"That workshop there have become the deterioration of the neighborhood. Now there's everything in there, there will be mice, of snakes, a part that has become a den of drug dealers. The police can not go inside because it is private property and they go away when the police if they come out. The people, however, claim there is nothing to be done. Not that I was angry with immigrants, because when I worked there, I've had non-colleagues and were very good people, but those we are just now sleeping criminals. " So says a former worker now retired from Bologna. The factory where he worked and that we are telling, the Workshops Casaralta, manufactured and repaired railroad cars. The plant, located in Bolognina, Bologna area still very popular, "is finally decommissioned in 2003. This worker, who lives a few steps from the factory, told us about the workers' struggles of the seventies and eighties, the occupation against the closure of the factory. Then, with the same passion, expressed anger at the immigrants (not all ...), in his view responsible for the deterioration of the neighborhood. Joined the Communist PRC.
Non diversamente da tutte le città italiane, anche Bologna è ossessionata dalla questione della sicurezza. Anche a Bologna, politici, media locali, comitati di cittadini insistono sul tema dell’insicurezza delle strade e del “degrado” e lo legano in modo automatico all’immigrazione, facendo di questo nesso una delle questioni politiche centrali in città. Colpevoli dell’insicurezza sono di volta in volta gli immigrati, i clandestini, i rom, i rumeni.
Ad agitare tali questioni non sono qui (solo) la Lega Nord (che pure alle ultime politiche ha superato il 4% dei voti in città) o comitati di destra, ma spesso il Partito democratic citizens "left." A Ducati, and other popular suburb of the city, was born a year ago what is probably the first round of the PD: a group of elderly people, mostly ex-Communist Party and former Christian Democrats, with the backing of the Councillor districts (and security) Free Mancuso, patrolling the streets of the district between 18 and 21.
How to explain the security-and often results in a xenophobic city "left" (the Democratic Party stood here around 50% of voters)? Beyond reflection and analysis on the general climate covertly or overtly racist throughout Italy, it is interesting to investigate the individual cities in how to act and the issue of security products. In Bologna, some interpretations may arise when we reason about the disposal of most of the towns and industries in the process of building conversion implemented in abandoned areas. Interpretations are partial, not comprehensive, valid when it comes to the suburbs and (ex-) workers, less effective in explaining, for example, degradation and insecurity reported by the committees of the center. And is not Bologna Turin, Bologna and the industry is not the Fiat. Nevertheless, constitute, in our view, an interesting interpretive code.
Over the past fifteen years ended the century-old history is often productive of so many historical buildings of Bologna, located mostly in two areas of the city: the Bolognina, near the train station, Santa Viola, located along the Via Emilia Ponente. Both areas have increased in the postwar years around industrial plants and are now far too close to the center of the city to "bear" more production facilities. The list of "dead" is long. The Minganti, producing industrial machines sold around the world, has abandoned the establishment of Bolognina past three years become a commercial center, and operates a small plant in the province. A little farther on, via Corticella the Sasib, where a thousand workers churn out material for railway signaling and machinery for packaging, has been dismantled and sold to foreign multinationals. A short distance away, the empty factories and abandoned the workshops and Casaralta Cevolani. In Santa Viola, instead of the Riva Pants, which produced even for the Navy, there are now eight un'Esselunga and palaces. The neighboring foundry Caster had also closed. Last bankruptcy in order of time focused on the historic foundry last winter Sabiem, on the other side of the Via Emilia, for which we had hoped for a shift in the province and instead was simply closed. And they are only the most popular.
Bologna is then expelled from the city all industrial activities and the script is similar everywhere: workshops located in attractive areas in terms of construction, industrial crises (real, simulated or caused to art), workers' struggles against closure, promises of redevelopment "useful" and measure citizen (now a technology center, now a university, now a city of youth ...), union agreements to save the job (early retirement, mobility, redundancy), closure of businesses (sold to foreigners in the province moved or simply failed), the presence long years of dilapidated warehouses, up the conversion building, sometimes favored by administrators so opaque (right or left) and sometimes made by manufacturers (right or left), you'll discover, had purchased the area long before there was talk of the end of production .
But what has this to do with security? In our opinion a lot.
First, there are huge factories that remain empty and unused for years and are becoming increasingly gloomy and dilapidated. Sometimes they become temporary home for homeless people, often foreigners homeless. For the inhabitants of these neighborhoods, warehouses become the symbol of degradation and insecurity. To understand just how important these places may be, must take a step back: for many decades and up to no more than fifteen years ago, they were a symbol of another, was a symbol of working-class identity, mainly linked to the PCI and the CGIL, that, at least since World War II, was fundamental to the city.
