Nick Dines, Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples, Berghahn, New York and Oxford, 2012, 344 pages, $ 120.00, £ 75.00, hardback, 20 illustrations and maps. ISBN 978-0-85745-279-5.

Nick Dines’ book is the result of an extended ethnographic and archival research conducted in Naples during and after the second half of the 1990s, a period of intense physical and symbolic restructuring of the city under Mayor Bassolino’s administration known as the Neapolitan renaissance. Through the case of Naples, Dines provides an interesting critique of the literature that illustrates the demise of public space in contemporary western cities, outlining the relational process that constitutes public space through its everyday use and experience, together and beyond policies of control or closure.

Dines’ study focuses on the changes in three areas of the city: Piazza Garibaldi, Piazza Plebiscito, and DAMM (Diego Armando Maradona Montesanto), an occupied social centre located next to a small park in the neighbourhood of Montesanto. Dines shows the ways in which official narratives of urban regeneration impacted the production and experience of urban space itself. “I was thus deeply intrigued by the ways in which different people, particularly local politicians and the media, articulated ideas about urban change, but also what these might mean in practical situations; in other words, how transformations in the built environment were experienced in the everyday and the extent to which these experiences occurred or deviated from the dominant representation of the city during the period” (page 13).

Highlighting the use of expressions such as “identity”, “civic pride”, “renaissance” and “citizenship”, Dines insists on the key role of language in shaping the new Naples through both political and popular discourses. This analysis serves the purpose of originally integrating the sphere of physical transformation of the city with that of the human experience of it. The two are  connected thanks to the identification of the words that, describing the city, impact on citizens’ daily relationship with space.

The book opens with an extensive and detailed introduction, followed by eighteen chapters organised in four parts. Part One provides the historical background necessary to frame the analysis of urban transformation, while outlining fundamental theoretical reflections upon public space and the existence of conflict over it. The other three parts address the case studies: Piazza Plebiscito, formerly a car park converted into a piazza with monumental value; Piazza Garibaldi and the conflict regarding the use of space and the presence of an immigrant population; the history of the Montesanto neighbourhood and the role of DAMM in proposing an alternative public space. The focus on three so different urban locations has the double merit to provide a detailed account of each area and to illustrate the specificity of Naples and its inner diversity.

The introduction poses interesting issues regarding the city of Naples in the Italian context, the questione meridionale and the stigma of Naples as an outcast city. The author effectively deconstructs the traditional stereotypes related to southern Italy, which, as an Italian reader, I found particularly remarkable. Moreover, the detachment from a stereotypical depiction of Naples allows for the consideration of generally ignored sectors of society and their participation in the urban life and shaping of public space.

Piazza Plebiscito, the first case study presented in the book, has undergone an actual restyling promoted by the Bassolino administration, aimed at contributing to a radical transformation of the urban image. The square, previously used as a car park despite its central position and its artistic value, was identified as the location for fostering a “culturally rehabilitated centro storico” (page 21). Dines analyses the discourse surrounding the physical transformation of the square and the conflicts arising from transgressive uses that destabilise its new image. In the words of the author, “the restoration of Piazza Plebiscito had not simply reinstated the space to its former glory but had also enabled unforeseeable and unintended uses and accentuated those that had been less visible” (page 166).

The theme of conflict over different and sometimes diverging uses of public space re-emerges in the second case study, Piazza Garibaldi, an area considered dangerous and problematic. The presence of immigrant groups raises questions related to the different degrees of public involvement and participation in the decision making regarding urban development. The lack of voice of immigrant groups is informally substituted by actual uses of space that contest top-down attempts to control and regulate the Piazza:

“although certain groups and types of behaviour were ejected from discourses about a new Naples, they were nevertheless very present in public space. Each site was subject to episodes of conflict, daily minor infractions and unintended uses. Meanings about place were internalized, manipulated and resignified” (page 289).

The final part of the book gives an account of the experience of the social centre DAMM in the popular neighbourhood of Montesanto. This ethnographic picture interestingly shows the contrast between political interventions on the city aimed at a superficial restyling of Naples’ facade, and the daily work of activists committed to bring together the local community and provide a sharable and safe public space in a totally self-managed and non-institutional way. “By occupying the Ventaglieri Project, DAMM set about reconfiguring and investing meaning into a planned environment that had been left in the lurch but that now found itself in a resurgent city centre” (page 262). Through the experience of DAMM the author criticises the mainstream discourse on inclusiveness and exposes the emptiness of words such as “participation” or “civic consciousness” used by the administration to promote urban renewal.

One could argue that the specificity of the Neapolitan case does not lend itself to generalisations over processes of urban restructuring elsewhere. Instead, the value of this ethnography lies in the fact that it presents urban regeneration as a “multidimensional process, embedded within a set of historical, political, social, economic and linguistic conjunctures that advanced and sought to activate ideas about the transformation of the city” (pages 285-86). Recognising Naples’ uniqueness, Dines supplies theoretical and analytical tools for understanding urban regeneration in the direction suggested by Jennifer Robinson (2011) and others, thus fostering the kind of case study-focused ethnographic research that meets the urgent need to think across different urban experiences.

Each case study presented in the book invites reflection upon the implications of political discourses about public space, as well as upon the rhetoric of participation and inclusiveness. Collectively, the case studies show the importance of considering different social groups’ divergent ideas and uses of space when studying spatial conflict. Complexity thus becomes an element to be valued and acknowledged in the urban project—in Naples and in contemporary cities elsewhere. 

References

Robinson J (2011) Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35: 1-23.