RISULTATI RICERCA

The author, currently head of Florence’s Office of Urban Planning, introduces a different conception of the historic center, no longer thought of, mechanically, as nothing more than the city enclosed within the walls demolished by Poggi in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today, the historic center can be better described as a series of parts that differ from each other, morphologically, socially and culturally, far more than they differ in these same respects from the surrounding urban areas outside the historic center. The city’s present administration has outlined a number of priorities for action: programs for relocating services and functions at the metropolitan scale; programs addressing infrastructures (and mobility in particular); specific urban planning initiatives targeting sensitive contexts. Relocating certain major functions in the urban fabric also makes it possible to revitalize the functions that remain in the historic center. Similarly, setting up a system consisting of the urban and metropolitan rail lines, the new LRV network and its connections with Florence’s new railway station will ease the pressure that automotive traffic now puts on the historic center, and link it with the areas earmarked for various important functions. As for specific urban planing initiatives targeting sensitive contexts, an interesting example is that provided by the San Lorenzo district, teetering on the line dividing crisis and growth. Here, the municipal administration has commissioned studies of the district’s economic and social situation, as well as a survey and interpretation of the district that provided input for the administration’s Structural Plan. In addition, the administration implemented a repurposing project that returned the privately owned areas of the former Cinema Apollo in Via Nazionale to public use, and initiated procedures for dealing with the Sant’Orsola complex, the true crux of the area.

The article opens by noting that the Italian urban network, stabilized and forced into a hierarchical order by the railways, has shed its functional significance now that Italy can be seen as a much shorter series of urban apparatuses whose size puts them more on a semi-continental than a merely national scale. We must thus think of historic centers as part of an immense and multi-faceted commuter system that moves people back and forth between home, work and services. If, then, we shift our attention from the city to the actors in it, we begin to see how difficult it is to identify the communities that city government regards as its real constituency: a problem aggravated by the refusal on the part of the Italian regulatory framework and of Italian culture on the whole to accept the emergence of metropolitan structures. Commuters, students, tourists: all are a vital part of the system that tends to be excluded, just as the region around a metropolitan area must have a voice in deciding that latter’s future. The historical portions of our metropolises provide an excellent proving grounds for testing ways of dealing with these difficulties. The role of historic centers is also the result of the shift in the centrality the many centralities that they traditionally enjoyed. Consequently, much of what was once the beating urban heart of historic centers has abandoned its former haunts which, for lack of an alternative, have simply been hollowed out. The final section of the article focuses on Venice, a city that, though it has lost many of the functions that sustained it in the past, still has an urban complexity and a power of attraction that ensure its continued vitality.

With today’s fixation on the here-and-now, our relationships with the past merit strategies founded in long and careful thought. And since clashes and conflicts between memory and the society of the present day are most likely to arise in our urban spaces and places, and in historic centers in particular, we must ask ourselves whether these historic centers be fact or fetish idola mentis that lead the mind astray. The answer, as the article reminds us, is that they are both, a mixture whose deformity derives from the boundary that separates them from the urban context. Now, forty years since Law 765/67 came into force, the transformations it triggered are so complex that they must be assessed case by case. In the second part of the text, the author recalls his experience as a member of the group that addressed the problems of Palermo’s historic center thirty years ago. Here, the scene we now see before us is so radically different that the author prefers to suspend judgement until the entire cycle of studies of historic markets has been brought to completion: the evolution of these markets is one of our most sensitive indicators of ongoing change. In Palermo, from the aftermath of World War II down to the present, these markets have continued to display an intense, and indeed obstinate, vitality in a physical and social setting that seemed all too likely to consign them to oblivion. For this reason, it is paradoxical (to say the least), that while the rest of the city regains its momentum, the greatest threats to the markets come precisely from that society of the spectacle that is by its very nature most closely attuned to their forms.

