The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Florence Peripheries

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S

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space giulio giovannoni silvia ross

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S

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

to Italian Urban Space

edited by giulio giovannoni

silvia ross

with contributions by

teresa v.sá, luca pocci, richard ingersoll, remi wacogne, francesca mugnai, serena acciai, donata panizza, giulia brecciaroli,

marzia beltrami, meris nicoletto, assunta de crescenzo, vincenzo binetti

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The essays contained in this volume are the result of activities carried out by the Cross-Disciplinary Urban Space research network. The network was established by Giulio Giovannoni and Silvia Ross in 2015 in order to advance the debate on urban space from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space examines the city and its environment through theoretically-informed essays stemming from a variety of disciplines, including urban planning, architecture, cultural geography, architectural history, heritage studies, film studies, literary studies and photography. Updates on the activities of the research network can be accessed at: www. crossdisciplinaryurbanspace.com.

The volumes are subject to a qualitative process of acceptance and evaluation based on peer review, which is entrusted to the Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture (DIDA) with blind review system. Furthermore, all publications are available on an open-access basis on the Internet, which not only favors their diffusion, but also fosters an effective evaluation from the entire international scientific community.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Florence Publication Fund and of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Studies Research Publication Fund, University College Cork.

Printed on paper Fedrigoni FreeLife Vellum

didapress

ISBN 978-88-3338-088-9

graphic design

didacommunication lab

Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Susanna Cerri

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indice indice 9 39 65 89 105 133 157 Introduction: Crossdisciplinary Italian Urban

Spaces

Giulio Giovannoni, Silvia Ross

PART I. Theorizing Space(S) And The Environment Henri Lefebvre, Urban Society and Everyday Life

Teresa V. Sá

Franco Arminio and the Heterotopia of comunità

provvisoria

Luca Pocci

Public Space in the Age of Climate Change

Richard Ingersoll

The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Florentine Peripheries

Giulio Giovannoni

Is There Space for Heritage in Marghera?

Remi Wacogne

PART II. Representing Urban Space: Literature, Film, Photography

The Literary Image of Brunelleschi’s Dome

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Florence Overexposed: Early Photography and the Production of the Cinematic City

Donata Panizza

Uncanny City: An Exploration of Milan and Turin in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini (1960s-1970s)

Giulia Brecciaroli

Natalia Ginzburg and Gendered Space: Country, City and House between Fascist Womanhood and Feminist Liberation

Silvia Ross

Urban Space as Cognitive Metaphor? Suggestions from Alessandro Baricco’s City

Marzia Beltrami

Turin: ‘Narrating Architecture’

Meris Nicoletto

Naples in Antonella Cilento’s Narrative: “un corpo di animale antico” (“an ancient animal’s body”)

Assunta De Crescenzo

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”: Narrating Transnational Urban Spaces as Fluid Forms of Resistance and Conflict

Vincenzo Binetti NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 177 205 229 253 279 303 331 355

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Giulio Giovannoni University of Florence

the social life of non-places: lessons the social life of non-places: lessons from

from fflorentine peripherieslorentine peripheries

Introduction

The concept of non-places, introduced by Marc Augé in his 1994 book of the same name, is often used to describe most of the spaces that characterize the contemporary city. This use is widespread among architects and urban planners, who often qualify as ‘non-places’ spaces ranging from shopping centres to airports, car parks, service sta-tions, public housing districts, and the suburbs in gener-al. My thesis is that the concept of the non-place is an ide-ological device that is both useless and harmful. Its use-lessness derives from its inadequacy for describing any so-cio-spatial system. In fact, by qualifying a space as a non-place, a generic negative connotation is attributed to it and, in fact, its deeper understanding is precluded. The harmfulness of this concept is a direct consequence of its futility. By preventing us from understanding the com-plexity of the social dynamics that take place in space, the concept of non-place ends up by greatly limiting the design capacity of architects, urban planners, and pol-iticians. This is particularly regrettable, since the spaces considered non-places by dominant urban thinking

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cor-106 giulio giovannoni

respond to much of the contemporary city and its suburbs. Therefore, it stands to reason that the frequent use of this concept would manifest a widespread unscientific, ideo-logical and nostalgic attitude to the study and planning of the contemporary city and suburban areas.

