From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna's Manifattura delle Arti more

This article was downloaded by: [University of Leeds] On: 13 July 2011, At: 07:49 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Western Journal of Communication Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwjc20 From Wound to Enclave: The VisualMaterial Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna's Manifattura delle Arti Giorgia Aiello Giorgia Aiello is a Lecturer in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. a a Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds Available online: 13 Jul 2011 To cite this article: Giorgia Aiello Giorgia Aiello is a Lecturer in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. (2011): From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna's Manifattura delle Arti, Western Journal of Communication, 75:4, 341-366 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2011.586971 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Western Journal of Communication Vol. 75, No. 4, July–September 2011, pp. 341–366 From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna’s Manifattura delle Arti Giorgia Aiello Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 In this article I examine the visual-material performance of urban renewal in Bologna’s cultural district Manifattura delle Arti. Through an evaluation of its physical characteristics and with the aid of personal narrative, I elucidate that the district performs meaning potentials of exclusion and distinction. Not unlike when it was a run-down former industrial area, the district visibly interrupts the cityscape. In doing so, it is now constituted as an enclave for the global(ist) communication of Bologna. Rather than being an organically integrated or politically disruptive presence, this urban enclave ultimately contributes to the deepening of inequalities that are typical of advanced capitalism. Keywords: Bologna; Global Communication; Manifattura delle Arti; Mediatization; Urban Built Environment; Visual-Material Performance Like more globally famous Italian cities such as Rome and Florence, Bologna used to wind around a river and numerous canals that traversed the northwest section of the city. In this article, I focus on the historic core of Bologna’s Porto neighborhood, which until the early 20th century hosted the city’s harbor and its main industrial center. Over decades, this area has undergone numerous dramatic changes, decay, Giorgia Aiello is a Lecturer in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2009 National Communication Association convention in Chicago. ´ The author wishes to thank Greg Dickinson, Karma R. Chavez and the anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments and careful suggestions on this work. The author’s parents, Chiara Grande and Vincenzo Aiello, must also be thanked for helping her remember more vividly and for teaching her how to love her neighborhood when it was difficult to do so. This essay is dedicated to the author’s sister, Benedetta, who helped her navigate the neighborhood through her childhood and who never got to see it change into its current state. Correspondence to: Giorgia Aiello, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: g.aiello@leeds.ac.uk ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2011 Western States Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2011.586971 342 G. Aiello and, in recent years, a ‘‘rebirth’’ as a cultural district christened Manifattura delle Arti. In an apropos manner, and with a telling capitalist pun, this name translates both as ‘‘the factory’’ and ‘‘the manufacturing’’ of the arts. As part of the uptake of Bologna’s reconversion project in the international press, the New York Times travel columnist Ann Wilson Lloyd (2008) picked up on the prized discourse of cultural production inherent in the Manifattura delle Arti’s name and purpose: For centuries, the northwest corner of old Bologna was an industrial zone, home to slaughterhouses, salt works and tobacco factories. But now the once neglected neighborhood, a 15-minute walk from the city center, is churning out a new commodity: art. Jameson (1991) famously wrote that, in the 20th century’s late capitalism, culture became ‘‘a product in its own right’’ (p. x). At the same time, the beginning of the 21st century has witnessed ‘‘the ‘culturification’ of industry’’ (Lash, 2007, p. 74). With the increasing importance of ‘‘culture’’ as a commodity, industrial practices and economic relations have been reorganized around the ways in which language, aesthetics, design, and other symbolic ‘‘goods’’ can drive the financing and production of key material structures of contemporary life—including our cityscapes. In other words, it is not only the symbolic or ideological dimension, but also and perhaps most importantly the materiality and phenomenology of our everyday existence that is at stake in contemporary cultural production (cf. Ott, 2004). As the reconversion of many former industrial areas into ‘‘creative’’ districts demonstrates (cf. Hesmondhalgh, 2007), urban renewal has become a globalized and widespread genre of cultural production (Lash & Lury, 2007). The Manifattura delle Arti district (MdA) is an emblematic example of urban renewal’s entrenchment of advanced capitalism1 and, in particular, global(ist) communication practices. In the course of a century, this locale has gone from being an active industrial area, through several decades of being a metaphorical and literal wound in the heart of the city, to becoming what may soon be one of the most important reconverted cultural districts in Italy. It is in this sense that the MdA may function effectively as a contained site for the global—and, even more so, globalist—communication of Bologna as a world-class city. It is not an accident that the reconversion was tied to Bologna’s status as a European City of Culture in 2000. Elsewhere I have argued that this EU-led scheme, now named ‘‘European Capital of Culture,’’ is in and of itself a globalist genre of cultural production (Aiello & Thurlow, 2006), as it summons competing cities to mobilize articulate branding and communication schemes as symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) for the acquisition of global capital—namely, the material infrastructure and economic resources offered by EU funding, national and foreign investment, and tourism. Bologna’s reconversion project, then, emerged in the light of the city’s involvement in Europeanist cultural politics and global(ist) communication practices. Bologna is also where I grew up. I lived with my family in a low-income housing complex on the edge of the area now covered by the MdA from my birth in 1976 until my migration to the United States in 2002 to pursue a doctorate. Throughout my time as a resident of the neighborhood, this area was known as ‘‘Ex Manifattura Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Western Journal of Communication 343 Tabacchi,’’ because it revolved around the park located by the condemned building that used to host the municipal tobacco and cigarette manufacturing plant. My parents still live in the complex, as do most of the neighbors with whose children and in whose apartments I spent a good portion of my childhood. With many of the families in the complex having lived in their stabilized-rent apartments for up to 50 years, it was obviously a shock when we all first heard about how the building was to be sold to private landlords by INPS,2 the Rome-based national social security institution that owned ours and other similar buildings for decades. This news was in the air as early as the 1990s, just as plans for the area’s reconversion began in sight of Bologna’s European City of Culture status. In May 2008 my parents, and the other 40 families in the complex, received a letter announcing that the building had been sold and that the new owners would be reselling its one- and two-bedroom apartments for up to 220,000 Euro each.3 In this article, I argue that the area covered by the MdA has been transformed from a wound in the heart of the city into an enclave of global(ist) communication. Through a sustained evaluation of the physical characteristics of this locale and with the aid of my own embodied personal narrative of the neighborhood, I elucidate that the MdA is characterized by visual-material performances of exclusion and distinction. This point is especially relevant in the light of the overt political and social aims of the reconversion. Through some of the very same appeals to vitality and the ‘‘organic trope’’ (Gibson, 2003) that are often central to the public discourse