Giuseppe Scandurra

City Visualscapes, an Introduction

Socio-anthropological studies on the city have addressed directly the audiovisual recently. This trend emerges from the awareness that the textual materials usually employed in research too often show their limits, given the complexity of the urban phenomena. The increasing use of audiovisual research raises a crucial question: what is the added value of photography and video, as well as of the many extra textual languages that increasingly are complicating research work? The simple diffusion of electronic text and the use of devices have taught us to manipulate text and images simultaneously, but in the process have changed the methodological approach of social sciences from the definition of questions and research hypotheses to the construction of the empirical basis, and finally the writing and analysis, seen as experimental practices that flow into what we might call an expanded search. Urban studies, having complexity as their main object as well as an undeniable encounter of paradigms and disciplines, have implicitly encouraged and made common the use and testing of audiovisual technology. City Visualscapes is an attempt to focus on those experiences of urban research that privilege languages employing experimental visual practices alongside more traditional research tools.

The ring and the street: young immigrant boxers in the Bolognina neighbourhood of Bologna

This article describes the social organisation of the ‘Tranvieri’ boxing gym in Bolognina, a working-class neighbourhood of Bologna that has been rapidly changing over the last 20 years due to the closure of factories and the arrival of immigrants, especially from the Maghreb. The gym population has changed accordingly: currently about two-thirds of those attending the gym as a leisure centre have immigrant parents. The author studied the everyday life of these young boxers, born in Italy but without citizenship, who visit the gym daily after finishing vocational school, work and family responsibilities. For them, boxing is not a solution to the frustration inflicted by a society they perceive as indifferent if not hostile towards them, but it does offer them the possibility of not being represented as persons excluded from that society.

Creatività e spazio urbano

At the heart of this essay is a question: what is creativity’s role in planning, using and experiencing urban space? The first part of this piece outlines the concept of creativity, relating it to certain Italy. The second explores the concept of ‘creativity’ empirically through a specific case study, in Tunis, an exemplar of the artistic process as a collective practice of reappropriating the urban space. The essay’s general aim is to critically analyse cultural and artistic reappropriation experiences. Finally, we reflect critically on how these places come back to life and also on how these contexts can become experimental arenas for a new and seminal link between the city and democracy.

Photography and Urban Marginality

In recent years several monographs have appeared in Italy, though even more abroad, as a report of ethnographic research into the everyday life practices of marginal urban social groups; all fall under a disciplinary subfield the author calls “Anthropology of urban marginality.” The authors of these works have increasingly been using technologies other than written representation, as for instance the medium of photography. There is a question at the core of this article which could be summed as, Why and how can this medium aid in a better understanding of the phenomena being investigated?

La città tra romanzo e studi urbani/ The city between novels and urban studies

The focus of this study is the relationship between literature and urban studies. This relationship comes into view when novels and anthropologists tackle the modern and contemporary city. Today we are aware of how our “non-fiction”, our scientific writing, is just one of the many writing machines, not always clearly distinguishable among each other. What kind of writing is “Gomorrah”, we started asking several years ago? An essay, a novel, a piece of journalism, of literature, an ethnography? What’s the role of fiction in it? To answer this question we have to go back to a time when disciplines were less institutionalized and see how the literary set of images was conceived and influenced by urban scholars, and vice versa, in order to determine the moment when the “two cultures”, ie literature and scientific production, have influenced each other. In addition, the city was born with modernity. Novel was born with modernity. The first urban ethnographies were born with the birth of the city and of what we call “modern”. How much, how and why do these three words work together?

Lo spazio e la violenza

Obiettivo di questo numero e concentrare l’attenzione, in termini di studi urbani, sul rapporto tra lo spazio e la violenza. Per fare questo sono stati selezionati specifici saggi, tutti opera di ricercatori italiani e condotti attraverso la pratica etnografica in quanto ritenuti ideali per tracciare uno stato dell’arte su questo tema. Utilizzando la pratica etnografica e partendo dalla specificita urbana e possibile costruire un campo di studi transdisciplinari.

“Villa Salus” and Quartiere Savena. The scholastic and social integration of a group of young foreigners in the Bologna area.

Le storie riportate in questo saggio si riferiscono a un gruppo di rom protagonisti di una ricerca condotta tra il marzo 2006 e il luglio 2007 a Villa Salus, nel quartiere Savena, dove 146 cittadini romeni hanno abitato a cominciare dall’inverno 2005 insieme alle loro famiglie. Le storie raccolte di una decina di minori rom romeni residenti a Villa Salus sono state fatte dialogare con le voci e le rappresentazioni di un gruppo di insegnanti degli istituti scolastici del quartiere Savena che insieme a noi hanno riflettuto a voce aperta sulla presenza di alunni stranieri nelle scuole del territorio. Solo mettendo a confronto gli immaginari, le aspettative, i bisogni degli alunni da una parte, in grande parte minori romeni di Villa Salus, e delle insegnanti dall’altra abbiamo pensato si potesse analizzare un termine fin troppo evocativo come “scuola multiculturale”, a partire da un caso specifico come quello dell’inserimento scolastico e sociale di un gruppo di minori stranieri in un circoscritto territorio bolognese.

Villa Salus e il Quartiere Savena : Inserimento scolastico e sociale di un gruppo di minori stranieri nel territorio bolognese

Le storie riportate in questo saggio si riferiscono a un gruppo di rom protagonisti di una ricerca condotta tra il marzo 2006 e il luglio 2007 a Villa Salus, nel quartiere Savena, dove 146 cittadini romeni hanno abitato a cominciare dall’inverno 2005 insieme alle loro famiglie. Le storie raccolte di una decina di minori rom romeni residenti a Villa Salus sono state fatte dialogare con le voci e le rappresentazioni di un gruppo di insegnanti degli istituti scolastici del quartiere Savena che insieme a noi hanno riflettuto a voce aperta sulla presenza di alunni stranieri nelle scuole del territorio. Solo mettendo a confronto gli immaginari, le aspettative, i bisogni degli alunni da una parte, in grande parte minori romeni di Villa Salus, e delle insegnanti dall’altra abbiamo pensato si potesse analizzare un termine fin troppo evocativo come “scuola multiculturale”, a