The workers of different generations proudly tell stories of struggle and work at the factory. Tell how to work Minganti tantamount to go to university. They said that the Bologna metalworkers were so good to "do the feet of flies." They tell of the struggle against dismissal and against politicians over the years Scelba Fifty, for the rule of the Workers in the Sixties and Seventies. Describe harsh working conditions, lack of security. Mourn the dead for asbestos. But also about a world in which there was a constant feeling of social progress and democratic, where the struggles and strikes came from the factory gates and poured in the neighborhoods: "It's not that much work was exciting - there has Lia said Amato, immigrated from Sicily and for years the tobacco factory workers - but it was a tool for my improvement. Many times they win, the fights. Struggle to improve the contract, the struggle for social services for additional payment, send their children to school and not pay the nest. In your life you could see an improvement, growth. You could see the life inside the factory to improve: the cafeteria, the nest .... " And Guido Canova, for over thirty years to the worker and union representative Casaralta: "From 1969 until the mid-seventies, there were great achievements of which we had evidence of real and we realized in practice. One was the issue of reducing working hours from 48 hours per week plus three on Saturday morning reached within a few years the 40 hours. And then the organization achievements, winning the famous works councils, and then the Workers' Statute. "
A world in which la fabbrica era simbolo di progresso, di modernità e di identità di una classe. In quegli stessi quartieri, quell’identità si è frantumata lentamente insieme ai suoi monumenti. Oggi fare un lavoro manuale è spesso considerato una vergogna. Alle grandi fabbriche si sono sostituite piccole officine artigianali nelle quali l’attività sindacale è quasi nulla. L’operaio è sempre più precario. E anche nelle grandi fabbriche, la Ducati su tutte, il sindacato vive sconfitte prima di tutto culturali.
Ma non è solo una questione di “identità”. La presenza operaia era anche una garanzia di controllo del territorio. Cesare Poggioni, operaio alla Casaralta negli anni Novanta: “Quella vecchia e dura e ruvida classe operaia di una volta, una certa forma di – usiamo un termine orribile – controllo del territorio evidentemente lo esercitava, perché i primi turnisti alla Casaralta entravano alle quattro e mezza del mattino, così come la sera fino a verso le otto, le nove, le dieci c’era gente, insomma c’era quasi sempre gente lì attorno, e non solo a Casaralta: alla Manifattura, al deposito degli autobus. Insomma, una sorta di polizia in tuta blu”. Racconti forse un po’ troppo nostalgici ricordano che nei palazzoni popolari della Bolognina non venivano mai chiamati i carabinieri e i conflitti venivano risolti dai capicellula del Pci o dai parroci. This presence and authority that came from working-class political or labor union is now clearly failed. These districts are increasingly only bedroom communities. The population is aging. The warehouses are empty or, as in the case of Officine Minganti (Coop) and Esselunga Santa Viola, are transformed into shopping centers, which represent new sites of sociality (social relations, therefore, linked to the consumption) and work.
daily to attend public places are, for some years, especially the foreign Casaralta is concentrated around the Chinese presence in Bologna, with workshops, warehouses and import-export, restaurants, travel agencies. In place of the old neighborhood stores are Pakistani pizza, kebabs Maghreb, African hair. In the parks there are Bangladeshi families, groups of Romanian children roam the streets. Older people struggle to recognize their neighborhood, they see the newcomers as outsiders and often as enemies. Neighbors carry different worlds, but incomunicanti, parallel. Older workers expressed anger that the Chinese written in an alphabet incomprehensible menu outside the restaurant or because they spit out the window. Strange people roam the crumbling factories and no matter if to swell the ranks of those seeking shelter in abandoned factories there are also people who work during the day (black) construction sites in the city. Foreigners are considered guilty of all the enemies.
On the "enemy" is there to do one more consideration. In memory of several generations of workers Bologna describes a "community" (worker and neighborhood) that he felt compact and had "enemies" clearly defined and identifiable: the master, first, Democrats second, and governments. Leah Amato still says: "There were tough times for discussion, confrontation between us. But hard times where we knew there was always like a barricade, that we were here and the owner was there. Even threads harder did not question this barricade. " The master was the enemy of social progress and democratic struggles against the boss fights were to improve their living conditions.