of urban renewal, the MdA reconversion project was framed as bringing new life to the neighborhood and the city at large (Giampaoli, 2008). However, the district itself performs a story that is widely different from some of the key stated social aims of the reconversion and that therefore does not contribute to organically reintegrating the area into the surrounding cityscape. Overall, the physical and social reconversion of the area may function as a form of gobal(ist) communication, which may de facto be severed from the exigencies of the local community, and exclude a host of nonprofitable and=or unbecoming presences, ranging from the transients that used to occupy the area to the long-time residents of adjacent low-income housing complexes. The argument that I advance here does not simply originate from my own interest in the specific case of my birth neighborhood. Rather, it is tied to a necessity to nuance scholarly and public discourses on urban renewal, as this becomes increasingly entrenched with key dimensions of contemporary global cultural production—in particular, the mediatization (Lash, 2007) and overall semioticization of social and economic life (Fairclough, 2003), and the key dialectic between homogenization and heterogenization in communication (cf. Appadurai, 1996; see also Thurlow & Aiello, 2007). Mediation and Mediatization: The Built Environment as a Visual-Material Performance My specific focus here is on the urban built environment, and how the physical qualities of our cityscapes communicate given meaning potentials. While the built Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 344 G. Aiello environment is by no means coterminous with space or even place, it is a crucial dimension of spatiality—as the latter should be broadly considered as a relational and performative construct, rather than being associated with specific physical or ´ material characteristics (cf. Chavez, 2010). In this sense, I see this work as contributing to the growing body of communication scholarship on space and place, and particularly to an understanding of spatiality as ‘‘the product of power-filled social relations’’ (Massey, 1999, p. 21). Based on Blair and Michel’s (2000) analysis of the Civil Rights memorial as a material performance, I conceptualize the built environment more systematically as a visual-material performance. The built environment is not only a crucial material medium for the communication of given discourses and the constitution of specific subjectivities (a form=force of mediation), but it is also most often mobilized as symbolic currency, via its aesthetic qualities and various forms of visual imagery, for the remote publics found across prized global marketplaces of symbolic exchange—including tourism, public communication, and commerce (a form=force of mediatization). I therefore maintain that the urban built environment should be considered as a key contemporary form=force of mediation and mediatization alike. As a key performative dimension of space, the urban built environment is intertwined with the demands of advanced capitalism, or globalism. Communication scholars across the discipline have been interested in so-called ‘‘global culture.’’ However, academic debates on global communication have been dominated by a focus on media and communication technologies (cf. McChesney, Meiksins Wood, & Bellamy Foster, 1998; see also McPhail, 2010). Although media studies scholars have been increasingly interested in space, place, and the urban contexts in which media are produced and consumed (Georgiou, 2006), the urban built environment per se has not been systematically examined as a medium of (global) communication. It is therefore vital to texture global communication scholarship with an expanded conceptualization of what constitutes ‘‘mediation’’ in late modern times. With the global culture industry being rooted in ‘‘the fusion of the attention and the production economy, of aesthetics and economics more generally’’ (Arvidsson, 2006, p. 7), the urban built environment is not only a central dimension of the mediatization and overall semioticization of everyday life, but also a form and force of mediation in its own right (Conley & Dickinson, 2010). Mediation may be broadly defined as ‘‘the processes by which a given social dispensation produces and reproduces itself in and through a particular set of media’’ (Mazzarella, 2004, p. 346). An increasingly globalizing ‘‘resource for structuring the interaction through which . . . content is communicated’’ (van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 126) both transculturally and translocally, the urban built environment should be seen as an integral part of these processes. As mediated communication becomes more hybridized and—so to speak—less mass-mediated, Couldry (2009) confirms that ‘‘the media’’ should no longer be seen ‘‘as a privileged site for accessing a common world’’ (p. 441).4 The urban built environment has become a key interface between global capital and the different publics that may have a stake in urban renewal itself (Gendelman & Aiello, 2010). In this sense, urban renewal is also a Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Western Journal of Communication 345 fundamental context for the negotiation of local and global(izing) identities, much in the same way as more ‘‘traditional’’ media have been and are to this day. In conceptualizing the urban built environment as a key form=force of mediation and mediatization, I bridge two key communication perspectives on space and place, which have developed largely distinct terminology and theoretical concerns. On the one hand, U.S. critical rhetoric and cultural studies scholars have focused mainly on ‘‘the material spaces of the everyday’’ (Dickinson, 2002, p. 6) and their role in the constitution of specific forms of identification and subjectivities (cf. Dickinson, 1997, p. 4). Blair and Michel (2000) claim that this kind of analysis focuses much less on ‘‘issues of symbolism’’ than ‘‘on the performative dimension of the site’’ (p. 40).5 On the other hand, scholars whose work is rooted in mainly British and Australasian critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social semiotics (cf. Aiello, 2006) see the ‘‘landscape’’ as a deployment of multimodal discursive=semiotic resources that (re)enact some of the power relations which are typical and productive of globalism (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Scollon & Wong Scollon, 2003). In terms of their respective theoretical and critical import, these two scholarly lineages are complementary. In considering the built environment as a visual-material performance, I examine both the ways in which it constrains and summons subjects to identify and act in specific and exclusive ways (how the built environment mediates the performances of our everyday life), and the semiotic resources that it mobilizes for the global stage (how the built environment performs for mediatized communication). This integration of the rhetorical=cultural studies and CDA=social semiotic perspectives yields an enriched critical outlook on visual-material communication. However, the phenomenological dimension of space (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1964) cannot be fully accounted for within either paradigm. For critical analyses of the built environment to quite literally ‘‘matter’’ to academic and nonacademic readers alike (cf. Blair, 2001; also Ono, 1997), it takes more than the however systematic analysis of physical—and, in a sense, ‘‘objective’’—characteristics of spatiality.6 It is in performance studies and its emphasis on the ‘‘research, analysis and performance of personal narrative’’ (Peterson & Langellier, 1997, p. 135) that we find a useful instrument to account for the embodied experience of space (cf. Langellier, 1999, p. 139)—specifically in relation to the emotional=affective and diachronic=temporal dimensions of visual-material analysis.7 ´ As Chavez (2009) explains through her notion of performance cartography, space constitutes specific subjectivities and therefore compels stories that may in turn reveal its rhetorical import. Given my intimate relationship with the MdA, first-person narrative is the most appropriate instrument for my investigation of key forms of spatiality enabled by the MdA’s built environment (cf. Park-Fuller, 2000). Needless to say, this more properly phenomenological dimension of analysis cannot be limited to the appraisal of solely visual or even more broadly material characteristics. Rather, personal narrative is bound to yield a wide range of sensorial and experiential information. However, for the specific purposes of this work, personal narrative should be seen as contributing additional textual=descriptive and contextual=interpretive details to visual-material analysis. In doing so, the sensorial and experiential quality Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 346 G. Aiello of personal narrative also enhances the political import of visual-material analysis, as it provides vital insights into why and how changes in the built environment may critically matter in the ‘‘flesh’’ of everyday life (cf. Langellier, 1999, p. 138). As a case study that may illuminate the broader relationship between the built environment and globalism, and within the scope that I have just outlined, this analysis aims to balance empirical and phenomenological concerns. Through the instruments I have discussed in this section, I turn to a brief historical outline of the reconverted area, followed by an analysis of the visual-material performances that define the MdA as an enclave of global(ist) communication. A Brief History: Ex Manifattura Tabacchi/Manifattura Delle Arti I grew up in Via delle Lame, which literally translates as ‘‘Blades Street.’’ As a child, I often heard my mother say that this name was due to the presence of small ‘‘blades’’ of water in the streets near the canal. Over the years, I also heard others ascribe the name to the street’s high concentration of knife makers and sharpeners. To this day, I don’t know which version is correct, or whether there is an altogether different explanation for the name of my birth street. Nevertheless, both versions of this historical account are evocative of the importance of water and trade for the area’s once thriving economy, and their gradual disappearance from the physical and social fabric of the neighborhood. The MdA extends over 100,000 square meters, stretching from the former tobacco manufacturing plant to the former salt storage building, municipal bakery, paper mill, and slaughterhouse that used to serve the entire city (see maps in Figure 1). As early as the 1910s, city officials and scholars expressed concern about the hygienic hazard posed by the canals, which were used for laundering, bathing, potable water, and waste disposal alike (Capelli, 2010). In the early 1930s the canal Reno was partially covered, as the new monumental Via Roma (now Via Marconi) was further expanded. During Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Figure 1 Map Indicating the Location of My Housing Complex on the Edge of the MdA (Left) and MdA Map Featured on the City of Bologna’s Official Website (Right). Western Journal of Communication 347 World War II, the area was extensively bombed. Despite the major urban planning endeavors of the prewar period, then, it was not before 1955 that the canal was completely paved over. By then, Bologna’s Renaissance harbor had disappeared, along with the industrial activities that had animated the neighborhood up until the war—with the notable exception of the slaughterhouse, which continued to operate until 1974 (Torresin, 2007). After World War II, Bologna’s former industrial center fell into a state of abandonment. The neighborhood’s residential areas were rebuilt in 1950s architectural styles, but the former industrial edifices were left untouched. De Pieri and Scrivano (2004) explain that the physical appearance of Bologna’s centro storico, its historic center, has been consistently rooted in the city’s historical tribulations, political aspirations, and cultural imaginations—rather than inherent authenticity. In fact, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that discourses of urban preservation became central to city governance.8 Until the 1990s, the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi area had not been included in this vision of urban preservation, despite several political changes in the city’s governance. In 2003, the local section of the national newspaper La Repubblica celebrated the birth of Bologna’s ‘‘culture citadel’’ as ‘‘one of the largest in Europe’’ (Parisini, 2003). The reconversion cost over 500,000,000 Euro9 and involved contributions from the city, the region EmiliaRomagna, the university, and the EU alike. The MdA currently includes the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi park (recently renamed Parco 11 Settembre), the Cineteca (Bologna’s world-leading Film Archive, in the former tobacco factory), the Film Archive’s theater, library, and archives, and studio spaces for the University of Bologna Department of Music and Performing Arts (all located in the former slaughterhouse complex), the University of Bologna Department of Communication Studies (in the former paper mill, known as Ex Mulino Tamburi), the Museum of Modern Art (named MAMbo, in the former municipal bakery), and the national headquarters of Arcigay (Italy’s main organization for LGBT culture and rights, in the former salt storage building). The district also includes a 550-space underground parking facility, a nursery school, a community center for senior citizens, student housing, and municipal low-income housing. The MdA was deliberately designed to combine cultural institutions with establishments of social welfare. Despite this overt discourse of socially progressive revitalization, and as I explain in the next section, the MdA is constituted as a separate (and separatist) enclave of global(ist) communication. The City Interrupted: From Wound to Enclave Winter after winter, on my yearly visits back home, I have taken time to walk through the area I was raised to know as the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi. With a bit of amazement, I have often found myself feeling nostalgic for the time when the MdA used to be the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi. Yet I know that this is not how I, or anyone else in the neighborhood, always felt about this place. From the early 1980s and into the 2000s, the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi area was never a ‘‘good’’ place. This was the place where, as a college student, I once saw a man who had passed out, with a needle still Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 348 G. Aiello dangling from his arm, by the doorway of one of the big concrete buildings in the complex where I lived. Just across from him, a few men stood in front of the betting agency on the corner, smoking cigarettes. Almost as if they took that kind of presence for granted, they ignored him until I asked one of them to call an ambulance with his cell phone. This is also the place where heaps of used syringes were regularly left behind by heroin addicts, mostly in the secluded corners of Via del Castellaccio, a narrow street unwinding tortuously along the park’s massive walls. And, again, this was the place where, as a child, I was never allowed to venture without an adult— even though my parents let me play with my friends and sister in the street or even roller skate to another park a few blocks away. As a teenager, I started taking trains to see my friends in nearby towns. While my parents rarely objected to the occasional out-of-town forays of my teenage years or the more systematic adventures of my 20s, each time I headed for the train station they warned me against taking a shortcut through the pathway by the Cavaticcio—the green area obtained from one of the paved-over canals. The Ex Manifattura Tabacchi was a place plagued by the wave of heroin addiction that hit Italy in the late 1970s and lasted well into the 1990s. It was a place of run-down and abandoned buildings, with very little ‘‘street life’’ aside from the illicit drug activity and the few establishments that catered to the neighborhood’s residents. And, yet, I find myself feeling nostalgic about a place that was off-limits to me in a host of significant ways—and that therefore made me angry. As I traverse the MdA today, I feel deeply ambivalent. This area is no longer badly injured and potentially injurious. It is clean, well lit, well frequented, and now also well surveilled by CCTV cameras. I am often amazed to realize that I can now walk on the sidewalks, rather than on the street along parked cars, without fear of stepping on a used needle or, worse, being mugged or attacked. This newfound sense of cleanliness, safety, and respectability suggests that this area ´ is no longer a wound in the heart of the city. Anzaldua (2007) defines the Mexico-U.S. border as an open wound, ‘‘una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds’’ (p. 25). Just like the borderland, the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi was a ‘‘a vague and undetermined space’’ (Lugones, 2006, p. 79) where communication