Trifuoggi, Mario. 2024. Managing porosity: public space, informality and urban change in Naples, Italy. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis examines the relationship between informality and urban change in Naples, one of Europe’s poorest large cities and the hallmark of Italy’s uneven development. In many ways, modernisation did not erase Naples’ fluid and informal character, which Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis famously encapsulated in the metaphor of the porous city. As evidence of this, a significant segment of popular classes continues to inhabit the city’s historic centre, outlining porosity as an unequal and yet cohesive urban logic in contrast to the patterns of social differentiation and separation observed in many modern cities. However, this logic has been recently challenged by the rise of an extractive tourist economy, which is aligning Naples with other southern European cities in terms of urban political economy and threatens to displace the most vulnerable residents from her historic centre. This calls into question the politics of porosity, which the thesis interrogates through an ethnography of the Quartieri Spagnoli, an extremely poor inner-city neighbourhood undergoing a galloping touristification. The latter is ostensibly visible in the local streets and alleys, where informality has been key to the proliferation of outdoor bars and restaurants, the creation of street art, and other urban interventions contributing to the tourist economy. The ethnography, carried out between 2016 and 2017, centres on this transformation, with a specific focus on the domain of public space and the struggle over its informal appropriation. The underlying view of informality as a structural component of urban development, rather than a marginal economic sector, draws on the scholarship of critical urban theorists and geographers (especially from a postcolonial perspective) and intersects with the debate on the distinctiveness of Mediterranean cities. In this respect, the thesis runs counter the representation of Naples as ‘other’ to modern Europe, seeking to highlight her on the map of a more global, less Eurocentric urban studies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00036349
Keywords:	urban informality, urban change, Naples, ethnography, porosity
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Sociology
Date:	30 April 2024
Item ID:	36349
Date Deposited:	16 May 2024 16:16
Last Modified:	16 May 2024 16:16
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/36349

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