The first part of the article draws a rough sketch of the current situation, where the areas stretching westward from Milan towards the Malpensa airport are ceding their once-dominant role to the enormous new retail centers that have sprung up in thirty-five municipalities lying chiefly to the northeast and southwest of the city. This is a situation in flux, and one which should be regulated to a much greater extent than is contemplated by the provincial administration’s planners. The second part of the article is devoted to Milan, and in particular to four major processes of change that are now affecting commerce. The first of these processes is the steady spread of shopping areas that are already highly specialized: the so-called Golden Quadrilateral between Via Montenapoleone, Via Manzoni, Via della Spiga and Via Venezia, which has expanded in recent years largely as a result of the growth of designer clothing businesses, and the Canonica-Sarpi district, where the rapid growth of the Chinese community’s cut-rate textile and clothing outlets has upset an earlier equilibrium between native and non-native populations and different forms of trade. The second process arises from the failure of the radials extending outwards from the city’s hub to specialize: several of these areas, which historically provided their residents with a highly varied mix of stores, can now offer very little that is in any way out of the ordinary. The third process concerns the halting approach taken to commerce in public areas: the potential of this historic form of retail is still largely untapped, and few investments are being made to improve its organization and the range of commodities it offers. The fourth process is the return of shopping malls and other large retail outlets to the city: following in the footsteps of many European metropolises, Milan has moved ahead of other Italian cities in this respect, using disused industrial areas mostly located between the city center and the far outskirts as a resource, but seeing these new sales outlets as islands separate from their surroundings and, in some cases, as an opportunity to boost property values.

The article offers a synthesis of how the commercial landscape of Naples’ historic center has evolved: first, the changes that took place at the turn of the twentieth century; then the process of development that, from the post-World War II period to the end of the Eighties, laid the foundations of trade in the consolidated city; and, finally, the transformations that commerce has undergone in the last two decades. As early as the nineteenth century, there was a high city and a low city, matched by gradations in the social scale, with a select group of small merchants in the one, and a myriad of tiny shops and craftsmen in the other. Though commerce retained its pride of place on the Neapolitan scene after the Second World War, between the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties, the city was engulfed by a speculative boom that pushed the urban area well beyond its old boundaries. The commercial area, however, saw no change until a decade later, as the Sixties gave way to the Seventies. In the Eighties, commerce was hit by a crisis that cut deep into city’s economy as well as into the spaces traditionally given over to trade. The most significant changes in the commercial landscape of Naples’ historic center have occurred when urban dynamics overlap the sectorial dynamics of commerce. To climb out of the crisis, the more innovative enterprises were able to win back consumers by leveraging the connection between shopping and leisure, while more traditional retailers were marginalized. This is a situation that is now being replaced by a fluid, diversified commercial geography, where a post- hierarchization is superimposed on the traditional hierarchization of space. This brings us back to the relationship between city and commerce, in the sense that the bidirectional link between the two can produce effects that are as noticeable as they are new or, conversely, become weaker, contradictory and unclear.

The article traces the broad outlines of the evolutionary trends that have been at work in the historic center of Naples over the last few decades. In the first thirty years of the postwar period, the city’s problems were still rooted in unhygienic, overcrowding housing, a deteriorating building stock, wildly chaotic traffic and a crime-ridden economy. The year 1980 can be seen as something of a watershed, not so much because of the abortive attempt to introduce a new master plan that was to have taken up where its predecessor left off, as because of the socio-demographic changes that took place in the historic center. Here, in fact, a gradual decrease in population was accompanied by a sharp shift in the area’s social balance, with a large proportion of its middle- and working-class inhabitants supplanted by the very wealthy and the very poor, and by non-European immigrants in particular. The Nineties were marked by urban image-building efforts that attempted to instill new life into the city, starting from its historic core. Nevertheless, the resulting flurry of activity, which ranged from the new Master Plan to investments in urban furnishing, from the crackdown on illegal activity to the Monumenti Porte Aperte initiative that reopened many of the city’s monuments to the public, and from the new public transport policy to the introduction of pedestrian zones, has now, as the URBAN program and the Siren project have also demonstrated, lost much of its momentum through a lack of effective public action.