was maintained opaque and social action inert by structural poverty and marginalization.10 For decades before the reconversion, this area had been bleeding copiously—and quite literally—from the needles and lives left behind by heroin addicts, and from the cracked walls and broken windows of locked-up buildings ´ steadily eroding towards condemnation. Just like Anzaldua’s wound, this area was an oozing split in the flesh of the neighborhood and a major ‘‘break’’ in the already uneven fabric of Bologna’s centro storico. As I stated earlier, urban renewal is often discursively framed as a way to mend such painful, disorderly, and dangerous ruptures in the ‘‘body’’ of a city. However, not unlike when it was the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi, the MdA still ruptures the neighborhood. While the ‘‘hemorrhage’’ has stopped and the area has been cleaned, and indeed sanitized, a noticeable split between the MdA and the rest of the neighborhood and the city still exists. To understand how this works from a Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Western Journal of Communication 349 visual-material standpoint, I turn to Blair and Michel’s (2000) work on the Civil Rights Memorial. Just as the Memorial is actively inserted into and aesthetically distinct from downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the MdA is quite literally wedged in and different from the Porto neighborhood. Blair and Michel explain that the Memorial disrupts and infringes on the public space of the city with the same resolve that the Civil Rights Movement opposed institutionalized racism and segregation. As a rhetorical performance of ‘‘sit-in’’ tactics, for example, the Memorial’s design creates significant material constraints and inconvenient pathways for the pedestrians moving through the sidewalk along which it is located. This disruption, they explain, entails the subversion of normative spatiality for social change, through the assertive affirmation of a political presence. Despite its physical and aesthetic discontinuity from the surrounding cityscape, the MdA does not disrupt the city to make a political statement or convey a ‘‘message of resolve’’ (Blair & Michel, 2000, p. 41). Rather, the MdA interrupts the city much in the same way as it used to break the ‘‘flow’’ of the neighborhood before the reconversion—or, when it was a wound in the heart of the city. In a visual-material sense, the distinction between the critical=political import of disruption and that of interruption resides in the potential for social change—or lack thereof. Instead of being a tactical endeavor, the MdA is in line with contemporary strategies of global(ist) communication. In particular, the MdA’s relationship of interruption with the surrounding neighborhood further reinforces some of the very same spatial and social divisions that predated the area’s reconversion, while also creating new insidious forms of separation and inequality. For this reason, the notion of enclave is especially fitting for my conceptualization of the MdA as a visual-material performance of interruption, rather than disruption. Originating from the Latin verb inclavare, to ‘‘lock up’’ (enclave, 2010), ‘‘enclave’’ suggests that a distinct locale may result from the active delimitation and separation of portions of spatial and social dimensions of everyday life. From a spatial standpoint, this notion has been applied to the study of gated communities. In this context, an enclave is quite literally defined by ‘‘the addition of gates, walls, and guards’’ (Low, 2001, p. 52) to the otherwise fairly undifferentiated spaces of a suburban neighborhood. This is emblematic of how space can be materially organized and kept separate in the name of urban fear. The notion of enclave has also been used to describe the social processes associated with lifestyle affinities. These are defined by loose, yet highly significant affiliations such as ‘‘shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities’’ (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 335) among otherwise geographically scattered individuals. Lastly, some of the key spatial and social implications of enclavic everyday life have been synthesized by Wood (2009) in his conceptualization of ‘‘omnitopia.’’ He argues that generic, ‘‘banal’’ environments such as those found in malls, airports, and hotels create an enclosed yet ubiquitous urban space that is not tied to specific locations or identities, but is intimately bound with patterns of contemporary consumption. All of these perspectives imply that the notion of enclave is tied to the deterritorialization and standardization, or overall homogenization, of spatial and social Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 350 G. Aiello Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 practices alike—and consequently their separation from organic community life. However, these analyses focus on sites of consumption. And, as Dickinson (1997) explains, there are sites of consumption—such as U.S. ‘‘old towns’’—‘‘where ‘communities of memory’ and ‘lifestyle enclaves’ meet each other’’ (p. 6), or where the heterogenous and organic character of community life meets and overlaps with the increasing homogenization and fragmentation of consumer behaviors. The enclavic visual-material organization of a site of cultural production may further complicate this dialectic between homogenization and heterogenization. The symbolic profitability of a cultural district such as the MdA resides in its ability to perform a highly distinctive identity within some of the genres and discourses that are privileged in advanced capitalism. Before I return to this point in my conclusions, in the next two sections I examine the two key visual-material performances, namely exclusion and distinction, that are at the heart of the MdA’s status as an enclave of global(ist) communication within and for Bologna. The Visual-Material Performance of Exclusion: Gateways and Boundaries As a child I was a ‘‘regular’’ in two different establishments by the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi park. In the summer, my father and I often went to the ‘‘Dopolavoro Ferroviario e Tabacchi’’—the community center where railway and tobacco manufacturing workers, together with most of the neighborhood’s elderly men, could socialize after work. At the Dopolavoro we usually got ice cream for me and a gazzosa, an old-school Italian tonic water, for my father. As we walked in, I would be hit by the artificial lighting dimmed by the clouds of smoke that enveloped the hall up to its vaulted ceilings, the stifling yet inviting smell of cigarettes, the loudness of multiple voices competing for attention and the sight of both senior citizens and younger men intent on playing cards and bocce. Like any other coffee bar, the Dopolavoro had a freezer full of prepackaged ice creams from popular companies at the time like Toseroni, Motta, and Algida. Usually I chose the Toseroni waffle cone named ‘‘Blob’’ for its thick layer of hard chocolate and peanuts. Other days, I preferred Motta’s ‘‘Coppa del Nonno,’’ which had a grown-up coffee flavor and made me feel fancy as I ate ice cream from a bowl with a spoon—even if both were plastic. My father and I would then leisurely stroll back to our place down Via del Rondone, following the familiar concrete-paved and patched-up sidewalk along the crumbling brick wall of the park. Next door to the Dopolavoro was the ‘‘Cinema Embassy,’’ which we often patronized during the colder months. Being cinema lovers, my parents often took my sister and me to one of the several inexpensive movie theaters that were within walking distance from our home, which had names evoking grandeur, spectacle, and America: Admiral, Arlecchino, Capitol, Odeon, Embassy. Visual-Material Gateways Both the Dopolavoro and the Cinema Embassy conferred social continuity between the visual-material decay of the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi and the rest of the Western Journal of Communication 351 Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 neighborhood. They were quite literally gateways of inclusion, which summoned us and others to frequent an area that we would have otherwise avoided, especially when dark. As both establishments closed down, doors and gateways that had been locked since time immemorial were opened to the public again, under new premises. In the 1970s, the ample outdoor space that belonged to the former slaughterhouse had been turned into a car depot, which could be perused from behind a heavily locked gate facing the street. With the reconversion, I was for the first time invited