Violenza e spazio: Un’etnografia comparativa di due “badlands” italiane
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3847
Questo articolo presenta una comparazione tra due quartieri “marginali” italiani, o “badland”: la Zona Espansione Nord (ZEN) di Palermo e San Siro a Milano. Descrive i diversi tipi di violenza che li colpiscono e il loro nesso con differenti processi multi-scalari. I due quartieri, esito di storie urbane distinte, possono essere parzialmente schematizzati con due immagini dicotomiche: la marginalità “non-fordista” dello ZEN, un’enclave sociale spaziale su base economica senza passato operaio; e quella “post-fordista” di San Siro, una configurazione socio-spaziale multiculturale con un passato operaio. Riprendendo l’idea del continuum della violenza, gli autori suggeriscono come anche lo spazio urbano sia euristicamente connesso alla violenza tramite un simile continuum. Per illustrarlo, questo articolo introdurrà i due casi studio, esplicitando le loro principali caratteristiche comuni come “badland” urbane, e indicando i loro tratti specifici. Quindi collegherà il continuum della violenza allo spazio urbano, in primo luogo in una prospettiva sincronica, mappando le diverse forme di violenza che colpiscono oggi i due quartieri e in secondo luogo concentrandosi su una dimensione diacronica di questo rapporto a partire dalle etnografie e le storie di vita di alcuni degli interlocutori. Attraverso tale confronto gli autori indicano come questi due casi studio rinviano a ciò che in sintesi definiscono il continuum dello spazio urbano e della violenza.
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Violence and space: A comparative ethnography of two Italian “badlands”
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Paolo Grassi
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Violence and space: A comparative ethnography of two Italian “badlands”
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                                           2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 183-210




Violence and space
A comparative ethnography of two Italian “badlands”
Ferdinando FAVA
Università di Padova / École nationale supérieure d’architecture, Paris la Villette
Paolo GRASSI
Politecnico di Milano




ABSTRACT: This paper compares two marginal neighbourhoods and Italian “badlands”: the
Zona Espansione Nord (ZEN) of Palermo and San Siro in Milan. It concerns multiple types
of violence that affect them and their connections with different multi-scale processes.
The two neighbourhoods emerge as the result of two urban histories that can be partly
schematised in two dichotomous images: on the one side, the “non-Fordist” marginality
of the ZEN, a social enclave of unemployment without a working-class past; on the other
side, the “post-Fordist” marginality of San Siro, a multicultural socio-spatial
configuration with a working-class past. Following the idea of the continuum of violence,
we suggest that space is heuristically connected with violence and to this continuum. In
order to illustrate this hypothesis, this paper introduces two case studies, drawing out
their main common characteristics as urban badlands, and singling out the different traits
that mark their specificity. It then links the continuum of violence to urban space, firstly in
a synchronic perspective, mapping the different forms of violence that affect the two
neighbourhoods today, and secondly on a diachronic perspective pointing to their
different on-going dynamics, through the life stories of some of our interlocutors.
Through this comparison, we illustrate how these two case studies combine and account
for what we call the urban space-violence continuum.

KEYWORDS: COMPARATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY; VIOLENCE; URBAN SPACE; PALERMO; MILAN.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Ferdinando Fava, Paolo Grassi
Violence and space: A comparative ethnography of two Italian “badlands”
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 183-210.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3847
184                                                            FERDINANDO FAVA, PAOLO GRASSI



Introduction
   In 2008, Ferdinando Fava completed a 13-year period of intensive
research in the ZEN neighbourhood – a public housing project in the north
of Palermo, Sicily, that is considered to be a paradigmatic case of urban
decay in Italy (Fava 2012a)1. He then started to interrogate the relationship
between violence and urban space, as well as the theoretical consequences
and ethnographic practices demanded by this relationship (Fava 2010,
2012b, 2014a, 2017). He made use of the results of this reflection to set up a
new research project in the city of Milan2, together with Paolo Grassi, who
had previously carried out urban ethnographic research on violence and
gangs in Guatemala City (Grassi 2018a).
   Taking into account both the global and local dynamics affecting
contemporary Italian cities, such as urbanisation, international migration
and socio-economic transformations – especially since 2007, when the
global financial crisis began – this paper aims to analyse the multiple types
of violence and their connections to two contemporary Italian “badlands”
(Dikeç 2007), both as multi-faceted, scalar and spatial related phenomena.
   Following the idea of a continuum of violence (Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois
2004), we suggest that space is heuristically connected to violence on a
similar continuum, bounded by two poles: “the space” of the daily violence
experienced within urban space and “the space” of the structural and
symbolic violence “produced” by urban space itself (cfr. Fava 2014a). We try
to combine these two elements, which are usually split within the social
sciences. The first is the study of the micro-level violence in the city; the
second is the study of the effects of violence o f the city, both through a
spatial lens. In the former, urban space seems to be just a passive back-
ground, a set stage; in the latter, urban space seems to disappear. However,
just as violence refers not only to physical harm, urban space corresponds
not only to visible walls, roads and buildings. Space is not just an adornment

1. This article is the result of a joint process of reflection between the two authors. However,
paragraphs can be divided as follows: Ferdinando Fava: The violence continuum in Palermo
and Milan; Palermo: illegal occupation as a response to violence; The last four paragraphs of
the Conclusion: built environment and social bonds. Paolo Grassi: Introduction; Two urban
“Badlands”: the ZEN and San Siro; San Siro: the neighbourhood committee; the first three
paragraphs of the Conclusion: built environment and social bonds. We would like to thank
the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper.
2. Paolo Grassi began to work in Milan in January 2017, collaborating with an action-
research group of the Polytechnic of Milan called “Mapping San Siro” and comprising
mainly urbanists.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                              185


