The Axial City: disjunctioning radical pluralities from an urban galaxy

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1999, the City Council of Brescia (Northern Italy) approved the construction of the city’s inaugural subway line, which began operating in 2013. Since its inception, the subway has been reshaping Brescia’s urban structure. Its aim was to spatially integrate essentials urban services into a seemingly cohesive and post-industrial socio-spatial system, a process that have been termed as urban wholing. However, wholing dynamics have simultaneously solidified and splintered the city’s urban structure. Over the last decades, Brescia has evolved into an “Axial City” socio-spatially governed through the regimented mobilities emanating from the subway. This configuration is spatially marked by the presence of “hierarchized centralities” that disproportionately catalyze investments and development policies. Furthermore, the subway system establishes distinct patterns of socio-spatial (dis)junction, defining different areas as “(dis)integrated ecologies” from the city-as-a-wholed. Via this approach, the processes of wholing generate mobilities according to normative class, racial, gendered, and age-related urban relations, transforming the Axial City into a comprehensive system fueling unprecedent conditions of selective (dis)integration and “kinetic segregation.” This contribution explores the governmentality expressed by the Brescia’s infrastructure, emphasizing how the socio-spatial processes of splintering radical pluralities, intrinsic to the efforts towards wholing, are crucial conditions of injustice permeating the contemporary city’s political project.