Abstract
This paper traces the recent transformations that have taken place in the city of Bologna to critically redefine the meaning and scope of the changes related to commerce and consumption, and including the city’s more general practices and promotional rhetoric. It will show how, starting from the increase in tourism and the strategic planning and policies to render the city more attractive, the city has undergone a reconfiguration through important regeneration processes linked to food. It will highlight the limited range of political and economic values which, through new ways of regulating public space and access to consumption, have redefined the socio-spatial fabric of certain areas of the city. The processes described will trace a path for deconstructing the reductively optimistic way in which Bologna is being portrayed, which ends up producing forms of displacement and exclusion.
Highlights
In the last ten years the city of Bologna has undergone significant transformations that have affected its urban fabric, commercial activities and, more generally, modes of consumption
The aim of this paper is to show how, starting with the increase in tourism and the strategic planning of beautification policies, the recent transformations of Bologna’s urban space can be re-examined from a privileged perspective in order to reach a critical understanding of the significance and extent of changes related to commerce and consumption, and to include the city’s more general practices and rhetoric of promotion and representation
The processes described above become the engine of substantial transformations that redefine the methods of use and regulation of public space and, in some instances, of social conflict
Summary
In the last ten years the city of Bologna has undergone significant transformations that have affected its urban fabric, commercial activities and, more generally, modes of consumption. At least two main factors have determined this complex mechanism of representations and interventions concerning the urban space: first, the consequences of the crisis of some important economic assets and more traditional forms of consumption and commerce; and second, the steadily increasing tourist influx While the former has seen, since the Great Recession of 2008, a progressive redistribution in the patterns of labor and employment, the latter, linked above all to the increase in tourism, has called for new infrastructure strategies and planning to redefine and resignify the urban space. The increased tourist influx has been fundamental in guiding intervention and revitalization policies through a series of the city’s geographical plans and imaginaries (Papotti 2020) This renewal has involved closely related urban policy operations; I will focus on at least two fundamental ones: the first concerns the upgrading of infrastructure; the second the way in which the city narrates itself through defining new discursive frames and storytelling (Mager, Matthey 2015; Sandercock 2003). This visible, material aspect has been followed by an important one which has not directly concerned infra-
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