on a micro-social scale: it can also have an agency on a macro scale, even if
it is “invisible”. This paper underlines the silent connection that mutually
ties violence and space: if violence is something constitutive, creative and
performative, it never happens only in the urban space. On the contrary, it
always happens in relation to it. The theoretical contribution of this paper
corresponds with our attempt to connect the continuum of violence with the
insights of the anthropological “spatial turn”, applying them both to our
ethnographic experiences, linking the micro-social level with the structural
one.
   The following pages discuss the theoretical and ethnographic challenges
posed by this relationship between violence and space, and outlines the
provisional results of an on-going comparative research project. The ZEN
and San Siro emerge not so much as epitomes of global conditions, but as
results of two peculiar local histories (clearly influenced by the former): the
non-Fordist ZEN, a social enclave on the one side, and the post-Fordist San
Siro, a multicultural socio-spatial configuration with a working-class past.
   Through a heuristic and multi-scalar comparison (i.e. a comparison
related to interactions, institutional policies and urban structures), we
illustrate how these two case studies show what we label as the urban space-
violence continuum. The paper is divided into four parts: the first part
introduces the two case studies, drawing out their main characteristics as
urban badlands, and the different traits that mark their specificity. Here we
start to map different forms of violence that affect the two neighbourhoods.
The second part relates the continuum of violence to the case studies, also
linking it to space. The third part focuses on the synchronic and diachronic
dimensions of these spaces, starting from our ethnographies and the life
stories of some interlocutors. We thereby show how the different types of
violence that are affecting the residents of the two neighbourhoods have
changed over time, affecting their agency. The conclusion builds on the
analysis to expand the theoretical framework on the space-violence
continuum.
   Juxtaposing two Italian badlands through an ethnographic approach
needs some clarification on our comparison procedure. Following the
indications of a well-known text written by Andre Gingrich and Richard G.
Fox (2002), we criticise a monolithic conception of comparison and claim a
qualitative and non-theory-oriented process, along regional, historical and
transnational dimensions. We are not interested in approaching discrete,
homogeneous and unchanging units, but rather, in bringing together
mutable elements, connected in a global system through certain structural
forces. Comparison is thus heuristically aimed at illustrating the differences


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186                                                 FERDINANDO FAVA, PAOLO GRASSI


in and the uniqueness of our case studies. We compare relationships
between a number of their elements – not just the two places – because of
their incomparable uniqueness (cfr. Simmel 1997: 18).

Two urban “Badlands”: The Zen and San Siro
   The ZEN – Zona Espansione Nord (Northern Zone of Expansion) – and San
Siro are two Italian neighbourhoods of public housing, two marginalised
places, and thus two urban badlands. Following Mustafa Dikeç, we define
“badlands” as stigmatised places, signified as deviant and a threat to the
prevailing social and moral order of the rest of the city (Dikeç 2007: 3-14).
These socio-spatial configurations must be related – at one time – to their
local histories and to differential response to similar national structural
conditions: the economic crisis and the financial deregulations; the
development of a tertiary sector; industrial collapse; increasing job
flexibility and social inequalities; and a progressively weaker welfare system.
   With reference to the province of Palermo, in 2013 only 41% of people
aged 20 to 64 were employed, 6.7% below the rate in 2007. In 2012, the
income of families per capita was 13,687 euros – less than the figure for 2011
and significantly lower, compared to the national average (17.307 euros –
Servizio Statistica del Comune di Palermo 2015). In contemporary Milan, 9%
of the population holds over one-third of the city’s total wealth. In 2019,
2,845 evictions were carried out (+593% compared to the previous year)
throughout the province of Milan. 15,000 eligible families are listed, on the
ranking of the Municipality, as waiting for public housing (Lareno 2019). In
the last few years, living standards of the residents have worsened and social
polarisation has been exacerbated, especially in San Siro (Cognetti, Padovani
2018), while the population of the Zen has always experienced a life of
radical precariousness and uncertainty.
   As is well known, Palermo and Milan are located in two very different
contexts, with the former generally described by international observers as a
less-developed, agricultural Italian south, and the latter as a “rich” north,
dominated by private companies (cfr. CIA 2019). Considering these local and
historical dynamics that continue to shape also San Siro and the ZEN, we
have found some important differences, stemming from their past histories
within – we could say, using two dichotomous images – a post-Fordist city
and a non-Fordist city. In fact, while San Siro shows a multicultural and
post-Fordist socio-spatial configuration, with long-standing inhabitants
having a working-class past, the ZEN of Palermo is a social enclave without
an industrial or working-class history, that is thus captured here as non-


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                     187


Fordist. The ZEN has been constituted as a “social left-over” in the urban
economy of Palermo. It is an in-between, connecting a “not-yet-industrial
society” with a “no-more-industrial society”. In fact, after the Second World
War, industrialisation never resumed in Sicily, particularly in Palermo (Fava
2012a). Concomitantly, the tertiary sector developed massively. In this
framework, the ZEN never represented an area for a reserve army of labour,
cyclically absorbed by a Fordist economy, and cannot be classified today as
an advanced, marginalised urban area (Wacquant 2008). We could also say –
in Marxist terms – that the ZEN is a kind of contemporary spatialised
lumpenproletariat (Fava 2012a; Bourdin 2013)3.
   Over the years, the two neighbourhoods evolved into paradigmatic
examples of the endemic housing emergency in Italian cities. They were also
represented, particularly by media, as the social “black hole” of the violence
in the two cities of Palermo and Milan, that is, the urban areas where all the
forms of urban violence are localised: drug dealing, abusive behaviours,
racketeering, etc.
   However, the local economic and political history of San Siro and the ZEN
points to their distinctiveness. In fact, their reconfigurations are neither
reducible to the mainstreaming taxonomy of contemporary badlands, nor to
the ghetto – an urban area segregated on ethnic and racial grounds – nor to
the advanced marginality developed through deproletarianisation processes,
as in the ex-Parisian red belt (cfr. Fava 2008; Wacquant, Slater, Pereira
2014). In this respect, the ZEN of Palermo, a neighbourhood on the northern
outskirts of the city, can be described as a typically run-down
neighbourhood, the paradigm of degraded Italian peripheries for more than
30 years. San Siro, on the other hand, only gained a similar stigma in the last
few years, after its foreign population grew significantly, with more than
45% coming from abroad. Although the majority of foreign residents arrived
from Egypt and Morocco, overall 84 different nationalities were registered by
ALER (Azienda Lombarda Edilizia Residenziale), the public institution that
manages this urban space (Cognetti, Ranzini 2016). Thus, San Siro is
characterised by a super-diversity that nourishes the division between this

3. Deproletarianisation of wage labour, which is a characteristic of advanced marginality,
did not have a direct effect on most of the residents of the ZEN. This was not only because
industrialisation never began in Palermo, but, above all, because the inhabitants have
always been employed in the casual economy: the building sector, services and retail trade.
The building sector and retail trade entered into a deep crisis from which they did not
emerge: In parallel, the tertiary sector developed at irregular intervals (Vento 2004). By
1981, this predominance of the tertiary sector was already related to the absence of
employment opportunities in the industrial sector and not to a transition to a post-
industrial society (Chubb 1981: 48).