The article starts with a brief survey of three key factors that have transformed the commercial sector: the rise of large retail chains, the evolving regulatory framework governing wholesale and retail businesses, and changing patterns of consumption. We then turn to the case-study, a natural shopping center in Florence’s San Lorenzo neighborhood, for which two surveys based on a questionnaire developed for this purpose were conducted in 2003 and 2005. The two surveys investigated the characteristics of the commercial fabric, business turnover, entrepreneurship among non-European immigrants and occupation of public land, and indicated that commercial initiatives are increasing in number but not in quality, and that the presence of non-European businesspeople is on the rise.

M. Loda, Social morphology, patterns of consumption and the pull of the city in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Florence (Morfologia sociale, comportamenti di consumo e domanda di città nel quartiere S. Lorenzo a Firenze) After noting that urban phenomena in historic centers are more dynamic than the brick and stone that houses them, the introduction draws attention to the need for a direct survey in achieving a better understanding of demographic structure, social morphology and patterns of consumption: the homely attractions of the neighborhood and the pull of the city. The analysis thus starts from demographic structure, which is compared where possible with the picture given us by the official data, turning then to social morphology, examined in terms of occupation and residence, and to patterns of consumption as reflected by buyers’ preferences for various types of retail outlet. In conclusion, the article scrutinizes the competing attractions of city life and neighborhood roots.

Though the very origins of the historic center and the efforts to safeguard its architectural heritage, combined with the feeble guidance provided by urban planning, economic and social policies, have resulted in glaring contrasts on the regional level, it must be recognized that geographers have devoted little attention to detailed investigations of individual urban situations, and even less to investigations at the intraurban scale. This is an area where the Laboratory for Socio-Territorial Analysis and Documentation has been concentrating its efforts in a series of studies whose findings are presented in this issue: Loda and Mancini-Burzio on Florence; Amato and D’Alessandro on Naples; Faravelli on Milan; Guarrasi on Palermo; Zanetto on cities and their historic centers; and, in conclusion, Biagi on the political and administrative repercussions of the historic center’s problems.

In the period following the Second World War, the Società Generale Immobiliare was one of the principal land owners and the leading real estate and building company in Rome. This company has often been considered by both contemporaries and subsequently by scholars, as a symbol of the speculative forces which operated a negative influence over the urban growth of the Italian capital city. This article provides a survey of the activity and in particular of the numerous residential building initiatives of the Società Generale Immobiliare. It aims to evaluate the company’s actual role in the urban growth of Rome. Leading ideas, operating strategies and projects are illustrated, presenting both those initiatives which were carried out and those which were not.

This article is based on an historical approach to the management of sanitation in the contemporary city. Flow and network are concepts that characterised modern cities, in terms of relation systems, urban functionalities and space conflicts. Between these flows, there are those unequivocally related with the modernization of the city electricity i. e. but also those garbage collection and sanitation that established conflicts between different types of interests. This kind of conflicts are particularly evident in the case of improvement of sewers, which reshaped the relations between public and private, in terms of spaces, social structures and political approaches. The case study of Barcelona, with its hierarchal but also relative disrupted organization, show how the adoption of a system of tout-à-l’égout, after a long debate throughout the XIX century, represented the beginning of a model for many aspects unsustainable.

This article will consider the relationship between two types of map, produced in London from 1848 to 1851, that were closely related to the future improvement of the city’s sanitary infrastructure: the first Ordinance Survey of London, which was requested by the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers (MCS) in 1848 and mapped London’s above-ground topography; and secondly, maps produced as a result of the MCS subterranean survey of existing sewers, begun during the preparation of the Ordinance Survey plans. This article will demonstrate that these two interrelated maps, far from demonstrating a coherent planner’s vision, instead highlight inconsistencies and contradictions within that vision.