The end of the factory is carried as enemies. The owners are gone. The left is also (sometimes) to the government. But the living conditions seem to improve more. Becomes the new enemy alien. Why do not you understand, because he has occupied spaces. Why do we steal their jobs. Why live in a shack. Why spits out the window. Why wash the windows at the lights. The immigrant becomes the cause of the insecurity, the main problema sociale. Ex-comunisti ed ex-democristiani si uniscono nella ronda. La “comunità operaia” unita contro il padrone è diventata una “comunità italiana” da difendere contro gli extracomunitari.
Non sempre e non dappertutto, per fortuna. Mentre il sindaco Cofferati nell’autunno 2005 sgomberava i rumeni nelle baracche di Borgo Panigale, i cittadini del quartiere gli ricordavano con una lettera aperta (cui i media locali diedero poco risalto) che nella lista dei disagi i rumeni erano solo al nono posto (!), mentre ai primi c’erano i cantieri dell’alta velocità che rendevano impraticabili le strade del quartiere e devastavano il territorio. Ma tornando the establishment of Casaralta is truly unique for the inhabitants of the buildings surrounding the main pitfall is the immigrants who live there and that no asbestos is still present in the roofing of the workshops, shooting and left to themselves, and that day day real threat to their health.
But there is still a key to reading these processes. Brownfield sites move strong economic interests. The Casaralta Cevolani and are located behind the exhibition, a stone's throw from the station and downtown, is beside the Sabiem Maggiore Hospital. The owners of the areas will make large profits by building hotels, apartments, shops, shopping malls. Often these factories have been closed because of redevelopment work lucrative construction, such as the Riva trousers, however, spoiled by the enormous conflict of interest of a deputy mayor, John Salizzoni, who at the same time is responsible for the design firm that has operated the conversion.
But economic interests must be negotiated with those of the community, at least in a city that is reputed to have a strong social conscience. The new Structure Plan City, launched a major effort even with the media in 2007, seeks to guide the development of many urban areas of the city. Negotiations between authorities and private authorities on the fate of areas often exist for years, during which the presence of disused industrial barracks is being felt heavily. The constant talk of degradation and insecurity, perhaps caused by the people "illegals" of those tenements (mostly in the absence of current events), then seems to play into the hands of those who want to build.
Cevolani The sample areas, and Sasib Casaralta seems emblematic owners are invited by the City to submit a joint project for a redesign of the district staff. They are asked to participate in a participatory planning workshop, where citizens can discuss the fate of the areas. The workshop is announced in October 2007, but the joint does not come. In May 2008, the City's planning department Virginio Merola writes Unit-Bologna to address the "concerns" of the citizens: "The effect of degradation is the fact that these areas suffer enormous intrusion and abuse are the goal of frequent illegal. [...] Areas become so threatening, that disturbing, particularly at night. " The Assessor re-announces the start of the workshop in September 2008, but this time only about two-thirds of the Casaralta, without mentioning the other two. In the meantime, However, existing sites (not attend) and we are open to Casaralta Sasib.
The factories were in business a distinctive identity for neighborhoods. The workers' struggles against the closure of establishments have been supported by the people, despite all the contradictions relating to emissions. But when a factory is closed and shaken the issue of degradation and the citizens demand that it be dismantled as soon as possible and do not care if the place were built schools, supermarkets, parks or hotels.
the first to notice some of these processes are workers in factories who work there, that denounce as disposals are not the result of production decisions or related to environmental impact, but the appetite for real estate agents and builders on building sites within the city. Some workers reveals the deception and says, "I want to be mischievous, this game is our 'friends' manufacturers because so they can say' ah! The degradation! Ah, an intolerable situation! ', Because ... they do play, because it serves to speed up the whole thing, no? ". Sabiem the same awareness, during the occupation of last winter against the closure of the foundry, "You will all go into disuse, we sleep and the poor will be the citizens asking that the garage is demolished. "
the crisis of the factory is followed in many ways a social vacuum. But if the gaps left by the industrial establishments in the city's fabric were used to redraw the districts and the city to make them more livable for its citizens, to create spaces for socializing, convenient facilities to the community, maybe productive activities environmentally sustainable ? And if the redesign of the city happen in a transparent and citizens will contribute effectively? And if not the blame of all the problems on newcomers? In most cases so far, not Bologna this happened.
Each scapegoat hides a collective sin: for some it is the fault of a historic defeat for others greed. Luckily there are foreigners, otherwise it would not our fault.
0 comments:
Post a Comment