In contrast, this essay contends that what Augé defines as non-places constitute the main social structure of the contemporary city. This social framework has been little studied by academics, and neglected by architects, urban planners and politicians, who have only in a handful of cases been able to plan and design the contemporary city and the suburbs in a way that is appropriate to their eco-nomic and social function. I argue that by challenging Augé’s concept of non-places, and proffering a theory that instead elevates and promotes these important spaces, it would be possible to manage and organize them appropri-ately as well as explore their full potential through archi-tectural and urban design.

In the first part of this essay I discuss the definition of the concept of non-place provided by Augé and I sketch a cri-tique of this theory. In the second part, I frame the ide-ology of non-places within the more general attitude of nostalgia for the historic city and of the ‘phobia’ towards contemporary suburban developments. Although this at-titude to the ‘new city’ has existed in the history of West-ern culture since at least the first industrial revolution, I discuss what I call suburbophobia, from Henri Lefebvre to the most recent anti-sprawl trends and the discourse on the periphery in Tuscany. In the third part, I focus on the social life of non-places, commencing from

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empiri-107 the social life of non-places

cal research conducted over several years in the Florence and Prato areas. In the final section I draw conclusions on the policy and design implications of this analysis, mak-ing some proposals to revise national and regional legisla-tion governing shopping centres, outlets, multiplexes and service stations. I also appeal to my fellow architects and town planners to conceptualise and design these collec-tive facilities not only as spaces of consumption, but also as opportunities for social life.

The ‘Non-Place’: and Ideological Device?

The concept of non-place is defined by Augé in opposi-tion to that of anthropological place. The anthropologi-cal place is a

concrete and symbolic construction of space [which] is a principle of meaning for the people who live in it, and also a principle of intelligibility for the person who observes it1_.

Of variable size, the anthropological place is such inso-far as it is an entity invested with meaning. It is also con-cerned with identity, as a place of birth and of self-identifi-cation; relational, as the object of a shared identity as well as support of social relations; and historical, as it is stable over time and it is possible to find in it reference points that are considered as fixed and immutable. On the con-trary,

a space which cannot be defined as relational, or histori-cal, or concerned with identity will be a non-place2_.

1_{Augé (1995), pp. 51-52.} 2_{Ibid., pp. 77-78.}

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108 giulio giovannoni

For Augé, non-places are the product of what he de-fines with the neologism ‘supermodernity’ (surmoderni-té), that is, the current condition characterized by three main figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of references. Overabundance of events is the phenomenon in which time perception is confused by the excessive number of stimuli and events. Overabundance of space is the result of the shrinkage of the planet caused by the conquest of space and the development of rapid transport. The in-dividualization of references occurs when the individu-al considers him or herself to be a world in his or her own right3_{. For Augé, supermodernity, that is to say the} present era characterized by excesses, essentially produc-es non-placproduc-es, i.e. spacproduc-es without history, identity and so-cial relations:

[N]on-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified – with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance – by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestri-al space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with an-other image of himself4_.

3_{This way of conceptualizing time and space shares similarities with the}

concept of ‘dromology’ previously developed by Virilio, and with the no-tion of space-time compression developed by Harvey. See in particular: Virilio (2009); Harvey (1990), pp. 260-307. The notion of non-place is, in turn, similar to the concept of placelessness developed by Relph (1976).

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109 the social life of non-places

Although the title of Augé’s book speaks of the ‘anthropol-ogy of supermodernity’, it presents an entirely superficial look at the spaces that are identified as non-places. His definition of non-places – and his repeated classification of their features – is not presented as a research hypothe-sis to be verified through accurate anthropological work, but is a kind of self-evident postulate whose validity is nev-er questioned. The ‘ideal type nature’ of the non-place is recognized by Augé himself when he states:

Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never to-tally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly re-written5_.

It is interesting, therefore, to consider the concept of non-place in light of Max Weber’s definition of ideal type:

It is a conceptual construct (Gedankenbild) which is nei-ther historical reality nor even the ‘true’ reality. It is even less fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumed as one instance. It has the sig-nificance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication of certain of its significant components6_.

If we assume that Augé’s non-place falls into the cate-gory of the ideal type described by Weber, what is miss-ing from the work of the French anthropologist is the comparison of this concept with the empirical reality of which Weber speaks in the above definition. Spaces that are identified as non-places are never described and

5_{Ibid., p. 79.} 6_{Weber (1949), p. 93.}

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studied by him except in a generic, abstract and atopic way. This is the case when he speaks of shopping cen-tres, which he claims are experienced “through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; [and that are] a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral”7_{. Similarly, he} imagines a hypothetical user of non-places as a “foreign-er lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing strang“foreign-er’) [who] can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains”8_. Also following this model are his descriptions of airports and stations, perhaps the spaces that are closest to the ide-al type conceived by Augé.

