Dissolving Bologna: tensions between citizenship and the logistics city

Abstract

The contemporary crisis of the nation-State’s paradigms lead to the resurgence of the city as a political space of action. However, the very concept of the city itself is being profoundly reshaped by new global processes. During the last years a cycle of struggles in Northern Italy’s logistics sector, with an epicentre in Bologna, has revealed many aspects of this crisis of the traditional city. The series of strikes involving the main firms charged with the circulation of commodities have shown a new urban texture, a logistics city that dissolves Bologna within a complex geography of interconnections stretched over a huge territory that radically reshapes the old city boundaries. These logistics struggles have been enacted mainly by migrants, highlighting a specific tension with regards to citizenship. Sustained by some historical snapshots, the article elaborates a critique of the urban citizenship concept moving through the mobile triangle logistics-city-citizenship to investigate the crisis in the conception of the city itself.