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urban space and the rest of the city (Vertovec 2007). For instance, San Siro
has often been described as a “Kasbah”, an Arab fortress in the centre of the
capital of Lombardia (Grassi 2018b).
   No public agency can give the exact figure for the population of the ZEN,
but an estimated 30,000 people are now living in its Gregotti insulae4. Most
residents are Sicilians, who illegally occupy the apartments, while non-
Italians, the majority from Sri Lanka, constitute a small group5. Built
between the late 1960s and early 1980s, its maquette was even exhibited in
1994, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, to attest to the excellence of
Italian design (Fava 2009). Since then, the ZEN has evolved into an
archetypal example of disrupted Italian public housing projects. San Siro, on
the other hand, constitutes one of the largest publicly managed
neighbourhoods of Milan, comprising almost 6,000 apartments, with
approximately 11,000 inhabitants. It was built during the 1930s and 1940s in
what was then a semi-rural area but is now centrally located in Milan. In
April 2015, when the Piazzale Segesta subway station was opened at the
northern border of the neighbourhood, the centralisation process reached its
final stage thus far.
   Both the ZEN and San Siro have, since their foundation, been
characterised by and publicly known for continuous waves of illegal
occupation. In the ZEN, illegal occupation started at the end of the 1970s
and reached its climax at the beginning of the 1980s, even before the
tenement houses were finalised and assigned to people6. Some apartments in

4. Vittorio Gregotti is the modernist architect who designed the ZEN project in 1969.
5. The precise number of residents of the ZEN is difficult to obtain: the available statistical
data of the census units are always aggregated and made public together with those of the
higher administrative units (the circoscrizioni), thus making them unusable for the real
measurement of the phenomena. They underestimate poverty by preventing correct
understanding (Fava 2008).
6. The ZEN was designed in the mid-1950s, when the Municipality of Palermo devoted a
large area of the north of the city as residential. The first part, known as Borgo Pallavicino,
consisted of around 300 houses. In the meantime, the construction of the second part of the
neighbourhood (the ZEN 1) began in 1966, consisting of 10-storey buildings comprising
more than 1,200 apartments. The third and final part of the settlement (ZEN 2) was
designed in 1969 by a group of international architects headed by Vittorio Gregotti, winner
of the tender issued by the Institute for Public Housing of the province of Palermo.
Characteristic of this last phase are the insulae, made up of four buildings in line, separated
by three internal roads: two for pedestrians and one for cars. The idea was to recreate the
typical blocks of the intricate texture of the historic centre of the city. For a detailed and
critical account of the complex events related to the realisation of the project, cfr. Sciascia
2003; for the history of the occupation, Fava 2012; for the political and administrative
history of the ZEN within the urban history of Palermo, cfr. Pedone 2013.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                              189


San Siro were occupied after its foundation, when the first Italian labour
migrants arrived in search for employment from the Italian south. An
informal real-estate market currently prospers in both neighbourhoods.
   Badlands are not only produced by similar social mechanisms, but also
receive similar responses, in terms of security practices of surveillance,
control, and improvement through interventions. The ZEN and San Siro
have been at the centre of multiple projects of urban regeneration. Referring
to the ZEN, in 1989 a national law (“Decreto Sicilia”) provided the legal
background to accomplish structural works, such as the rehabilitation of
sewage and sanitation systems and power lines and the provision of drinking
water. These works were completed only a decade later at the beginning of
the 2000s. In the meantime, the apartments were mainly restored and
maintained by the illegal occupants themselves. While the public
administrative housing agency – Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari – was
unable to provide funds for the works, innumerable social projects have been
funded by the European Union since the late 1990s. These projects were
implemented together with social initiatives. In particular, these actions
targeted children and women in impoverished neighbourhoods, who had
been pressurised with the mantra of the social regeneration and social
cohesion.
   Although an extended urban renewal programme was implemented in San
Siro during the past 15 years, and while many apartments were internally
restored by the oldest residents, many buildings are still in a serious state of
deterioration: stripped plaster, old installation, humidity and cockroaches
are part of the everyday problems that San Siro’s inhabitants have to face.
Many interlocutors – members of two local committees, social workers, and
the residents themselves – additionally describe the “institutional
abandonment” that would affect the neighbourhood since the end of the
programme in 2015 (Grassi 2018c).

The continuum of violence in Palermo and Milan
   The central issues of this paper involve a reconsideration of concepts of
violence and urban space, their plausible relationships, the notions of
causality, and the agency inscribed into their relationality, methodological
dimensions and the consequences of these issues for the way we understand
them. At the same time, the theoretical framework requires us to
continuously return to the ground and thus to the ethnographic fields.
   The main question is how to ethnographically tackle violence and urban
space. On the one hand, witnessing violence acts (at any level) also raises –
at the same time – epistemological and ethical dilemmas about definitional

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190                                                           FERDINANDO FAVA, PAOLO GRASSI


issues, the point of view assumed by researchers (cfr. Riches 1986) and their
interpretative instruments (Abbink 2000; Diez de Velasco 2005: 109;
Schmidt 2011). Observing a violent act without doing anything about could
be classified as a hit-and-run, or a failure to provide assistance (cfr. Bourgois
2001; Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois 2004). On the other hand, within urban
space, ethnography is related to a micro-social here and now, while urban
space consists of more than just the physical fabric, the roads and houses we
c a n see and experience, or the place in which violent acts can happen.
Ethnography thus faces a scalar challenge with respect to urban space,
because it is always circumscribed to a micro-social and micro-local level.
Thus, analysing urban space mainly from a structural level seems
impossible.
   Violence is a slippery, uncertain issue, which has a disintegrating effect
on human life (Taussig 1987). Anthropology has experienced a considerable
delay in studying violence. During the last century, many anthropologists
interpreted conflictive elements as disturbing factors for their research (Dei
2005). From the 1950s, publications on warfare and violence increased
(Otterbein 1999). Anthropologists began to acknowledge that violence is
anything but uncommon. On the contrary, it is an existential dimension for
millions of people, including residents of the marginal areas in cities, which,
like other existential dimensions, are investigated by anthropologists, who
themselves have to navigate while investigating the badlands (Whitehead
2004; Jütersonke, Muggah, Rodgers 2009). The definitional debate on
violence, encompassing almost all areas of the social sciences and
humanities, swings between a restricted notion of violence (Riches 1986)
and another broader, and thus more inclusive, one (Henry 2000; Jackman
2002; Barak 2003; Quaderni di Sanità Pubblica 2003). The restricted notion
considers violence as a physical and interpersonal activity intent on harming
others. We think this characterisation it is insufficient, as it omits critical
elements of harm:
      First, it excludes the emotional and psychological pain that results from the
      domination of some over others. Second, it tends to focus on the visible, inten-
      tional, interpersonal harm between individuals, while excluding harm against
      individuals by institutions or agencies. Third, it ignores the violence of social
      processes, which produce systematic social injury, such as violence perpetuated
      through institutionalized racism and sexism. Fourth, it excludes the ‘symbolic
      violence’ of domination, that ‘‘gentle, invisible form of violence, which is never
      recognised as such, and is not so much undergone as chosen, the violence of
      credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude,
      piety” (Bourdieu 1977: 192, cited in Henry 2000: 18).