Now, as we have seen, the non-place is defined as the ne-gation and opposite of place. The latter is such only if it is historical, identitarian and relational. Even this defini-tion is quesdefini-tionable to say the least. In fact, by prioritiz-ing the characteristics of history and identity, the concept of place thus refers to a narrow and potentially perverse conception of the relationship between space and com-munity, one in which those whose histories and identities are not rooted in the place where they live – who make up a considerable and growing share of the population of every contemporary city – might in theory have no right to claim to belong to that community or territory9_.

7_{Augé (1995), p. 78.} 8_{Ibid. p. 106.}

9_{In my opinion, the notion of place defined by Augé risks interpretation}

in this narrow and exclusionary sense. For a critique of such concepts of community and place, see for example: Sennett (2002), 294-312; Harvey (1996), pp. 291-326.

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Being representative of the current era, non-places de-scribe what Henri Lefebvre would have defined, albe-it in different words, as the production of abstract space in contemporary capitalist society. Behind the concept of non-place, in fact, there is on the one hand a general crit-icism of urbanization and, on the other, a yearning for the pre-industrial city. In fact, Augé’s book is dominated by a clear nostalgic accent, which can also be discerned in works by many of the great critics of contemporary urban-ization, including Lefebvre. It is important to give due at-tention to the persistent longing for the old city, as it con-tinues to have profound effects on the way space is being produced today.

Urban Nostalgia, Non-Places, and Suburbophobia

According to Raymond Williams, nostalgia for the past has long characterized English society. In his book The Country and the City (1973), he retrospectively retraces several generations of poets and writers who, while living in different eras, had in common the fact that they missed the ‘good old days’. The ironic aspect, he argues, is that in many cases the same era that an author remembers as a happy period of an honest and genuine society is seen by some other author, who is perhaps only a few decades old-er, as a time in which an earlier moral and material order had already become corrupted irreparably. Based on this phenomenon, Williams imagines an escalator that takes one back in time and allows one to find at different peri-ods in history the same nostalgia for the past and resent-ment of the present. Virtually, this escalator would stop

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only in front of Eden, the Paradise Lost, where of course no better precedent could be found. Williams points out that this way of relating to society and the living environ-ment of the present and the past does not derive only from an innate tendency in each of us to be nostalgic for the years of our childhood, but from the ruling classes’ need to perpetuate, through a complex cultural and ideologi-cal structure, a certain social structure and power system. Nostalgia for the city and countryside of the previous era has also shaped the planning debates in Europe and the United States since their origins10_{. The notion of} non-place developed by Augé in 1992 is part of a broader nar-rative characterized by nostalgia for the city of the past and by phobia of the contemporary city. In this section, I will focus in particular on Lefebvre, an author who had a very strong influence on the urban debate and policies in Europe since the early 1960s11_.

Lefebvre’s critique of contemporary urbanization is based on the Marxist concepts of work and product, use value and exchange value. While use value is related to the util-ity of a good, exchange value refers to its selling price. For Lefebvre, contemporary urban growth has abandoned the traditional urban model in favour of abstract urban-ization. Whereas the city of the past was a work (oeuvre) and was socially experienced according to its use value, contemporary urbanization is conceived as a product to

10_{See for example: Secchi (1984); Boyer (1983).}

11_{In the Anglophone context, the scholar who most contributed to what}

I call here ‘suburbophobia’ is certainly Jacobs, with her landmark 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For reasons of space, I will avoid dwelling here on the American author.

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be exchanged on the market as any other good. The shift from the traditional city to urbanization, determined by the advent of industrialization, causes the disappearance of community relations typical of pre-industrial societies: in fact, contrasting with today’s model, in the past the city was considered a work of art to be used and enjoyed with-out any consideration of profit12_.

