We have no alternative: We can recover! The abandonment symptoms and social reproduction in Taranto’s Old City

Abstract

ABSTRACT Starting in the 1960s, state investments in the economic development of Southern Italy led to the construction of large-scale production plants and radically transformed spaces and social relations. In the context of Taranto’s Old City, the impacts of the steel industry continue to fuel the degradation of buildings and spaces, encapsulating the struggles between social marginality, health ramifications and the need for economic alternatives. Through ethnographic research conducted with an active group of Old City residents, I explore how a fractured and devastated urban space becomes an opportunity for resilience and social regeneration. This material degradation comes from Taranto’s pre-industrial past, in the sense that it is a by-product of the historical sedimentation of housing processes in the Old City. However, it is also inherently future-oriented if we consider the context’s current ecological and urban transition challenges. Inhabitants reclaim spatial waste to recover the economic and social alternatives destroyed and repressed by industrial development. The manipulation of the ruins allows the inhabitants remaining in the Old City to claim a social valuation of space that challenges the logic of industrial reconversion. People on the periphery of industrial development produce a new interpretation of the interaction between what is discarded and what is recovered, shifting the focus from the relics of a bygone era to the strategic recovery of ruins.