to cross over into that space which, as I described earlier, now hosts a film theater, a library, archives, and studio spaces. Likewise, the Ex Mulino Tamburi’s gates were opened to enable access to the new location of the Department of Communication Studies. While new gateways have opened to ‘‘revitalize’’ the area, these points of access are also highly exclusive in their own right. Markers of selective inclusion can be found on the walls by each gateway in the guise of signage pointing to the cultural institutions housed in the newly reconverted buildings. The former slaughterhouse’s open gate invites passers-by to step in and experience this reconverted space, but only insofar as they are invested in its meaning potentials of high culture (Figure 2, left). In a similar fashion, the Department of Communication Studies is identified by institutional signage placed next to the main gate. In addition, the stretch of Via Azzo Gardino where the department is located is now closed to car traffic and, by means of signage and metal posts, it is visibly accessible to pedestrians and bicycles only. Given that this stretch of street is only a few hundred meters long, and the surrounding streets are highly trafficked, this visual-material move seems to be less of a concrete attempt to foster environmentally sound practices and more of an ideological statement regarding the enclavic status of the MdA. Not only is access now conditional to one’s investment in high culture, but also a certain lifestyle associated with the symbolic cachet of cycling and pedestrianism as more refined alternatives to the mass culture of car transit. Figure 2 Former Slaughterhouse Complex Gateway (Left) and Signage (Right). 352 G. Aiello Visual-Material Boundaries Other markers of exclusion can be found in the visual-material boundaries between the MdA and the rest of the neighborhood. Five tall Plexiglas posts are now each located between one of the key historic buildings that host the MdA’s cultural institutions and the edge of the surrounding neighborhood, mostly in correspondence to one of the major streets that wrap around the area—namely, Via Lame, Via Riva Reno, Via Don Minzoni, and Via Marconi (see map in Figure 1, left). Specifically, the posts are placed near the Department of Communication Studies, by the entrance of the park next to the Film Archive’s main office, near the Arcigay headquarters, and close to the Museum of Modern Art. The appearance of each post points to the MdA’s distinctive identity and appeal of high culture. The posts’ Plexiglas panels are tinted in a milky light blue hue that stands out from the city’s typical color palette, which is characterized by a combination of concrete grays, stucco oranges, and brick reds. On its outward-facing panel, each post also features the scripting of ‘‘Manifattura delle Arti’’ as a single word, in a lightly serifed black font with contrasting dark red and uppercase lettering for the ‘‘M’’ and ‘‘A’’ (Figure 3). On the one hand, there is here a typographic reference to high culture, as the association of the color black with serifs points to experiential meanings of traditional print culture (cf. van Leeuwen, 2006). In addition, the choice of uppercase lettering in red for the initials ‘‘M’’ and ‘‘A’’ can be seen as a cultural reference to the practices of medieval monastic scribes, who were responsible for manually copying legal, philosophical, theological, and medical texts, and who used to begin each text’s new section with a flourished initial, in a contrasting color such as blue or red. On the other hand, semiotic resources such as the minimal use of serifs, the single-word scripting, the mobilization of visual cues like color and size to mark distinctions across words (as in the smaller rendition of the word ‘‘delle’’), and the sideways treatment of the Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Figure 3 Plexiglas Posts by the Department of Communication Studies (Left) and the Arcigay Headquarters (Right). Western Journal of Communication 353 script all point to the visual appeal of contemporary practices of branding. Ultimately, the posts contribute to marking the visual-material boundary between the MdA and the surrounding cityscape, while also identifying and even branding the MdA as a locale of contemporary high culture. This meaning potential is augmented by the placement of both the city and the university’s official seals at the top of each post’s outward-facing panel, and the reproduction of these seals and the MdA script in a smaller size on one of the side panels. This is also where one can find a map with a legend of the key institutions that are included in the MdA, and that therefore socializes passers-by into the activities, communities, and forms of knowledge that are sanctioned in and central to the district (Figure 3). Textural Boundaries Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Finally, there are more subtle boundaries that pertain to the difference in texture between the outer edges of the MdA and the streets just outside its limits. Not only is the MdA ‘‘different’’ from the rest of the neighborhood and, as I explain in the next section, aesthetically distinctive in relation to the city at large. Some of the key semiotic resources it mobilizes for such visual meaning potentials of distinction also contribute to specific material experiences of exclusion. In particular, the area’s streets used to be simply paved, and often patched up and ridden with small potholes. As part of the reconversion, the streets were repaved with brand-new, leveled cobblestone, as to add an old-time feel while also polishing up the area. This choice also created a stark contrast between this new aestheticized texture and the imperfections of the street and sidewalk spaces surrounding the MdA (see Figure 4). Another Figure 4 Textural Boundaries: Cobblestone Pavement by My Housing Complex on Via Lame (Left) and by the Arcigay Headquarters at Porta Lame (Right). 354 G. Aiello Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 example of this mobilization of textural boundaries can be found in the facade space ¸ of the Museum of Modern Art, which is located at the northern end of the MdA on the wide and trafficked Via Don Minzoni. In their treatment as an extension of the museum’s ground floor facade, the building’s arcade columns were covered in silver ¸ gray metallic panels with an engraving of the museum’s name, MAMbo, facing the street. These panels are placed so as to cover each column’s first grooved tier from the base’s molding, thus also creating the effect of a horizontal border across the base of the building (Figure 5, left). At both ends, each corner column is now entirely covered in panels from the molding up, and LED lights are inserted where the grooves in the column’s design pattern would be (Figure 5, right). The panels’ chromatic dimension blends in with the surroundings. However, together with the engraving of the museum’s name, textural resources such as the panels’ brushed metal and LED lighting create a visual-material boundary between the building and Via Don Minzoni. Therefore, these resources contribute to interrupting the flow of the city, as they draw attention to the museum as separate from the street it faces and, consequently, also the MdA as a distinct space. These textural boundaries enhance the separation that exists between the MdA and the neighborhood. Together with selectively inclusive gateways and more overt boundary-making resources such as the Plexiglas posts described earlier, the textural divide created by the newly repaved cobblestone and the museum’s facade metal ¸ paneling constitute the MdA as an enclave. Although there is no concrete gatekeeping system such as fences or walls, one’s experience of the MdA is structured by visual-material resources that make access exclusive and exclusionary. The MdA interpellates subjects to be(come) invested in meaning potentials of high culture as soon as they cross over into its space. In this process of interpellation, it is only specific subjectivities that can be successfully included. The divide between the area and the surrounding neighborhood is now made even starker by visual-material Figure 5 Textural Boundaries: Museum of Modern Art Brushed Metal Paneling and LED Lighting. Western Journal of Communication 355 resources that invoke not only their architectural and overall physical difference, but also a disparity in cultural and social capital. And the same resources are also mobilized as symbolic capital, as visual-material currency, for the global marketplace. By emphasizing and even branding the MdA as an enclave of cultural production, the