Alberto Vanolo

Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy

The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper is largely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a case study. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the European Union has been reclassified to produce new visions of the ‘good city’ and the role of private actors and citizens in the management of urban development.

Internationalization in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area: Images, Discourses and Metaphors

Abstract This paper investigates promotional images in the Metropolitan Area of Helsinki, focusing on the projection, outside national boundaries, of specific “ideas” concerning the cities of Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa. After introducing the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, presenting its geographical features, urban dynamics, actual problems and actors involved in image-building, the focus of this research will be a comparison between the images proposed in promotional materials and policy documents by the various territorial units, looking at their differences, overlaps, synergies and clashes. In fact, as will be discussed, even if the images proposed by the cities consist of the same thematic fields (technology, nature, culture, etc.), they contain slightly different implicit messages, targets, representations of the cities, values, strategic orientations and approaches.

European Spatial Planning between Competitiveness and Territorial Cohesion: Shadows of Neoliberalism

This paper analyses the use of the concept of territorial cohesion in policy documents produced by the European Union. It is an idea celebrated in community documents, such as cohesion reports, the Territorial Agenda of the European Union and the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion; after more than a decade of political debate, the concept is about to gain a legitimate institutional role, after being included in the Lisbon Treaty, and is among the competences that the EU shares with other member states. At first, territorial cohesion seems to oppose the logics of neo-liberalism by reinscribing welfare problems and policies in spatial terms. However, using the analytical framework of cultural critics, and intending cohesion to be a discourse carried on by a community of European scholars and policymakers, the research will discuss the conceptual relationship between competitiveness and territorial cohesion in European policies and narratives.

Normalising autonomous spaces: Ongoing transformations in Christiania, Copenhagen

Christiania is an autonomous Free Town, born as a squat in 1971, located in the centre of Copenhagen. After 40 years of struggles and negotiations with the Danish institutions in order to survive and to maintain its autonomy, Christiania reached an agreement with the state in 2011. If on the one hand the agreement apparently guarantees the survival of Christiania, on the other hand it regulates various domains that used to be self-regulated by the community, and therefore limits Christiania’s autonomy. The aim of the article is to discuss the potential effects of the agreement – and more specifically of the new government technology placed in operation through the agreement – on some of these domains. Assuming that autonomy is always fractured, partial and ongoing, the thesis proposed in the article is that, in this new context, Christiania has come to represent a peculiar case of hybridisation of forces of autonomy and of forces of neoliberalisation, and that the tensions between these two forces could potentially lead to different outcomes that challenge traditional understanding of both autonomy and neoliberalism in urban contexts.

Locating the couch: an autobiographical analysis of the multiple spatialities of psychoanalytic therapy

Using an autobiographical methodology, the paper examines the different spatialities involved in psychoanalytic therapy. The paper proposes an understanding of space that is simultaneously physical, relational, emotional, symbolic and transformative. Focusing on the practices and microgeographies involved in psychoanalytic therapy, the aim of the paper is to contribute to the body of literature dealing with psychoanalytic geography by discussing how spatial logics pervade psychoanalytic treatment and to test autobiography as an experience-near, subjectively immersed instrument for investigation.

Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing: reflections from Paris and Turin

Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the literature from emotional geographies, the article proposes an alternative take on the geography of gay and lesbian clubbing by applying the metaphors of the island and the archipelago from cultural geography to the gay and lesbian scene. The island and archipelago are presented as metaphors that imply emotions, performance, materiality, spatiality, strategy, and imagination in the performance of the gay and lesbian playscape. The article argues that the club, intended as a type of gay and lesbian island, does not necessarily imply a condition of insulation. Rather, the island implies both metaphor and materiality, and movement may also be considered an emotional strategy for gays and lesbians in the heteronormative urban space.

Exploring the Afterlife Relational Spaces, Absent Presences, and Three Fictional Vignettes

Cultural understandings of the Afterlife are often embedded in spatial thinking and spatial metaphors. This article, first develops an understanding of the Afterlife as a relational virtual space populated by absent presences. Second, the article explores the possibility of investigating the Afterlife with ethnographical approaches. Exploring three fictional vignettes, the article discusses alternative spatialities of the Afterlife, in order to emphasize the pervasiveness of spatial thinking in conceptualizations of apparently nonspatial phenomena, and to challenge dichotomist spatial interpretations of presences/absences, the living and the postliving and life/Afterlife.

Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place

ABSTRACT Lingotto used to be an important industrial site and a highly symbolic space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memories, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the last decades, following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. The analysis shows that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin’s resilience strategies used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Furthermore, it shows how Lingotto is a highly resilient urban fragment and building. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve and stage local urban heritages, this paper offers an account of Lingotto’s resilience, which highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingotto thus contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city, stressing the ambiguous role of the often-implicit politics of forgetting and amnesia in a framework of urban resilience.

Selling cruises: Gender and mobility in promotional brochures

Leisure cruising combines movement and stativity in a particular tourist experience: users are supposed to enjoy very different activities, with the movement of the ship guiding them to their destinations. This article analyses visual representations of gender and mobility in over 600 images collected from leisure cruise promotional brochures by taking advantage of a qualitative methodology and by focusing on narratives related to themes of pleasure, work, age and contact with nature/culture. The results stress the presence of an implicitly masculine gaze, with complex and non-linear associations with the themes of mobility and immobility, which relates to visual narratives in a number of different ways, testifying to the multiple meanings that may be assumed by the idea, the practice and the experience of movement.

SPATIALITIES OF CONTROL (TURIN 2006)

Turin, a city in northwestern Italy with a population of about 900,000 and a metropolitan area of about 1.5 million was the host of the 2006 Winter Olympics. As the capital of the Piedmont region of 4.3 million inhabitants, Turin is the fourth-largest Italian city. Thanks to the headquarters of automobile manufacturer Fiat, the city was recognized as the Italian capital of automobile production, and as such, Turin has often been compared to Detroit (see Vanolo, 2008, 2015). As in many other cities dominated by one corporation, the general crisis of the Fordist-style factory manufacturing, beginning in the late 1970s, has been dramatic, thus laying the foundation for a debate on the economic future of the city. Following a devastating automobile crisis in 1996, the metropolitan administration launched an initiative to support the city’s economic diversification and a change in its industrial image.