In addition to being poorly supported in terms of histori-cal research, this way of representing the old city is quite idealized. In contrast, the representations of the periphery provided by Lefebvre are strongly dystopian. They have more than one point in common with Augé’s descriptions of non-places:

Urban reality, simultaneously amplified and exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from the previous pe-riod: organic totality, belonging, an uplifting image, a sense of space that was measured and dominated by mon-umental splendor. It was populated with signs of the ur-ban within the dissolution of urur-banity; it became stipula-tive, repressive, marked by signals, summary codes for cir-culation (routes), and signage. It was sometimes read as a rough draft, sometimes as an authoritarian message. It was imperious. But none of these descriptive terms completely describes the historical process of implosion-explosion (a metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics) that occurred: the tremendous concentration (of people, activities,

12_{“This city is itself ‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts with the}

irrevers-ible tendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed the oeuvre is use value and the product is exchange val-ue. The eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, edi-fices and monuments, is la Fête (a celebration which consumes unpro-ductively, without other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enor-mous riches in money and objects)”. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on cities (1996), p. 66. Author’s italics.

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wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, va-cation homes, satellite towns) into space13_.

According to this description, in the periphery produced by capitalism, movements and behaviours are as if forced and dictated by a repressive and authoritarian order. This idea forms a very recurrent topos in sociological and ur-ban literature. Assuming, like Lefebvre, a Marxist per-spective, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) already de-scribed the contemporary city as a device of social con-trol and oppression14_{. Other descriptions of suburbs as} culturally poor automaton environments include some of the works of Lewis Mumford, William Whyte, and Da-vid Riesman15_{. The loss of freedom, with controlled and} conditioned movement, is also a recurrent and persistent film topos, from Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927) to Mod-ern Times by Charlie Chaplin (1936), from the documen-tary The City by the American Institute of City Planners (1939) to Koyaanisqatsi (1982), up to more recent rep-resentations. It is not surprising that Lefebvre is also sensi-tive to this topos and basically describes the periphery as a space of forced movement and authoritarian control:

Movement in the street, a communications space, is both obligatory and repressed. Whenever threatened, the first thing power restricts is the ability to linger or assemble

13_{Lefebvre (2003), p. 14.}

14_{“[T]he town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate}

in-dividuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital”. From: Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), p. 94.

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in the street. Although the street may have once had the meaning of a meeting place, it has since lost it, and could only have lost it, by reducing itself, through a process of necessary reduction, to nothing more than a passageway, by splitting itself into a place for the passage of pedestrians (hunted) and automobiles (privileged). The street became a network organized for and by consumption16_.

It is not difficult to take an opposite viewpoint and see how, in many cases, the monumental splendour of historical cit-ies had opposite meanings to the positive ones attributed to them by Lefebvre. For example, many of the old monu-ments were nothing more than the architectural and urban codification of a deeply hierarchical, unjust and author-itarian social and political order. Not to mention the ba-roque monumentality of Haussmann’s Paris, that was pro-duced by policies of social and spatial purification of the centre of Paris, to the detriment of the lower classes. Cor-respondingly, it is possible to find numerous positive rep-resentations of contemporary mobility as a symbol of free-dom and emancipation, both at class and gender levels. In a way similar to Lefebvre’s approach, the passage for Augé from modernity to supermodernity, from places to non-places is reflected in the fact that words which, until a few decades ago, were not used have now become fashion-able. Terms such as interchange, passenger, and communi-cation, have taken over the terms crossroads, traveller, and language. While the former reflect an abstract and imper-sonal way of moving in space and relating to it, the latter de-scribe a way of living and relating to others and to places17_.

16_{Lefebvre (2006), p. 20.} 17_{Augé (1995), pp. 107-8.}

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This way of looking at the contemporary city is very root-ed in the urban debate in the West, and has very impor-tant effects on the way we understand and govern it. In the United States, the condemnation and demonization of sprawl and suburbs commonly perpetuated by plan-ners and policy-makers prevented them from grasping the complexity and diversity that certainly characterizes the American suburbs, in terms of social and ethnic com-position, built environment and lifestyles18_{. Only a small} number of more recent studies have attempted to account for this complexity19_.

In Italy and Europe, the myth of the city of the past is even more deeply rooted. In a recent study on Tuscany I tried to show how the utopian descriptions of the city and the countryside of the past, and the dystopian representations of the contemporary city, are two features of the same ideo-logical device dating back to the cultural hegemony of the landed aristocracy. This device still has the effect of pro-tecting the interests of a small cultural, political and eco-nomic elite that continues to produce, in the same way as in the past, a highly polarized and unequal urban space20_. In the German context, Thomas Sieverts argues that the myth of the compact city of the past prevents us from cor-rectly understanding and designing peripheries, i.e. the

18_{Many scholars have a dystopian view of suburban areas. A list of works}

which reflect this perspective, certainly too long to be made here, would include: Davis (1990); Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck (2001) and Sil-verstone, ed. (1996).