district’s visual-material gateways and boundaries contribute to positioning Bologna as a world-class city. In this regard, in the next section I focus specifically on the design of the district and its implications for the MdA’s status as an enclave of global(ist) communication. The Visual-Material Performance of Distinction: Specific Locale, Generic Design In the early 1980s, on her way to work, my mother used to walk me down Via del Rondone and through Via Azzo Gardino to reach the ‘‘Enrico Panzacchi’’ elementary school on Via Marconi, on the edge of the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi area. Day after day, we would walk past the Ex Mulino Tamburi. As Via Azzo Gardino narrowed into its more visibly historic stretch, I anticipated the sight of the former paper mill’s red brick and large steel window frames, and the pigeons that would flutter through the windows’ broken glass. Opposite the mill was a residential complex with several run-down homes in the traditional Bolognese architectural style, which had been empty for a long time before being occupied illegally. The street then widened again and turned into an ample open space facing Via Marconi’s modernist architecture. In those few hundred meters before Via Marconi—the same stretch that is now only open to cyclists and pedestrians—I inhabited a world that was vastly different from the gray concrete housing complex where I lived. It is perhaps for this reason that I still vividly remember my imagination as a child around this stretch of Via Azzo Gardino. Each time I walked by the mill, I was compelled to imagine myself living as an artist between its four walls. At times I asked my mother to remind me what that building used to be. As she responded that it used to be a paper mill, I wasn’t quite able to grasp what that meant. However, I knew it was something about a past that had disappeared, but which was still visible in the crumbling facades that stood before us. ¸ Historical/Local and Contemporary/Cosmopolitan Meaning Potentials Today, the MdA still has a noticeably historical and ‘‘local’’ flavor. Each time I visit, I recognize and revel in the ‘‘copiousness of signs’’ (Dickinson, 1997, p. 10) indicating that this is a manifestation of la vecchia Bologna, the old-time city. It is the terracotta reds, pinks, and yellows of painted walls. It is the red brick and the newly introduced but old-fashioned cobblestone. It is also the arched doorways of residential buildings and the red cloth curtains on the windows of university buildings. All of these are signifiers of tradition and local identity and, as I explain in a moment, the reconversion deliberately mobilized visual-material resources with such meaning potentials. Not unlike when I was a child, upon entering the MdA I instantly inhabit a world that is vastly different from the rest of my neighborhood. And, yet, the MdA also Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 356 G. Aiello Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 looks different from the ‘‘typical’’ old-fashioned cityscape of Bologna’s city center. Interspersed among the traditional local colors, textures, and materials are details that I recognize from a number of the cosmopolitan cities that I have personally visited, or even simply and significantly perused in the media: steel, glass, brushed metal, dark wood, Plexiglas, modular patterns, and rounded shapes, and colors such as black, white, and silver. There is here a deliberate act of stylistic referencing, which, in our work on urban building facades in Post–Eastern Bloc Europe, Gendelman and ¸ I (2010) identify as a semiotic resource aimed at invoking the cultural cachet of given forms of architectural denotation. In the MdA there are two different sets of stylistic references: those pointing to connotations of historical and local identity on the one hand, and those appealing to meaning potentials of contemporaneity and cosmopolitanism on the other. Brand-new constructions such as the residential units by the Department of Communication Studies (Figure 3, left) and the ‘‘Riva Reno’’ parking facility deploy a traditional Bolognese aesthetic on their facade space, through typical plaster colors, ¸ contrasting trims, and arched windows and doorways. In doing so, they also reference the city’s past. Likewise, original dimensions of the MdA’s built environment were renovated so as to highlight their historic import. This was often done in a highly aestheticized manner, as several historical architectural details were preserved in ways that transcended their original meaning or function. For example, the stone ox head placed on one of the original buildings in the former slaughterhouse’s outdoor plaza was cleaned and restored as part of the facade (Figure 6, left). While the ox head orig¸ inally identified both indoor and outdoor spaces as part of the same slaughterhouse, it is currently preserved as a decorative element memorializing and aestheticizing the complex’s original function. Along the same lines, on the restored wall dividing the park from Via del Castellaccio, the original moldings of several windows and doors Figure 6 Historical=Local Identity: Former Slaughterhouse Ox Head (Left) and Window Molding on Park Wall (Right). Western Journal of Communication 357 Figure 7 Contemporary=Cosmopolitan Identity: Film Archive Entrance (Left) and Former Slaughterhouse Complex Glass and Steel Building (Right). Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 that are no longer there can be seen as decorative elements, polished and framed by fresh paint (Figure 6, right). In addition, in the MdA these historic and local stylistic references are often juxtaposed with much more ‘‘contemporary’’ and ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ architectural details. In the former slaughterhouse complex, opposite the building featuring the decorative ox head, the Film Archive’s entrance is rendered as a cylindrical volume, painted in a ‘‘flatter’’ version of Bologna’s traditional terracotta red (Figure 7, left). A matching, smaller red cylindrical construction sides the Museum of Modern Art. And, as I mentioned earlier, ‘‘modernist’’ colors such as black, white, and silver in flat, matte, and=or metallic hues, and modular structures made of glass and metal (Figure 7, right) are systematically deployed among traditional colors and textures (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, on the social semiotics of color). The Layering of Stylistic References This juxtaposition of architectural details is perhaps most visible in those instances where these two sets of stylistic references are layered so as to balance the historical=local and contemporary=cosmopolitan meaning potentials of the MdA’s overall design. A striking example of this act of layering (Gendelman & Aiello, 2010) is to be found in the student housing building at the end of Via Azzo Gardino (Figure 8, left). The building design combines contemporary details such as steel columns, white facade space and a stylized composition of variably sized, elongated windows with ¸ signifiers of history and tradition such as red brick, red cloth curtains, and even a facade layout that mimics medieval architecture. Bologna’s medieval appearance ¸ was characterized by facades consisting of awnings supported by wooden columns. ¸ The original function of this design was tied to hygienic concerns, as the ground floors of buildings were dangerously close to open-air sewage (cf. Albertani, 2007). In the 1500s the wooden columns were replaced with portici, the stone arcades that are still at the heart of Bologna’s trademark cityscape. The MdA student housing 358 G. Aiello Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Figure 8 Layering of Historical=Local and Contemporary Cosmopolitan Identities: Student Housing Facade ¸ (Left) and Former Slaughterhouse Complex Outdoor Plaza (Right). facade deploys architectural details that, despite their originally mundane functions, ¸ contribute to aestheticizing an historical past that by far predates the oldest construction in the MdA. At the same time, the facade design is encoded as thoroughly con¸ temporary, by virtue of the dark steel used for the columns, the flat white paint covering the awning and the stylized windows in the recessed portion of the facade. ¸ The layering of historical=local and contemporary=cosmopolitan stylistic references caters to the global(ist) gaze. This is because it communicates the MdA both as an authentic site that is worthy of global attention for its rich history and tradition and as a forward-looking site of contemporary creativity and cultural production. Another good