a transit and work area, where at the beginning it 
maintained a certain degree of invisibility, derived from work in the 
fields, but which has now become increasingly visible in urban areas. 
Even if it is not an "invasion", as the local right-wing proclaims to 
scare their voters, the volume of first- and second-generation 
foreigners is high enough to mark city life, both in large cities and in 
medium and small ones, where the phenomenon can be said to be more 
recent. In fact, when it was a question of a few individuals, especially 
young and male, their presence did not generally disturb urban life, 
except when the difference concerned precise bodily signs such as skin 
color; in fact, the recognizability of Eastern European migrants is not 
so immediate, considering that their somatic features are not so 
different from the Italian ones. The situation is different when 
families begin to arrive, and therefore women and children, who do not 
replace the flow of single men, but join them, especially considering 
the existence of family networks that have favored their arrival and 
settlement. This phenomenon is advanced in large cities, such as 
Catania, Naples or Milan, while in small ones it is an incipient 
phenomenon or that is only now becoming more visible.

The arrival of families, which expresses a certain economic and social 
stability, brings with it an important change both in their lives and in 
those of the historical inhabitants of the various urban contexts in 
which the emigrants have settled, generally peripheral, even if this is 
not so evident in small urban areas, where it is difficult to 
differentiate one area from another in economic terms. The most obvious 
signs of these new urban settlements, characterized by a certain ethnic 
homogeneity of origin, is the progressive mutation of the context: new 
spaces for socializing are created, unknown music is listened to, exotic 
cooking smells are perceived and, above all, shops and small 
supermarkets are born characterized by products from distant lands, but 
which also sell local products, from which it follows that even 
non-migrants end up frequenting them, even if often only in case of 
necessity. Finally, the multiplication of emigrant families implies the 
presence of children, from which the pressure on state bodies for their 
medical and educational assistance.

The panorama that we have outlined did not come about from one day to 
the next, but has been taking shape over the last thirty years, without 
politics realizing what was happening, apart from some local urban 
institutions, concerned about the existence of these new "citizens" 
without social protection, especially children. The legal country, as 
Bobbio would have said, coincides less and less with the real country; 
and even when legislation is made, it is done on the basis of "data" 
constructed ideologically and not derived from real knowledge of social 
processes, as is the case with the Bossi/Fini law or, more recently, the 
Cutro decree. An exquisitely psychological and, clearly, ethical problem 
arises here: do politicians and their voters, who do not "see" the 
Italian reality increasingly irremediably mixed with other cultural 
forms of life, lie knowing they are lying or do they see reality through 
the filter of its representation? The answer is obvious if we consider 
the five hundred thousand people who believed and voted for Vannacci, 
even if I have the impression that the general knows he is lying.

Talking about representation implies knowing how to distinguish between 
"panorama" and "landscape", where the first term alludes to real spatial 
processes of habitation, while the second refers to the historical 
construction of significant images of the panorama carried out by human 
groups. Just as undifferentiated space becomes territory when it is 
given names, meanings and values, the natural panorama becomes cultural 
landscape, differentiated according to social groups, one of which can 
become dominant, imposed by hegemonic groups and conveyed by the media. 
In the case of emigrants, the various cultural landscapes that are 
produced can vary from those that deny their already stable presence and 
the role they play in the country's economy (and the role they will play 
in the future; see the reference to the logic of pensions), to those 
that have already integrated them into the representation, especially in 
popular environments, naturalizing their presence. Mirrors of this 
different construction of the presence of the other can be considered 
the controversies on the presence of non-white Italians in elite Italian 
sports; as well as those on Salvini's statements that emphasize the skin 
color or the origin of those who transgress or commit a crime, which he 
does not do when the transgressor is a white and Aryan Italian!

Given that urban cultural landscapes are a group product, possibly 
homogeneous not only in terms of social condition but also made up of 
members who carry the same culture and speak a common language or 
variants with a common origin, even the growing communities of migrants 
permanently resident in Italy produce representations of the territory 
that can transform themselves into cultural landscapes, tools of action 
on a world that need to be controlled in some way. Of course, in this 
case, we must not forget that the same decision to emigrate and travel 
in terrible conditions towards Europe can be considered the result of a 
largely fantastic representation, but which is strongly defined by the 
contrast between wealth and poverty, something very real (even if they 
then discover that the poor also exist in the rich world!). In this 
sense, the old representation suffers from violent processes of 
restructuring, until it conforms to a new landscape, certainly subordinate.

The production of landscapes or, if you like, representations in urban 
areas implies that, faced with the panorama of houses and streets, each 
social group, of local or foreign origin, has different readings; that 
is, there are as many cities as there are social or ethnic groups that 
inhabit them and these different images "fight" with each other to 
impose themselves or, in any case, to obtain enough strength to propose 
themselves as a possible option, even faced with those traditional 
landscapes that try to exclude them. Hence the need for a debate on 
"multiethnic landscape" or "interethnic landscape", which necessarily 
passes through the same concept of integration, as we will see...

Emanuele Amodio

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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