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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                          191


   We underline that the integration of these elements has consequences for
the understanding of violent acts, expanding them from physical strength to
symbolic constraint; of damage, from physical injury to deprivation; of
targets, from the individual to the community. These shifts presuppose a
multi-scalar approach, moving from micro-social to macro-social levels that
must be taken into account by ethnographers. These levels include the
visibility of violence, as well as its disappearance from perceptions – and this
especially happens when punishments and suffering persist – and also the
transition between different temporalities, from punctual events to more
enduring processes.
   Thus, considering an inclusive and broad notion of violence, we started to
record its different forms (social, political, symbolic, and structural) in the
two badlands: our anthropological fields. A synchronic approach was
employed during this phase. Nowadays, the two neighbourhoods suffer from
a relatively similar violent framework. Squatting, theft, vandalism, dirty
spaces and police round-ups are the common denominators of their
“violent” urban texture7. Urban space emerges as a set for these phenomena,
a place where these practices are implemented. At a different level, however,
the ZEN and San Siro share a symbolic form of violence that corresponds
with processes of stigmatisation that frame both as urban badlands (Fava
2012a, 2014b). The ZEN is a peculiar area, where it is possible to recognise
how the political economy of the city and the social institutional apparatus,
through social policy analysis, urban renewal planning and media
communication, keeps structuring marginal urban spaces8. Also, the social
border dividing San Siro from the rest of the city of Milan is constantly built
and rebuilt by a stigma primarily created by local and national media. As we
have already noted, in the past few years, San Siro has experienced hyper-
visibility related to the presence of squatters linked both to a social movement

7. Clearly, we do not want to support sensationalist views describing the violent phenomena
affecting the two neighbourhoods. Comparing them with other European and non-European
contexts, the ZEN and San Siro are relatively safe, as “physical” violence does not seem to
dominate everyday life. There are not specific data for the neighbourhoods, but – just to
give an example – according to national statistics, in 2018 there were only 30 complaints of
homicide, attempted murder and infanticide in Palermo, and 85 in Milan (data of the Minis-
ter of the Interior, elaborated by Il Sole 24 Ore, https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/reati2018/, ac-
cessed on 01/07/2020).
8. The economy of Palermo from the post-war period to the present has been characterised
by the hypertrophic development of the tertiary sector, which shows the struggle for daily
survival among the poor, rather than indicating increasing levels of post-industrial wealth.
Urban policies, real-estate market and part of civil society contribute to the construction of
its urban marginality (Fava 2012).

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that struggles for “the right of the city” and to a network of criminals.
During 2017, at least three national television stations visited San Siro. The
two main national newspapers (Repubblica and Corriere della Sera) often
publish articles on the neighbourhood9.
   At a macro level, some important differences emerge. The contemporary
common global and national dynamics – marked by several elements, such
as: neoliberal politics, bad job conditions, low salaries at an economic level;
increasing social inequality at a social level; decreasing state intervention
and a weaker welfare state at a political level – are not sufficient to explain
the specific characteristics of the two urban places. As we have observed, the
two badlands are the result of very different historical processes: the non-
Fordism of the ZEN and the post-Fordism of San Siro. A situational analysis
of the two urban neighbourhoods shows very distinct processes, made
relevant by the distinct way in which the economical, political and social
histories unfold.
   The concept of the continuum of violence enables us to connect the
emphasised dimensions of violence and space in a common interpretative
scheme (Scheper-Hughes 1996, 2007; Bourgois 2001; Scheper-Hughes,
Bourgois 2004: 1-5). The description of violence as a continuum was first
used by Liz Kelly, in 1988, to point out how abuse and “typical” male
conduct are connected to specific social interactions, rather than being two
opposed sets of behaviours (Kelly 1988: 74-136). In Scheper-Hughes and
Bourgois’ notion, different forms of violence, implying different emerging
levels, are associated with each other more deeply, adopting an all-
encompassing idea of violence (cfr. also Bourdieu 1998). In general,
anthropologists and social scientists now recognise that “social violence” or
“everyday violence” cannot be dissociated from political, institutional and
economic violence (cfr. also Auyero, Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes 2015). They
are inextricably linked. The continuum of violence allows us not only to
identify different forms of violence, but also to look for the interconnections
between them. It suggests that daily submission to structural violence, and
the deprivation caused by it, sets the stage for the normalisation of more
overt and visible forms of violence, ranging from criminal violence to police
and state-directed violence. Thus, we can interpret the deviant acts that
affect the ZEN and San Siro only by associating them with the stigmatisation
processes and the structural characteristics already observed.


9. Cfr. for example Brunella Giovara, Case Aler, viaggio nella casbah di San Siro tra rifiuti e
case occupate, La Repubblica, 12/02/2018; Gianni Santucci, Rapine, vandali e occupazioni.
“Noi anziani lasciati soli a San Siro”, Corriere della Sera, 19/09/2016.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                         193


  However, space is not explicitly considered in the continuum of violence
but rather, is used as an indefinite background. Nevertheless, at least since
the “spatial turn”, anthropologists recognise that space is not neutral:
      [I]t is thought, constructed, analysed, and caught through different modalities
      and different temporalities into ideologies and social hierarchies. It works as a
      central operator of socio-cultural, political and economic systems. Moreover,
      together with technologies, it stabilies differential power relations (Fava 2014a:
      29-30).

   Space, and here more specifically urban space, is not simply a background,
a set, a container or an empty box to be filled with human action. Urban
space refers not only to the “built environments” (Low 1990), that is, the
building stocks experienced by the social actors of the ZEN and of San Siro.
Rather, it is inscribed in their very fabric, their design, and their geographical
distribution.
   These dimensions are not immediately perceivable through ethnographies.
On this scale, the built environment is formed by urban spaces such as
residential areas, workplaces, the provision of services (including rubbish
collection, education, health or public institutions) and their differential
positions in the cities. We label these arrangements as the city’s texture.
Transport infrastructures (road networks, public transport, and parking
areas), as well as other urban infrastructures (sewage, power, drinking water
supply), become relevant. There is an experiential and logical gap between
the different elements we have to take into account, and ethnographers thus
have to deal with different urban spaces: a) a sense-experienced urban
space, the here and now of the isochronic situation of research (what we
could call the ethnographic space); and b) a non-ethnographic urban space,
that is, the urban space that we cannot see here and now, but which is
possible to grasp, reconstitute and posit, for example, through maps, plans
and photos10. The ethnographic urban space and the non-ethnographic
urban space are both shaped by other processes, contributing to the social
structure at a given time and place. Some processual connections can be
identified with reference to the Lefebvrian triad (Lefebvre 1976): the sense-
experienced urban space refers to the representational space, while the non-


10. The difficulty of getting access to some spaces reflects a fundamental characteristic of
ethnography. Its object is always partial: there is always a space or time that cannot be
directly observed. There is always something else, something that is “out of the field”, but
which is correlated with the “here” and “now”. Here we underline that we do not refer
directly to hidden or interstitial urban spaces, but to a wider space that we cannot directly
experience, because it is not connected to our senses and perceptions.