19_{Interesting examples of this type of research are: Nicolaides and Wiese,}

eds. (2006); Archer, Sandul, and Solomonson, eds. (2015).

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living space of most people. For this reason, he focuses his attention on the analysis and design of the Zwischenstadt, or city in-between, that is, that hybrid mixture of city and countryside which is one of the main features of most sub-urban areas21_{. On a similar slant, Rem Koolhaas speaks of} the historical centres of the past as symbolically strong ap-paratuses that are now completely inadequate to support articulated and complex urban systems. And yet, their cul-tural and symbolic weight prevents the ‘new city’ from be-ing understood and designed for what it is:

Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its trag-edy is given in simple geometric terms. As the sphere of in-fluence expands, the area characterized by the center be-comes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the dis-tance between center and circumference increases to the breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated dis-covery of the periphery as a zone of potential value —a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be wor-thy of architectural attention— is only a disguised insist-ence on the priority of and dependency on the center: with-out center, no periphery; the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned, the condition of the periphery is made worse by the fact that its mother is still alive, stealing the show, em-phasizing its offspring’s inadequacies. The last vibes ema-nating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy22_.

21_{Sieverts (2003).}

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In fact, consolidated representations of historical cities and of contemporary suburbs strongly inhibit our ability to interpret and design peripheries. Augé’s book certain-ly belongs to this type of polarized utopian/dystopian rep-resentation, and is widely used by architects and planners to describe the contemporary city in opposition to the city of the past. My thesis is that the so-called non-places (i.e. shopping centres, multiplexes, service stations, etc.) that the French scholar speaks about are the new ‘squares’ – understood as the traditional places of urban sociality – of the contemporary city. However, while the debate on the dialectics between the centre and the periphery is now quite consolidated, that on the relationship between tradi-tional public spaces and the new social spaces on the pe-riphery, which I will deal with in the next section, is much less developed.

The Social Life of Non-Places: Evidence from Flor-ence’s Peripheries.

In this section I summarize some findings from research on social life in shopping centres and service stations con-ducted in the outskirts of Florence and Prato in the last 10 years. Among the many locales investigated over the years, I will focus in particular on three case studies: two service stations on the outskirts of Florence and a large shopping centre, the so-called Parco Prato, opened in 2009 in the southern outskirts of Prato. The two petrol stations on the south-western outskirts of Florence have been the subject of an in-depth study, aimed among other things at cap-turing the social life of these spaces at different times of

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the day and week, their relationship with the neighbour-hood, their level of ‘publicness’. Both service stations are equipped with bar-restaurants that are also open at night, making them suitable for becoming true landmarks for the inhabitants of this part of the periphery of Florence23_. The first of these service stations is located along Viale Nenni, a wide avenue that connects Florence to Scan-dicci. This avenue is located in a sparsely urbanized ar-ea between two historical routes – the Via Pisana and the Via di Scandicci – and is designed as a thoroughfare at some distance from residential areas. It is a sort of subur-ban ‘strip’ along which several petrol stations, the Coop Ponte a Greve shopping centre, some sports facilities and some neighbourhood commercial facilities are located. Apart from a few remnants of historical urbanization, mostly of a rural nature, there is no residential building facing it. Since September 2013 the central portion of the avenue has been occupied by the Florence-Scan-dicci tramway, which is also used by many to reach the Coop Ponte a Greve shopping centre. However, this ax-is does not have any of the features of an urban route, and the commercial and service facilities that are found along it are all designed to be accessed by car. The pet-rol station in question is a large service station equipped with a washing area and a McDonald’s restaurant open 24/7. Given the characteristics of the area described above, it would seem logical to expect this petrol station to have all the features attributed by Marc Augé to the

so-23_{For a detailed discussion of the two case studies, please refer to}

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called non-places, in particular the absence of stable so-cial relations.