«Monstrous city», «great wen», «painted sepulchre» and other similar expressions were usually adopted to describe European cities throughout early modern history. Defoe in England, Rousseau in France and many others could be quoted as evidence of contemporary concerns about the seemingly uncontrollable city. In contrast to these visions of urban depravity was a sense of smaller communities like the village as a counter-model of sound order and relative sanity. The manner in which such contemporaries conceptualised their social and environmental problems has had a profound influence on the way that modern historians have interpreted the development of towns. Although it’s commonly assumed that the action of early modern city governments was ineffectual to maintain a clean environment, a deeper scrutiny of documentary sources reveal that contemporaries showed an appreciation of the health risk that overcrowding posed. Stench, which according to miasma-humoral theory was believed to be a principal cause of disease, was strictly associated with plague and other illness. Prompted by frequent outbreaks of plague, olfactory vigilance played a central role in regulating towns from the discrimination against poor immigrants and beggars, to the shaping of the city and better sanitation. In this article it will be argued that combating stench was an important task in the mind of municipal governors most notably, to tame plague and its myriads disorder. Despite the close association of urban squalor, filth and disease, frequent complaints about negligence in tackling these problems were made, and, as a result, new institutions and strategies were devised to clean the cities. A comparative study of major European cities (London, Paris, Rome) can help us to better understand how civic sanitation schemes operated in the past, the principal concerns behind these schemes, and the obstructions to their successful implementation.

This article examines environment developments- housing, sanitation, water supply and public space in English towns from the 15th to the 17th centuries; until recently this has been a neglected subject. The article suggests that there were already significant advances by 1500 and that the environmental situation deteriorated in the 16th century as English towns experienced strong population growth, immigration, poverty, expanding trade, traffic and congestion. By the early 17th century there was a new sensitivity to dirt and other environmental problems, with innovations and ideas imported from abroad. This laid the foundations for large-scale urban improvement after the Revolution of 1688.

In this article is surveyed the environmental regulation of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, describing the systems of street cleaning and maintenance which were adopted within the capital. This analysis is related to wider reflections upon the historiography of public health and urban government. In particular the material which is presented about the vitality and demanding nature of civic and neighbourly regulation of public space is shown to present major problems for the most common models of medical and public health history. Some conclusive observation are drawn out with the parallels between author’s works on urban sanitation and recent works on the environmental management of early modern forests and common lands.

This article examines contemporary understanding of the cause and nature of plague and secondly relate this to the developing measures taken by the government of Florence during the last outbreak to affect the city in 1630-31. The idea of corrupt air, putrefaction and smell underlines these themes, but they also served to underline contemporary perceptions of the poor who were seen as the main source of disease. Inevitably the danger in examining plague through the eyes of governments is that this leads to a very one-sided version of events; those at the lower end of the social scale are lumped together under the heading of «the poor». While the article concentrates largely on the relationship between medical theory and government policy, by examining four main types of plague «narrative», it endeavours to clarify the identity of «the poor» and examine their reactions during the plague. The first plague «narrative» is the official account written by the librarian of the Grand-duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II. This is compared with the narrative of events as recorded in the deliberations and regulations of the Sanità, the health board responsible for the day-to day campaign against this «invisible enemy». The rationale behind these measures will then be examined, and in particular the relationship between the demands of public order and the contemporary understanding of the nature of plague as recorded in the texts written by contemporary physicians who advises the government. Finally, some idea will be provided about the identity and reactions of the poor through the events narrated in the Sanità’s court records. These trials throw a surprising amount of light on the reactions of the poorer members of society and enable one to talk in more specific terms about the motivation for their actions within the context of their understanding of plague.

This monographic number of «Storia Urbana» is focused on themes of environmental urban history: an apparently neglected subject in traditional approaches to urban history. This is only partially true, as the growing number of studies on this topic seems to suggest an increasing interest in this field of research, even if many of them are focused on modern cities. The articles proposed here suggest the need to enlarge the field of research to include also studies about early modern cities, adopting a longue durée perspective.