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ethnographic urban space combines the representations of space and the
spatial practices theorised by Lefebvre, an urban space being understood as a
conceptual analytical object that is not directly experienced.
   With Doreen Massey, we recognise that (urban) space – including the
non-ethnographic type – is always the product of interrelations and that is
always “under construction” (2005). However, through our reflection, we
would like to underline its plurality, or more correctly, its differential
comprehension, its varying understanding, its changing signification
according to the points of view of the social actors and the scales considered
by the research. After all, Massey also recognises this distinction in another
essay. For this author, places are always connected to elsewhere: they are
“constructed out of articulations of social relations […] which are not only
internal to that local” (1995: 183). By highlighting different urban spaces, we
try to show how the built environment is also both a product and an actor of
social relations and, moreover, how it intertwines with everyday life. Our
work aims to show how these two spatial poles are results and mediators of
interactions. For this reason, space, like violence, emerges as a distinct
phenomenon on different scales, assuming specific characteristics that
cannot be reduced to those which contribute to its constitution.
   Thus, the theoretical contribution of this paper corresponds to our attempt
to connect the continuum of violence with the insights of the anthropological
“spatial turn”, applying them to our ethnographic experiences, linking the
micro-social level with the structural level, or, in other words, with the
scalability of social life. The continuum of violence allows violence to be
connected to (urban) space, and thus to ethnographically capture and
analyse situations where the urban space is the object of violent gestures
and situations, in which the visibility of violent actions disappears, but
where violence still dominates the life of its dwellers. Ranging from everyday
violence to structural violence requires space to change its position from
constituting mainly the background for violence to becoming itself an
invisible actor. While violence may become less and less visible, space itself
can become violent.
   This relationship is not deterministic, in the sense that a certain space
causes certain forms of violence. Rather, it is a circular process. The agency
attributed to space in relation to violence remains complex, as for example
built space can simultaneously become a background for violence and an
agent. For instance, a wall built along a border can affect the practices of
different social actors and simultaneously provide the background scene, a



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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                         195


stage for different forms of daily violence. Space is never neutral11, but is
always in the background. Violence, however, is at the fore. Space can
become an actor primarily on a different scale – at the non-ethnographic
level, as we have pointed out. It refers to the possibility of promoting or
inhibiting individual and collective agency. We intend our scheme to be a
flexible frame with which to interpret our fields. In this way, the continuum
of violence becomes a continuum of violence and space, or a continuum that
tries to keep together and point to the social dimensions of violence and
space. Despite these clarifications, we prefer to use the continuum category,
because it seems for now that it allows us to heuristically indicate not only
the link between violence and space, but also the link between different
internal levels (social, political, symbolical, structural, and also infra-
structural, cfr. O’Neill, Rodgers 2012).
   To concretise the violence-space connection, we will return to and
analyse the ethnographic context of two specific urban fields introduced
above as badlands. First, we focus on the illegal occupations of the ZEN,
which we interpret as a response both to abusive personal relations and to
structural violence. Totò, Ciro and Vita (all names are fictional) are three
residents who – through their own narratives – introduce the different
entanglements of violence and space and outline their personal ways to cope
with it. Second, we move to a specific group in San Siro, the neighbourhood
committee, and a specific life story of one of its members, whom we call
Anna. The committee’s practices and Anna’s life trajectory testify to the
interaction between the different dimensions of violence and will recover a
diachronic component sacrificed in the above outlined comparative
perspective. The badlands of the ZEN and San Siro single out visible and
invisible violent constraints that their residents have to deal with. Their
bonds with the environment and their everyday practices are the dimensions
in which the invisible, the structural and symbolic violence of the city
operates. The invisible forms of violence are often reinforced by
sophisticated hermeneutics of urban professionals who fail to recognise the
residents as autonomous individuals, as well as failing to recognise their
performative competence in space, and their meanings in regard to violence
(cfr. Fava 2014c).

11. Referring to the agency of materiality, it is also worth mentioning the Actor-Network
theory of Bruno Latour: “[A]ny thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a
difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant. Thus, the questions to ask
about any agent are simply the following: Does it make a difference in the course of some
other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this
difference?” (Latour 2005: 71).

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From violence to space and return
      Palermo: Illegal occupation as a response to violence
   The narratives of illegal occupants that Ferdinando Fava collected, in
more than 10 years of fieldwork at the ZEN of Palermo, underline personal
responses to different scales of violence. We consider three different forms
of violence – social, political and structural – but start with the spatial
experience of some of the interlocutors.
   First, let us consider Totò and the social violence he has experienced.
Totò has been living on the first floor of via Joe Di Maggio since he arrived in
the ZEN in 1984. Since the death of his mother in 1985, he has been living
alone. During the week he works as an illegal parking attendant, and during
weekends he works as a guard in a game room. He also sells baits to
fishermen on summer evenings at the docks of Mondello, a port close to
Palermo. His economic situation is very precarious. His apartment in the
ZEN is desolated and neglected: part of the dividing wall that separates the
kitchen from the entrance has fallen down; the walls of the rooms are black
and dirty; the furniture is covered in rubbish; some windows are broken; and
a makeshift curtain made from empty cigarettes packets held together with
tape shields the apartment from sunlight. Dirty clothes and plastic bags are
scattered throughout the apartment. Even before he arrived in the ZEN, Totò
was used to substandard, deteriorated housing. The owner of his previous
apartment in the historical centre of the city refused to repair it:
        I had to leave my house because I was there illegally, for the law. I was an illeg-
        al occupant, because the house was about to collapse. The policemen and the
        firemen came twice; they saw the conditions of the house. It was dangerous.
        They told us: “You can stay here no more, because the house is being confis-
        cated”12.