To study the social life of this space, our team of six re-search students, led by me, used structured observation methods, interviews and mapping techniques. The study was conducted in April 2014. The results of this research demonstrate that this space, and in particular the Mc-Donald’s located inside the service station, is an impor-tant landmark for the inhabiimpor-tants of the area. Obviously it does not have the continuity of frequentation and so-cial life that is typical of traditional public spaces. How-ever, at certain times of the day, particularly in the after-noon and evening, it becomes quite a significant meet-ing point. Contrary to what one might expect, most of the users of this McDonald’s restaurant were not the alienat-ed and hasty drivers that Marc Augé discusses in abstract terms. The subjects observed were mainly inhabitants of the area, mostly young people. Although the driveway on which this service station is located is a car infrastructure, small groups of teenagers could be seen walking to Mc-Donald’s from the surrounding areas. The idea that some people maintained a stable and lasting relationship with this place is made clear by the statement of one of the Mc-Donald’s managers that “most of the clients are from the neighbourhood, we know many of them by name – there are few tourists here”.

The second petrol station analysed in the above study is located along Viale Etruria, also on the outskirts south-west of Florence. This research led to very similar conclu-sions. Thanks to the 24/7 bakery-bar, this service station

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had become a real focal point for the residents of a large area. Both of these service stations, in short, are unpreten-tious spaces without any particular architectural qualities, which, however, enjoy a certain level of social life. Con-sidering the role they play for the inhabitants of the sur-rounding areas, these suburban facilities could be easily transformed into real centres for social life in the suburbs. For this to be possible, however, their potential must be recognized and an appropriate regulatory system must be adopted. I will return to this point in the conclusion. Applying these principles on a greater scale, similar con-siderations can be made in relation to the third case of ‘non-place’ which will be discussed in this section, name-ly the Parco Prato shopping centre. I dealt with this space during an urban design studio conducted with students in the autumn semester of 2017. An important part of the studio work consisted in the structured observation of the social life of this shopping centre and of the villages sur-rounding it, and in listening to the inhabitants of the area through a large number of interviews. During this phase of the lab it became clear that Parco Prato plays a central role for a large portion of the southern outskirts of Prato. This city, the second largest in Tuscany in terms of population, is located in close proximity to the outskirts of Florence and is famous worldwide for its textile industry, which was to a great extent taken over by the large Chinese commu-nity that first moved to this territory in the early 1990s. The urban structure of the Prato suburbs is marked by a strong polycentrism of historical origin. There are nu-merous dispersed settlements, such as Iolo, Paperino, San

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Giusto, Galciana, and Maliseti, to name but a few. Peo-ple from Prato call these settlements villaggi, or ‘villag-es’, underlining their small size and their strong histori-cal and social identities. These villages are generally well equipped in terms of education and public facilities; al-though they often do not have sufficient commercial amenities. Many inhabitants blame the closure of neigh-bourhood shops on the opening of Parco Prato, inaugu-rated in November 2009 and considered the fourth larg-est and most visited shopping centre in Tuscany (the sec-ond if we exclude outlet villages, which are exclusively fo-cused on fashion)24_{. This large commercial complex is} de-veloped along a substantial portico, with a total length of about 350 meters. The two arms that compose the por-tico find a fundamental junction in the central covered square, which is also the space where the main recreation-al and socirecreation-al events are organized. Although there is a lack of comprehensive data to establish a clear correlation be-tween the opening of the centre and the closure of neigh-bourhood shops, it is not difficult to imagine that shop-keepers in peripheral villages would have experienced a decrease in revenue after the opening of this new com-mercial giant. However, during our structured observa-tions and interviews with the inhabitants, we could ap-preciate how this space has become a fundamental focal point for a large part of the local population.

One of the results of the survey was the somewhat surpris-ing fact that many parents regularly go to the shoppsurpris-ing

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centre exclusively for their children to play in the play-ground. A Moroccan lady from Iolo, one of the surround-ing villages, particularly likes Parco Prato for weekend shopping with her family and her little daughter. Several other inhabitants expressed very positive opinions on this space. This is not surprising, as in this facility many exhi-bitions, concerts, and social and cultural events are organ-ized on a regular basis. To give an idea of the number and scope of the events held in Parco Prato: between the be-ginning of June and mid-October 2018 there was a draw-ing competition for primary schools in the area, a music competition for young musicians (the ‘Talent Move’), a sporting event introducing golf, a dance show that donat-ed the procedonat-eds to the padonat-ediatric hospital in Florence, an exhibition with flag throwers from Volterra in medieval costumes, an initiative to promote alternative mobility, the Decathlon sports event, a day of volunteering, an exhi-bition of dinosaurs with entertainment activities for chil-dren, and various other events with entertainment and games for children.