example of this kind of layering can be observed in the former slaughterhouse’s outdoor space (Figure 8, right). Here, public seating made of dark teak on a brushed metal structure is set against the background of an historic building, featuring a red brick wall with yellow plaster trims and arched windows. This act of layering is made even more deliberate by the symmetrical framing of the three pieces of public furniture against the two original windows. The resulting effect of juxtaposition is striking and distinctive, but also familiar and generic. It is through such juxtaposition and layering of stylistic references that the MdA is made to ‘‘look like’’ la vecchia Bologna, while also performing a cosmopolitan identity. In this sense, the district is separate and distinctive from, rather than organically included in the cityscape. The MdA bears no visual-material similarity to any other part of the neighborhood in which it is nestled. Its contemporary built environment is designed not to resemble Italian postwar architecture, but rather the generic aesthetic of similar districts from across Europe and North America. It is also distinctive in relation to Bologna’s centro storico, which does not deliberately integrate contemporary Western Journal of Communication 359 architectural details with historic ones. In this sense, the MdA is a generically distinctive urban enclave, aimed at communicating Bologna as a highly specific and historically rich, yet translocally ‘‘recognizable’’ and appealing locale. Mobilizing Difference/Specificity Reconverted districts such as the MdA mobilize semiotic resources that balance local and global identity traits. In doing so, they maximize on the symbolic profitability of distinction—from the surrounding neighborhood, from the rest of the city, and from other cities—within prized, generic formats of urban design (cf. Julier, 2005; see also Machin & van Leeuwen, 2007). In this regard, Fairclough (2000) states that the neoliberal framework of contemporary globalization is characterized not simply by a process of homogenization or standardization, but rather by an active management, exploitation and ‘‘a new structuring’’ (p. 148) of difference and diversity. In communicating Bologna as a world-class city, the MdA mobilizes difference insofar as this does not become disruptive. While this is demonstrated by the several examples I have discussed throughout this section, it becomes most evident in the latest and ongoing portion of the reconversion. As part of the refurbishment of the green areas that were previously used as shooting galleries by heroin addicts, the Cavaticcio canal was uncovered after nearly a century underground. The historic canal is now visually framed by the former slaughterhouse complex, the museum, and the Renaissance salt storage building that hosts Arcigay. The water can now be viewed from an observation area between the museum and the Arcigay headquarters, and soon the planned park around the canal will connect these two sites with the former slaughterhouse to form a cohesive ‘‘designscape’’ (Julier, 2005). In an interview with La Repubblica, project engineer Caretti stated that these are ‘‘structural interventions that will enable [the city] to repropose an image tied to the docks and the former Renaissance harbor’’ (English translation). She also added that the project’s main aim is to ‘‘re-establish the presence of water throughout the year, while also however limiting its depth to about 40 centimeters, to guarantee the safety of park users’’ (English translation; Naldi, 2007). Caretti’s words further demonstrate that the MdA’s cachet is tied to its ability to mobilize a distinctively historic and local image, while also aestheticizing the import of such specificity so as to make it generically recognizable and acceptable. The MdA proposes itself as an urban enclave for the global(ist) communication of Bologna and, in doing so, it interrupts the city—rather than being organically integrated into its physical or social fabric or, alternatively, disrupting it for the purposes of political action. Conclusions: Interrupting the City for Global(Ist) Communication In the spring of 2002, as I walked down Via Azzo Gardino, I started seeing small groups of Moldovan immigrants gather in the dusty parking lot by the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi park, which has now been replaced by the gated entrance to the new underground parking facility. These were mainly women, likely working as Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 360 G. Aiello housekeepers for Italian families, and they were there to hand over care packages for their families back home to a few men in vans with Moldovan license plates. At the end of summer that year I left for the United States, and on my yearly visits back home I never saw them again. That is, until the winter of 2009, when I witnessed the same scene in a parking lot outside the MdA and closer to the train station. As the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi developed into the MdA, this immigrant group’s informal yet vital transactions had been displaced to a much more trafficked, less protected area. And while the Ex Manifattura Tabacchi was never a ‘‘good’’ place and, in fact, it was a bleeding wound, the visual-material characteristics of the MdA may contribute to amplifying some of the very discontinuities and inequalities that used to plague this area and the neighborhood. In concert with some of the unexpected implications of its envisioned social uses, the MdA displaces unbecoming or disruptive subjectivities through visual-material performances of exclusion and distinction. On my last visit, I also spotted protest signs on the new low-income housing building at the end of Via Azzo Gardino (see Figure 3, left). They lamented that these homes had never been assigned to eligible tenants, despite the presence of 3,000 households in need of subsidized accommodation. In the years following the district’s official inauguration, different groups that do not fit into the new ‘‘image’’ of the area have been displaced, removed, or marginalized from the MdA. In 2004, the Dopolavoro was briefly occupied by a group of activists (Usai, 2004). In 2007, the collective MetroLab took over the Cinema Embassy to ‘‘liberate’’ this unused space through the nonsanctioned creativity of politically radical artists and activists (Embassy sgomberato, 2007). Both attempts were repressed by the police. Even an historical national LGBT institution such as Arcigay was marginalized in the discursive constitution of the MdA as a site of cultural production. In 2004, right-wing mayor Guazzaloca deliberately omitted Arcigay from official city-led public communication of the MdA (Ramina, 2004). In 2006, left-wing mayor Cofferati, who had criticized Guazzaloca’s previous move, controversially considered following through with the former mayor’s plan to move Arcigay away from the MdA, in spite of the association’s proven record of collaboration with the museum and the Film Archive (Torresin, 2006). Finally, as of 2010, fewer than 15 families in my housing complex had decided to purchase their lifelong homes. In addition, about 15% of the apartments in the complex had long been empty, as their tenants had left and these homes had not been reassigned to others in view of the complex’s sale. In the wake of these deepening inequalities, the MdA is now mobilized as symbolic currency for the global communication of Bologna as a leading site of cultural production and an appealing destination for high-end tourism (cf. Willdorf, 2006). In this sense, in late modern times it is not only media based in representation and communication technology that are mobilized to carry professionally crafted meanings across cultural and national borders, but also ‘‘banal’’ enactments of globalization (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010) and overall ‘‘patterns of communication (without the ‘‘s’’)’’ (Thurlow & Aiello, 2007, p. 308). Therefore, it is not only Appadurai’s mediascape that must be examined in global communication scholarship, but also and most Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Western Journal of Communication 361 Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 urgently key flows of images, language, design, and materiality—namely, the broader semioscape of contemporary communication (Thurlow & Aiello, 2007). In particular, unlike Wood’s (2009) omnitopia, the global(ist) communication of cultural districts like the MdA relies heavily on difference—for example, locality, high culture, cosmopolitanism—to communicate an exclusive and distinctive