Emanuela Guano

EMANUELA GUANO, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded a grant in October 2018 to aid research on ‘Aesthetics and the Resistance to Redevelopment in a Postindustrial Neighborhood.’ At least since the late 1980s, scholarship in anthropology and related social sciences has devoted close attention to the aestheticization of cities. However, to date much literature on this topic still approaches urban aestheticization exclusively as a commodification strategy. Based on six months of ethnographic research in two of Genoa’s postindustrial peripheries, this project attends to competing ways of using aesthetics to mobilize consensus that do not entail the commercialization of cityscapes. If ethnographic research in Val Bisagno illuminates activists’ bottom-up tactics of invoking a hegemonic categorization of heritage to stop redevelopment, the Valpolcevera component of this project examines the top-down (corporate and administrative) use of depoliticized street art to pacify a ruined neighborhood in the wake of disaster. This project thus adds nuance to the understanding of how, in the age of neoliberal urbanism, aesthetics can become a terrain for the pursuit of consensus.