The fact remains that this complex, though it boasts some quality spaces, including the covered square that connects the two arms of the gallery, was not expressly designed as a social space. The main characteristics that limit its socia-bility are its excessive mono functionality, its low porosity, i.e. its reduced ability to connect to the surrounding areas, the limited opening hours and the total absence of night activities, and the fact that it is accessed almost exclusively by car. This last problem is very much felt by a noteworthy portion of the local population. An elderly lady from the

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San Giusto neighbourhood complained that some old lo-cal stores have closed and that not all people have access to the shopping centre. The same problem was also found in Casale, another small village southwest of the shop-ping centre. Given that a significant part of Prato’s pop-ulation is now elderly, many complain about the restrict-ed accessibility of the shopping centre, which has by now become essential to meet the daily needs of purchase. For the elderly population with limited mobility, and perhaps also for other disadvantaged segments of the population, a phenomenon similar to that of the so-called American food deserts is taking place here25_.

Perhaps the most interesting (and paradoxical) aspect of this story was the reaction of some administrators of Pra-to’s urban planning office to our projects and proposals. The lengthy analyses carried out led us to believe that a functional integration project was necessary to promote this ‘quasi-centre’ to the rank of a real social centre. In particular, we wanted to facilitate the connection of this space to the different villages surrounding it, through a network of cycling and walking routes and through ap-propriate connections with local public transport. In ad-dition, we presented a functional integration project that would allow the shopping centre to be experienced and used at all times of the day. We proposed the construc-tion of some residential buildings, a library, and other

ser-25_{Although food deserts are defined in various ways by different scholars,}

all definitions link this phenomenon to the difficulty that part of the pop-ulation has in finding food. For a literature review on American food de-serts see: Walker, Kean and Burke (2010), pp. 876-884.

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vices, restaurants and bars suitable for nightlife. We con-cluded from our research that this set of measures would, on the one hand, help to solve the problem of commer-cial desertification in the surrounding villages and, on the other, guarantee a satisfactory and easily accessible space of sociality to the whole area. The reaction we provoked was most surprising: it was not expected that a ‘non-place’ like a shopping centre could be expressly treated as a so-cial space. This possibility was not even contemplated in the political agenda of Prato, which, conversely, is known in Tuscany and throughout Italy for its receptivity to in-novation26_{. Moreover, this approach to the problem was} also considered inappropriate and problematic from a political standpoint. Reactions to our projects aimed at transforming some petrol stations into small communi-ty spaces for the suburbs have been quite similar. Obvi-ously there are cultural and ideological barriers, many of which I outlined in the beginning of this paper, that pre-vent us from considering these locations for what they al-ready are: social spaces on the periphery.

Beyond ‘Non-Places’: Overcoming Ideological Barriers and Designing Contemporary Suburban Spaces

Our inability to understand the role and potential that so-called ‘non-places’ assume in contemporary society

de-26_{In urban policy documents by the municipal administration of Prato}

the terms ‘innovation’, ‘contemporaneity’ and the like are particularly re-current. For example, see the document launching the procedure for the formation of the Prato urban plan available at: http://allegatiurbanistica. comune.prato.it/dl/20161209132428959/all_a_documento_avvio_pro-cedimento.pdf (accessed 23 November, 2018).

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termines a more general incapacity to grasp the demand for sociality that exists in the periphery. What is it that ob-structs our gaze and inhibits our planning? According to Sieverts, the persistence of the ‘myth’ of the old town is re-sponsible. From Europe to the United States, suburbs and suburban areas are generally ostracized, because they are different from the traditional and stereotypical image of the city. To be seen in this way, a city must correspond to the urban canons of density, of mixed-use, of a certain re-lationship between solids and voids. These canons, codi-fied in Jane Jacobs’s urban theory and easily found in Eu-ropean and North American cities before the First World War, prevent us from considering as a ‘place’ whatever does not conform to them. From this perspective, only the square and the street possess full dignity as public spaces. Koolhaas, as we have seen, maintains that the centre, with its symbolic weight, continues to orphan the periphery and prevent us from appreciating its real importance and relative weight in contemporary urban systems. However, the analysis by Koolhaas, just like that by Sieverts, limits it-self to providing an overview of the periphery as a whole without considering its social spaces. However, this con-solidated view of traditional public spaces as the only le-gitimate social spaces of our cities has strong negative im-plications in the ways in which contemporary spaces are regulated at a functional, infrastructural and performance level, and designed at an architectural and social level. Despite the recognized importance of shopping centres in contemporary society these spaces continue to be con-sidered by many the enemies of the retail trade, the ‘bad

