In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the
economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the
Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak,
dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside
increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population
loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by
the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe
their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism
destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and
cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that
had long been missing. Some of those people--educated, middle
class--seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity
into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and
cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers,
artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby
burnishing Genoa's image as a city of culture and contributing to its
continued revival.
Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, Creative
Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary cities through an
analysis of urban life that refuses the prevailing scholarly
condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption, even as it casts a
fresh light on a social group often neglected by anthropologists. The
creative urbanites profiled by Emanuela Guano are members of a
struggling middle class who, unwilling or unable to leave Genoa, are
attempting to come to terms with the loss of stable white-collar jobs
that accompanied the economic and demographic crisis that began in the
1970s by finding creative ways to make do with whatever they have.