   Totò’s experience testifies to his suffering due to unhealthy housing
conditions and abusive personal relations with the owner of his apartment.
His illegal move into the ZEN tenements is the answer to an unpleasant
relationship.
   The unfinished houses also testify to the battle between illegal occupants
and municipal housing policies. In this regard, the experiences of a second
interlocutor, Ciro, show the perversion of policies regulating housing
assignments of the city agency, and point out to a form of institutional
violence against the ZEN’s inhabitants. Ciro worked as a clerk at the Italian

12. All the interviews were literally translated from Italian to English, trying to keep some
contextual and social connotations.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                          197


Post Agency. He lived most of his life in a precarious condition, until he was
hired by the Post Agency when he was around 50. Before that, he worked as
an upholsterer, then in a theatre of Palermo, and was unemployed for a
while. He lived in an old and unwholesome house, whose owner did not
maintain it properly. The house was in via Castro, at the centre of Palermo.
The earthquake pushed him eventually to occupy an apartment at the ZEN.
Ciro has two married daughters: one is a teacher of philosophy at a high
school and the other is a primary teacher:
      Consider that the owners of the house didn’t spend money, they didn’t fix these
      houses, they didn’t repair shit, chisti di cca [these ones]. Therefore, these
      houses decayed. There are infiltrations. They began “to make and to say”. This
      house became this, with broken beams […] we live in a trap… it is a human trap,
      but I live here. It is a trap. There are broken beams […] the case popolari [public
      housing]… it was very close to me… but in the case popolari lived… ‘u [the] po-
      liceman, ‘u employee, ‘u marshal, ‘u schoolteacher […] they gave the public
      housing to them. Fuck you, did they give it to you? No, they didn’t! You could
      make 100,000 applications but what did they give to you? […] Sta minchia [bull-
      shit, nothing], do you understand? Public housing was allocated through
      nepotism.

   Ciro not only has to deal with an abusive relationship with the owners of
the house, but he has also to deal – this is the point we want to underline –
with the perverse effects of policies and their nepotistic applications
regarding housing assignments. He speaks mainly about the institutional
mechanisms that prevented him from getting public housing. His experience
attests to an institutional level of violence, which bypasses the threshold of
personal intentionality.
   The third interlocutor speaks of the structural constraints of the real-
estate market and of labour wages and their historical transformations. Vita
is 47 years old. She, too, illegally occupies an apartment, and she and her
family also live in a very precarious situation. When Ferdinando got to know
the family, Vita’s husband, Francesco, was officially unemployed. However,
he informally worked as a mechanic in a garage of the insula, located under
their apartment. During Ferdinando’s fieldwork, Francesco was hired as a
bricklayer in a local company which, after some months, was forced to close,
because of troubles with anti-mafia certifications13:
      I did not come here to save money […] I came here 12 years ago, during the first
      occupation […] I stayed half a day and then I escaped. My husband worked in a
      factory in De Simone; my husband earned [around] 400,000 liras a month. I
      rented a house… in via Dante and then in via Pallavicino. My husband earned
      250,000 liras a week […] I could save money and think: “Tomorrow I will buy

13. In order to get pubic contracts, any company needs to certify that its shareholders and
directors have no restrictions, limitations or bans according to anti-Mafia regulations.

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      my detached house”, not… here. I was forced to come here […] When my hus-
      band constructed [repaired] this apartment, I cried and I went away […] I didn’t
      know how they did it, I didn’t know anything [she was forced to move to the
      ZEN because she was evicted from her house]… the eviction […] my husband
      did not work, my husband was unemployed for three years… just small un-
      skilled jobs… and we arrived here for that. If he had been at least a paid worker
      […] Look, my husband worked only a year and half with a safe salary… now is
      unemployed: how can you pay a rent?

   Vita and Francesco have to cope with a lack of affordable tenements, low-
skilled and low-paid jobs, and a corrupt political and economic context,
connected to the mafia and criminal gangs. The Mafia controlled the urban
space of the Zen, to sell drugs in the streets of the neighbourhood, or for
dealing in stolen goods. The “illegal occupants” were the first ones to be
affected by this violence and by the stigma related to it. These criminal
activities limit the space and the time of the residents who have to face the
effects of these conditions. These elements also refer to another scale of
phenomena, different from those described above. They struggle with the
effects of structural forces, without being able to ascribe them to any
personal intentionality.
   The job market and the real-estate market of Palermo, as well as the
reduction of welfare provisions and benefits, point to a scale and a spatial
dimension that is not immediately visible at the micro-social level. Instead,
the cases of Totò, Ciro, Vita, and Francesco show how it is possible to track
their constraints on different scales through their experiences as residents of
one badland. Their illegal occupation of and devotion to the houses of the
ZEN describe the socio-economic constraints that pushed them to this place.
These constraints continue to affect their life. Totò, Ciro, Vita, and Francesco
continue to negotiate with them. Illegal occupation and devotion to the
domestic space can be read as tactics or a form of resistance to Palermo’s
economic and symbolic dynamics which marginalise them. The example of
Totò illustrates the agency of a sense-experienced urban space (he had to
cope with a humid and crumbling dwelling, and a bad relationship with the
owner of the apartment in the historical centre), while the experiences of
Ciro, Vita and Francesco point to agency of a non-ethnographic space (they
cope with the effect of a structural space related to the real-estate and job
markets, as well as particular institutional regulations). The duality of space
as set for violent interactions and of space as actor (in the ethnographic and
non-ethnographic spaces) is evident. In these three different experiences –
all of them on a micro-social scale – we can directly disclose their reaction to
cope with dissimilar but individual types of violence, where space “acts”
differently.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                   199


   The division between different types of space and violence may seem too
schematic. Surely, different levels interact. However, we think that each
example can show an issue and a predominant concern, respectively. In the
next section, we turn to San Siro and its neighbourhood committee. While
Ferdinando Fava’s ethnography underlines personal responses to different
scales of violence, Paolo’s case shows a more organised strategy for coping
with them. The life story of one of its members – whom we will call Anna –
demonstrates again the space-violence continuum and its relationship with
an urban badland. Anna’s life trajectory will also help us to take the rigidity
out of the analytical scheme, making it smoother and more fluid.
   San Siro: The neighbourhood committee
    Paolo’s fieldwork in San Siro proceeds along several directions of analysis,
focusing on a specific group: the neighbourhood committee [Comitato di
quartiere], and the strategies developed by its members to deal with what
they perceive as violent urban space. The neighbourhood committee is one
of two local committees (the second being the “Committee of the residents”
[Comitato abitanti], is linked to a Milanese social movement that fights for
the right to housing), which has been in the neighbourhood for about 20
years. It was founded by a woman, a former militant of the Italian
Communist Party and a resident of San Siro from the 1930s. Today the
committee has about 15 members, mostly elderly Italians. Every Wednesday,
the members of the committee meet in a room owned by ALER, the public
agency for social housing in the department of Milan. Usually, someone
visits the committee: policemen, politicians from both the local and national
level, ALER’s managers, or members of Azienda Milanese Servizi Ambientali, a
waste collection company. A public show takes place during the meetings:
purposes, objectives and intentions are expressed, but nothing really
changes. The committee focuses its activity on an indiscriminate struggle
against illegal occupation. Whether executed by illegal actors (an ambiguous
racketeering network probably managed by several small criminal groups), or
by a social movement that explicitly fights for the right to the city, squatting
is the public enemy against which members of the committee fight on a daily
basis. Certainly, squatting is not a violent phenomenon per se. However,
some practices related to the appropriation of the empty apartments of San
Siro (cracking locks, removing doors, and in some cases, tearing down walls)
are perceived as extremely brutal, especially by the elderly residents. As one
member of the committee explained: “Believe me! That door that they
remove with a crowbar […] If you are at home, you feel sick! It hurts you, at a
psychological level. You feel a violence, as they do it against you”14.