identity. In doing so, it also however manages, contains, and restructures (Fairclough, 2000) such difference through generically prized design, and in the service of global capital.11 As a site of contemporary cultural production, and presumably also socially progressive innovation, the MdA is in fact deeply entrenched with some of the same neoliberal discourses that characterize urban sites of consumption. Not surprisingly, then, the MdA is increasingly also becoming a site of globalist consumption. In the wake of the district’s reconversion, commercial establishments targeted at lifestyle publics have followed suit. A high-end vintage store called ‘‘Fratelli Broche’’ was the first to appear in Via del Rondone. I found out about it because of my mother’s complaints about how expensive it was for a secondhand store. More recently, an Italian fusion restaurant and jazz venue by the name ‘‘Jamboree’’ opened where a bar had been closed for almost a decade—and that, according to my father, used to make the best canned tuna and fresh tomato panini. Another establishment named ‘‘Chattanooga’’ moved into what used to be a Seventh-Day Adventist church, and is now open in the summer for ‘‘al fresco dining’’ and ‘‘special lunch’’ ´ (Figure 9, right). The museum’s cafe—called ‘‘Ex Forno’’—has become a trendy gathering place for aperitivo.12 Last winter it was surreal for me to meet there with a friend for spritz and vegetarian appetizers, as Via Don Minzoni used to be mostly deserted and off-limits to me. These changes are revealing of shifting communities and imaginations. The cheap movie theaters of a now bygone era may have evoked mythologies of spectacle and ‘‘America’’ to an otherwise deeply local, though economically diverse, population. Now, the new establishments that can be seen across the MdA contribute to the promotion of subjectivities and lifestyles that are constituted by and constitutive of Figure 9 Moving Out and Moving In: Cinema Embassy with ‘‘MetroLab’’ Tag (Left) and ‘‘Chattanooga Garden’’ Summer Restaurant (Right). 362 G. Aiello advanced capitalism. And precisely because of this globalist tussle, in this work I have conceptualized the urban built environment as a key contemporary form=force of mediation and mediatization alike. This approach, I believe, contributes not only to centering spatiality as a key dimension of critical communication studies, but also to making communication scholarship into a more prominent field for the study of space itself. In doing so, this work also promotes a higher degree of cross-pollination across some of the communication perspectives that have productively conceptualized space as a medium of communication in its own right. Ultimately, the adoption of a multidimensional approach (both phenomenological and empirical, and both ‘‘micro’’ and ‘‘macro’’ in its claims) is fundamental to understanding how the now numerous urban sites similar to the MdA may (re)enact visual-material performances of exclusion and distinction—and therefore also interrupt, rather than organically integrate or politically disrupt, our cityscapes. Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 Notes [1] I prefer to speak of ‘‘advanced’’ rather than ‘‘late’’ capitalism, since the latter terminology implies that there may be in fact an end to capitalist structures and relations. Speaking of advanced capitalism entails that there is an expansion, rather than a progressive disintegration, of the capitalist mode into various areas of globalist cultural production. Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale. This is approximately $300,000. Most apartments were in need of major renovation, and precedence was given to tenants in the apartment sale process. As Livingstone (2009) explains, it may in fact be more useful to speak of ‘‘mediation’’ rather than ‘‘media’’ when examining contemporary mediated communication. This is both because ‘‘mediation’’ enables us ‘‘to avoid tying down the focus to specific media (radio, press, television, etc.)’’ (p. 3) and, most importantly, account for processes of transformation and hybridization in ‘‘the dual centerpiece of the communication field—mass communication and interpersonal (or face-to-face) communication’’ (p. 3). In U.S. rhetorical=cultural communication scholarship, this view of the built environment as a material performance (Blair & Michel, 2000) has been applied to a variety of contexts in which significant contemporary subjectivities (e.g., citizen=consumer) may be (per)formed. These include the progressive spectacularization and lifestyling of both urban and suburban areas and the historical memorialization and ‘‘musealization’’ of given urban and rural locales (e.g., Blair, 2001; Blair & Michel; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2005; Stewart & Dickinson, 2008). Blair (2001) goes on to explain that this may be ‘‘particularly difficult in the cases of visual and material objects, for we must ‘translate’ from the senses to print’’ (p. 275). We most often cannot simply ‘‘read’’ the built environment, as we are fully immersed in it. This structuralist notion of ‘‘reading’’ experienced some popularity in the 1990s, thanks to its implied potential for the systematic and even empirical analysis of meaning-making practices rooted in sensorially rich texts. And, because this notion is problematic, yet convenient and powerful, there ought to be ways for scholars to endow their visual-material analyses with phenomenological texture and depth. The specific choice of method when collecting personal narratives is utterly dependent on the research contexts and the critical aims of one’s analysis. A scholar may elicit stories from local residents through semistructured or conversational interviews, much in the same way as an oral historian may do. Or else, she may compile the stories of her close kin, [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Western Journal of Communication 363 [8] Downloaded by [University of Leeds] at 07:49 13 July 2011 [9] [10] [11] [12] together with her own, to map out the identities and subjectivities that contribute to the ´ constitution of given cultural formations (cf. Chavez, 2009). Lastly, a scholar may solely speak in her own voice, ‘‘as a mode of self-reflexive, cultural criticism’’ (Park-Fuller, 2000, p. 38). These attempts at urban preservation were however inscribed into an urban landscape that had already been dramatically altered. In the first half of the 20th century alone, Bologna’s city center had been subjected to the demolition of its medieval fortified walls, the modernist widening of several streets, the Fascist government’s heavy intervention on the city’s medieval layer, and lastly also extensive war bombing. In addition, in the 1960s and 1970s Bologna’s urban planning schemes were not guided by criteria for defining what was worthy of preservation from the perspectives of local history and identity, but rather by the national political agenda of the Italian Communist Party, which presided over Bologna and showcased the city as an ideal model of leftist governance (De Pieri & Scrivano, 2004). This is approximately $700,000,000. Here I am obviously speaking of a very different kind of spatiality, in terms of setting, scale and the social inequalities that characterize its history and geography. Rather than being a ´ contained space of urban renewal, Anzaldua’s (2007) borderland is a vast space of colonialist domination. While this is beyond the scope of this article, a more systematic attempt to explore and nuance this tension should concern itself with the dialectic between the notions of gentrification and revitalization. Gentrification is associated with the ‘‘loss’’ of authenticity and social diversity brought about by the renovation, upscaling, commercialization, and overall stylization of formerly working-class and=or ethnic neighborhoods (Jacobs, 1961; Zukin, 2010). On the other hand, revitalization is usually associated with efforts to preserve, refurbish, and bring back to life former industrial or degraded areas for seemingly much more benign and community-oriented purposes. And, naturally, significant overlaps between these two processes have been observed and documented (cf. Gibson 2003). However, more needs to be said on how this dialectic may in fact cater to the constitution of urban spaces that are far more ambiguous and complex (cf. Makagon, 2010). A pre-dinner drinking and socializing occasion that is fashionable among Italian young adults. References Aiello, G. (2006). Theoretical advances in critical visual analysis: Perception, ideology, mythologies and social semiotics. 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