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giants’ who close the shops of the town centre. The fact that the majority of the population has been living in the suburbs for some time now, and that many lack the re-sources to go shopping in the city centre, is not recog-nized by the polemicists of the ‘small shops closing syn-drome’. However, in the United States, this rhetoric has been swept away by the advent of electronic commerce and by the subsequent phenomenon of ‘dead malls’. Now that they are disappearing, even shopping malls are being missed. These spaces, after all, have enjoyed considera-ble importance in the social and cultural history of tens of millions of Americans27_{. The rapid evolution of} e-com-merce could quickly make Italian and European shop-ping centres obsolete as well. The fact remains that these centres have been and still are exclusively regulated as consumption spaces. For example, the legislation in force in Tuscany, drawn up on the basis of the national frame-work legislation, sets out the number of parking spaces that must be provided in relation to the selling surface. It also limits the number of large shopping centres that can be built. However, it does not give any guidance about the range of public and private functions that should be real-ized, the accessibility that should be provided for the var-ious modes of transport (cycling, walking, driving, public transit), the necessity of creating some spaces of an exclu-sively public nature and that of providing adequate urban furnishings (such as seating areas and the like).

27_{Kurutz, “An Ode to Shopping Malls”, The New York Times, July}

26, 2017. Accessed 23 November, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/26/fashion/an-ode-to-shopping-malls.html.

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The case of Parco Prato presented above reveals that there is a demand for better and easier access to this important commercial and social facility. Citizens of this large sub-urban area also claim a ‘right to the city’ in terms of night-life venues, services, recreational activities, and so on. Vil-lages on the outskirts of Prato, as well as in many Italian and European suburbs, do not have the critical mass to create significant agglomerations capable of satisfying these needs and surviving in current market conditions. The historic centres of Prato and Florence, furthermore, as well as those of the northern European urban areas dis-cussed by Koolhaas and Sieverts, are located at significant distances to those living on the outskirts, and are difficult for them to reach. This is the case for the majority of the population today. National and regional regulations on shopping centre planning should therefore be updated to cover these key aspects. The advent of online commerce is not necessarily an obstacle. Personal services, food con-sumption and leisure activities continue to require real physical space. The growth of e-commerce could even encourage the spontaneous conversion of some of these commercial facilities into leisure and service centres. This would further necessitate the regulatory and plan-ning framework mentioned above.

Similar considerations, taking into account the difference in scale and the smaller radius of influence, can be made in relation to the planning of petrol stations. Although most of the petrol stations are exclusively technical facil-ities, some of them may well become, as we have seen, small centres for the local community. Urban planning

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and fuel distribution plans should acknowledge this reali-ty and rework their regulations to recognize the difference between facilities providing simple petrol pumps and car washes, and those integrated service stations that could have a wider role in serving local communities. For the latter, functional hybridization with complementary so-cial and commerso-cial activities should be encouraged, and better accessibility from the surrounding residential areas should be ensured.

The cases presented in this essay provide just a few exam-ples of what should, in my opinion, be a reconceptual-ization of a much more varied set of ‘types’ of new public spaces, which would include spaces such as outlet villag-es, airports, multiplex cinemas, stations, large car parks and sports facilities. Outlet villages could be thought of as gates connecting the highway network – along which they are located – with the surrounding regions. By in-tegrating commercial functions with tourist and social services, the economic and social benefits of these large magnets could be distributed across wider areas. Airports, usually conceived as negative elements that reduce the real estate value of the surrounding areas, could be trans-formed into generators of positive externalities, as plac-es of attraction in which to dine at night while observing the air traffic, to visit exhibitions and commercial spaces, to avail of personal services, and to participate in political and social events.

The transformations I have described above are in part al-ready underway. However, they are almost exclusively led by big economic actors, without any capacity for control

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and direction by national and local political and adminis-trative bodies. As I have tried to demonstrate, it will only be possible to develop an adequate regulatory framework and reach design potentials once the annihilating and obscur-ing rhetoric of the non-place has been overcome. This would involve deconstructing the consolidated and dom-inant narratives on this subject and basing our knowledge of these spaces on accurate socio-anthropological work that would allow us to grasp and appreciate their social rel-evance and functionality.

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