14. All the interviews presented in this paragraph were carried out in February and March
2017.

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   The institutional interlocutors (Municipality, ALER, etc.) approve the
committee’s strategy. Obviously, it allows them to shift attention from
structural weaknesses, bad management and economic deficits to the
everyday social violence that elderly Italians in the housing projects have to
face. A local politician explained:
      This [San Siro] is a social housing project, the situation is scary there, concern-
      ing the security, because, obviously, you find illegal activities of all kinds that I
      have repeatedly reported, from drug dealers to prostitution. There are illegal
      occupations – I think there are more squatters than regular residents there…15

   Often, the committee meetings end with a sort of press review, edited by a
member of the committee. The review includes articles about marginal areas
in Milan, ALER and criminality, but also about migrants or the refugee crisis,
as well as other more social themes. Apart from the weekly meetings, the
committee’s members take action. For example, in the past few years, they
have organised night patrols, and installed alarms in their houses and CCTV
in their courtyards. They have also given interviews to journalists, social
workers and researchers.
   Through their “talk of crime” (Caldeira 1992) and the strategic use of a
rhetoric of fear (Cohen 1980), their meetings and a securitising practice,
such as implementing surveillance technology, the committee of San Siro
tries to signify the radical changes that have transformed their neighbourhood
in the past few years and the violence they experience, as a result, in their
everyday lives. Their common feeling is expressed by one committee
member: “We are a ghetto in the ghetto”16. Committee members perceive
themselves as an Italian minority in a marginalised area that is increasingly
inhabited by foreigners. They perceive themselves as the rightful residents of
an urban badland. San Siro influences and affects their lives. The committee
provides an answer, a challenge against an urban evolution experienced as
violent by a specific social group of San Siro.
   The institutional abandonment of San Siro puts in place the end of the
meta-narratives that structured most of the lives of these old women and
men. San Siro’s proletarian tradition is over, and the Communist Party these
people grew up with no longer exists. The factories of Milan are closed down
and replaced by an advanced tertiary sector comprising transnational
companies, including the fashion industry, and design agencies. The members
of the committee do not recognise their “own” urban neighbourhood. From
their point of view, their home has turned into a violent and unsafe place.

15. Interview with a politician, member of the Municipality of Milan.
16. Interview with a resident who was a committee member.


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                                        201


And paradoxically, they try to resist this process by embracing the same
conservative and racist rhetoric they fought during their politically engaged
youth.
   If we turn our attention to the individual trajectories of the members of
the committee, the ethnographic gesture reveals, in all its complexity, the
space-violence continuum explored above. Anna is a member of the
committee, but she does not completely agree with its vision. The committee
provides her with a place in which she can maintain social relationships.
However, her own life story seems to challenge some of the committee’s
actions. Anna was a squatter herself, an illegal occupant of a public house;
thus, she herself has represented the public enemy that the committee is
now fighting against. Anna is not the only former squatter in the committee.
This apparently paradoxical situation testifies to a multifaceted and hidden
history of the neighbourhood, characterised by poverty and exclusion. In the
same way, the public image of the committee – based on its conservative and
racist rhetoric – contrasts with the more inclusive and tolerant everyday
practices of its members.
   Anna was born close to San Siro, in a casa minima – a very deprived public
housing project based on Rationalist ideas. Anna is poor among the poor.
Sometimes, the place where she was born is used by other members of the
committee to distinguish themselves from her: “She’s got a casa minima
mentality”, someone once said.
   Anna approached Paolo herself, asking him if she could give an interview.
In this way, she involved him, creating a relationship through an
anthropological gesture, organising a projective scheme to narrate herself
(Althabe 1969). She wanted to tell her story: “Come and talk to me,” she
said. They sat down in her tiny living room in San Siro, drinking espresso.
Her narrative focused on two elements: the place where she was born, and
her violent and alcoholic ex-husband:
      My life… It’s like the story of the Little Match Girl. Something like that […] I
      came from the lowest level, the level zero. After me, only gypsies: casa minima,
      one room, four, five people. I am the first of five sisters […] My mother had the
      last one when I got married. I was pregnant. They forced me. At that time, I
      didn’t know men. I met this one. He used to wait for me for hours while I was
      working […] I thought: “Poor man!”. I didn’t like him so much. Then my mother
      quarrelled with me. She went away for Christmas. She went to her sister’s
      house. I was alone. It was cold. He called me: “What are you doing?” […] He
      came and he turned the stove on. He was like an angel for me. I was wrong. He
      was a beast, a BEAST. He mistreated me my whole life. He beat my children. My
      son is now sick.



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   Anna was born in 1939, the year in which the Second World War began.
Her mother came from southern Italy to look for a new life in Milan: “I was
extremely poor, I lived among thieves and bitches”. At 10, Anna finished
primary school. She could not continue her studies, because the monthly
ticket for public transport was too expensive. She started to work. This was
the single moment in which Anna cried during the interview. She got
married at 19. She moved to San Siro with her husband and their first child.
She lived in her parents-in-law’s house for a while, then occupied an
apartment in her mother’s neighbourhood before she went back to San Siro.
She moved a couple of times before she moving in with her in-laws and
eventually succeeded in formalising her situation, that is, she got a rent
contract for the same house.
   After 16 years of marriage, she got a divorce. Her husband is still alive. He
has never paid for his abuses:
      One day he told me I was a bitch: “Hey, if I was a bitch, I would get more money
      than you. I could cover you with my money. You were a thief; I was not a bitch.
      So, I am still in the ghetto. You got out, but you have the ghetto here inside [in
      the head]”.

   After her divorce, Anna was “reborn”. The Communist Party became her
relief. Meetings, demonstrations, fairs: the party gave her the opportunity to
develop social relations, to start a new life, meet other men and to fall in
love.
   Anna does not like her neighbourhood, but she does not feel unsafe:
      I came here when I was 20 years old. Now I am getting to know that this place is
      horrible. I thought it was nicer than casa minima, but it is not […] My mother is
      from Sicily: “Why did she come here?” I started to work at 12, they exploited
      me. Fuck you. Studying in Sicily would have been better [...] My family de-
      veloped there. Here, one relative died in the mountains [during the Second
      World War], the others did not go to school […] They were poor, very poor. My
      grandfather came here because he had four daughters. He had to prepare the
      dote [dowry] for them. These horrible choices kill you, then.

