Abstract
The contribution starts from the historical importance of the commercial function in Naples in structuring the urban space, a function to which it is possible largely to trace the long-lasting relationship between consumption and demand for places, as well as many changes in the urban image. Retail organized the city not only on the main streets but also at the scale of non-minoritarian and widespread micro-spaces in the various neighborhoods, in a Naples that, especially in the twentieth century, was transformed according to macro logic very different from today’s. Today the element that seems to most order the structure of places and the urban landscape is consumption, mixed with living and related activities, walking and cultural functions: elements mediated by local authorities, which in turn must deal with new phenomena. The question arises in territorial terms, as retail and consumption (and their protagonists) claim places and public space. The case study will be that of the metropolitan territory in an extended sense and will be analyzed through four scales chosen as the most exemplary of the change: the upgraded/touristified city-centre; the historical centre in its marginal parts; the metropolitan interstices; the small and medium-sized centers at the metropolitan scale. Demands of products and places that become the expression of a new demand for cities bring out the potential, contradictions and conflicts of a Mediterranean city in transition.
Highlights
In the book Cities and consumption (2006), Mark Jayne highlighted the contribution that, in the last twenty years, the literature aimed to establish a relationship between these two themes had offered to the understanding of the contemporary world
The contribution starts from the historical importance of the commercial function in Naples in structuring the urban space, a function to which it is possible largely to trace the long-lasting relationship between consumption and demand for places, as well as many changes in the urban image
A contribution that, due to the nature of consumption itself, is necessarily partial and “situated” – to quote the words used by Juliana Mansvelt in one of the most innovative manuals on Geographies of consumption – because it is shaped by what we have studied, by the positions developed with respect to our object of study (Mansvelt 2005, XV) and, no less importantly, by the territorial context we have decided to investigate: the urban and metropolitan Neapolitan space
Summary
In the book Cities and consumption (2006), Mark Jayne highlighted the contribution that, in the last twenty years, the literature aimed to establish a relationship between these two themes had offered to the understanding of the contemporary world. For the population that lived in the rest of the city and in neighboring municipalities, Naples still represented the central location of a superior level in which to exercise consumption practices for which it was worth moving with private and public transportation, attracted by the possibility of finding a certain type of goods in organized areas from a spatial point of view, relying on the specialization and on the qualification of the supply and of the forms of sales. More in general are the Neapolitan urban and metropolitan spaces in their totality that appear significantly transformed by new urban-retail and consumption dynamics, which have accelerated, especially in the last twenty years
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