   Anna’s story exemplifies the intersectional relation between different
types of violence embodied in a singular biography through 80 years of
change: migration, the war, political struggles, the death of the big Italian
parties and their ideologies, the evolution of a marginal neighbourhood
within Milan. Anna’s story testifies to the structural constraints that blocked
her life opportunities and made her experience poverty, brutality and sexual
abuse. Anna experienced physical violence from her husband, and a
structural violence that forced her to react by abandoning education and


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VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                               203


getting a job. Her membership of the committee helped her, replacing her
political affiliation, providing her with the means to combat loneliness. The
city of Milan is the urban space where Anna experienced her deprivation. At
the same time, Milan, or more precisely, certain areas of Milan, are some of
the actors of her biography: from the house where she was born, to San Siro,
urban space concurred in constructing her representations and the ways
other social actors saw her – that casa minima stereotype against which she
has fought all her life, that “territorial stigma” (Wacquant 2008), which
began with her. Anna’s life story is the combination of her (violent)
experiences and the urban spaces she crossed.

Conclusion: Built environment and social bonds
   In this paper, we “unsystematically” mapped and compared the different
types of violence of the ZEN and of San Siro on different scales. More spe-
cifically, we considered illegal occupation at a social level, stigmatisation at
a symbolic level, and poverty, deprivation and economic crisis at a structural
level, trying to interpret their relationship with space as a historic, political,
economic, and social product, using two dichotomous images: the post-
Fordist socio-spatial configuration of San Siro and the non-Fordist spatial
configuration of the ZEN. Moreover, we conducted a comparative analysis,
starting with urban space, analysing the way in which these socio-spatial
configurations can be considered violent, and how and why. We stated that
while violence may become increasingly visible, space itself can become vi-
olent. We repeat that this relationship is not deterministic, in the sense that
a certain space causes certain forms of violence. Instead, the agency attrib-
uted to space in relation to violence remains complex. We tried to show how
– within ethnography – it is possible to interpret these forms of violence and
their connection to different forms of space.
   We showed how different types of violence affect the residents of the two
neighbourhoods, changing over time. First, we described the illegal occupa-
tions of the ZEN through the narratives of three interlocutors whom we
called Totò, Ciro and Vita. We interpreted them essentially as responses to
abusive personal relations on a micro scale, as responses to policies and reg-
ulations on a mid-scale, and as responses to structural violence on a macro
scale. We compared this to a specific group from San Siro, the neighbour-
hood committee, and a peculiar life story of one of its members whom we
called Anna. Totò, Ciro, Vita and Anna confirmed the interaction between
the different dimensions of violence and urban space, in both synchronic
and diachronic ways.

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   Through their stories, we tried to demonstrate that urban space is not just
the set for violent action. It is also an actor and “produces” violence itself.
This happens on different scales. Moving from social violence to symbolic,
political and structural violence, space seems to fade. However, space is also
an actor; it influences everyday life. For example, stigmatisation affects the
ZEN and San Siro as a whole, as a homogeneous unity. Our interlocutors en-
tangled their life stories with their experiences and the spaces they occu-
pied. Thus, different levels of violence and different spaces seem to influ-
ence each other.
   How do we identify the traces of structural constraints and causal powers
(the traces of the macro-systemic scale)? This was possible by unwrapping
the different types of constrictions present in the narrative interaction with
our interlocutors, or in its background: they are the effects that limit the in-
dividual initiatives with which they struggle, but which cannot be attributed
either to violent or unequal and coactive interpersonal relationships on a
micro scale, nor to explicitly penalising or discriminating institutional
policies on a macro scale. In our fields, unfortunately, relegation is often the
sum of these effects on these two scales: individual trajectories intertwined
with reported violence, discrimination and systemic political-economic
mechanisms that maintain inequalities, and political omissions or absences.
Violent causal powers manifest themselves when the agency desires of our
interlocutor rise or are stopped, limited or eradicated.
   Two very different case studies share some elements that allow us to in-
troduce an anthropological comparison, built on a theoretical framework
concerning violence and urban space. Moving from a synchronic description
of the forms of violence registered in two Italian urban badlands, we connec-
ted them through what we labelled the space-violence continuum and inter-
rogated this continuum through a diachronic analysis of various individual
and group responses.
   At the centre of the relationship between urban space and violence is the
old question concerning the relationships between the built environment
and social bonds, and the causation of the former and its determination by
the latter. Also, a radical cognitive conversion is needed to go beyond
Hume’s notion of cause, to the opposition between methodological individu-
alism and holism, to understand the effets de lieu, and to explore the condi-
tions under which we are allowed to talk about the agency of the urban
space, without falling into a spatial fetish, or relying on yet another spatial
metaphor. In the 1970s, Henry Lefebvre led the way in starting to answer
these questions without being trapped in a dualism of built environment and


2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 183-210
VIOLENCE AND SPACE                                                             205


society. The built environment is the material form of social organisation
and, as such, is never neutral, but rather, is the place where asymmetric
power relations confront each other.
   Contemporary cities provide relevant insights into the linkages of macro-
dynamics with the texture of the human experience. In other words, the spa-
tial dimension has changed, creating new kinds of relations that combine
urban spaces and global processes. This paper is just the first step in an on-
going process. As we have tried to explain, we are comparing the results of
our research and trying to extract elements upon which to build broader the-
oretical questions that allow us to identify deep regional and historical pro-
cesses and structural factors from the rich ethnographic details provided by
such studies.




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206                                                     FERDINANDO FAVA, PAOLO GRASSI


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 Ferdinando FAVA is Associate Professor at the University of Padua where he teaches
 Urban Anthropology. He has been guest lecturer at several universities in France,
 the Netherlands, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Austria, Finland, Poland, and Argentina. He
 is full member of the Laboratoire Architecture Ville Urbanisme Environnement of the
 French CNRS. His research interests focus on epistemological and ethical issues
 related to fieldworks in urban marginal areas. His last book is titled In campo
 aperto. L’antropologo nei legami del mondo (Meltemi, 2017).
 ferdinando.fava@unipd.it

 Paolo GRASSI is Post-Doc Fellow at the Polytechnic University of Milan and Lecturer
 of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Padua and the Academy of Fine Arts
 of Verona. Over the past ten years, he has developed interests in issues relating to
 urban segregation, violence and gangs, as well as the dynamics of slums and gated
 communities. He carried out ethnographic researches in the Dominican Republic,
 in Guatemala and in Italy. He has been a visiting fellow at the École Nationale
 Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, the University of Utrecht, and the
 University of the Valley of Guatemala.
 paolo.e.grassi@gmail.com




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Ferdinando Fava, Paolo Grassi
Violence and space: A comparative ethnography of two Italian “badlands”
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 183-210.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3847
