Independentemente
dos argumentos prós / contras o facto que “algo” e muito está a acontecer na forma de uma profunda
reacção Internacional à Turistificação desenfreada, à Globalização desmedida e à Gentrificação
galopante é evidente e inegável.
OVOODOCORVO
Why Italy Is Banning Everything
Kebabs and selfie sticks are just the tip of the iceberg in
the national struggle to wrest control of historic city centers.
FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN
JUL 31, 2017
On first glance, it’s easy to nod in agreement with Italy’s
wave of bans on tourist-related misbehavior. The latest city to join this
movement is Milan, which at the end of July has brought in a (potentially
extendable) summer ban on bottles, cans, firecrackers, food trucks, and selfie
sticks in its central Darsena neighborhood, a bar-filled canal district that
functions as Milan’s main after-dark living room. This comes not that long
after Florence’s mayor threatened to enforce a ban on al fresco picnicking in
the city’s Cathedral Square by hosing down offenders.
The Milanese tourist crackdown also comes fast on the heels
of Rome’s introduction of fines to anyone eating near or dipping their toes in
the Eternal City’s many fountains, then a measure banning nocturnal al fresco
drinking in every area of town (with the exception of the suburb in which Mayor
Virginia Raggi herself lives). Add these to bans on vending non-local food in
Florence, Venice, and Verona and a semi-comic picture develops of an official
boot, stamping on a kebab carton forever.
These are bans designed in part to deal with tourist
overload, so they are often greeted with general nods of sympathetic approval:
Even tourists hate tourists. But the regulations of selfie-sticks, fast food,
and other irritants are in fact part of a larger nationwide struggle over the
future of Italy’s urban centers—not just clamping down on trash and petty crime
but also attempting to control who does and doesn’t have rights of access to
key parts of the city.
A national exclusion law, called the Daspo Urbano, was
officially brought into action this April; it allows police to fine and
restrict the movement of people they deem a threat to public order. The law's
scope goes far beyond controlling visitors, as it can hinder access to city
centers to anyone officialdom deems undesirable.
The law’s origins lie in measures introduced in the 1980s to
counter soccer hooliganism—Daspo is an acronym for Divieto di Accedere alle
manifestazioni Sportive or “Sports Event Access Ban.” The regulation permits
authorities to arrest people in zones officially designated by local mayors (typically
city centers) who they deem to be engaged in “indecorous behavior.” Police can
impose a fine of up to €900 (though usually less) and ban people from the
prescribed area for 48 hours. If people barred in this short-term fashion
continue to cause problems, their ban can be extended for six months or even a
year.
But why is this crackdown happening now? There’s no question
that many of Italy’s city centers are in a poor state. Rome in particular has
become a byword for urban squalor, and barely a week goes by without another
tale of Rome’s Degrado (decay/deterioration). Problems include inefficient (and
possibly corrupt) trash collection that leaves central streets looking shabby,
potholed roads, major buildings left vacant, and historic areas overrun with
pushy street vendors—not uncommonly dressed up as ancient Romans. Public buses
can be rickety, while the administration itself continues to be riddled with
inefficiency and patronage.
Rome’s fall may have the highest profile, but it’s far from
alone in suffering poor conditions. Like much of Southern Europe, Italy was hit
very hard by the 2008 financial crisis and is still slowly recovering, leaving
public services underfunded and overburdened. It has also encouraged younger
people with less money (and thanks to high unemployment rates, more time on
their hands) to do their warm weather socializing and drinking in the street
rather than in bars.
Some recent urban incidents have exacerbated Italian fears
about congested disorderly city centers—in June, for example, a firecracker
sparked a stampede among soccer fans watching Juventus play live in a central
Turin piazza, causing one death and 1,500 injuries.
“When you try to simply repress something, it’s like trying
to empty the sea.”
It’s easy to understand the appeal of a law that promises to
make city centers look tidier for people who dislike or feel unsafe thanks to
the presence of hawkers, drug dealers, or sex workers. But civil liberties
advocates see it as oppressive and arbitrary: The law’s penalties are
inherently abusive, it has been argued, because it permits them to be
implemented on suspicion, without the police needing to investigate or prove
that a crime has been committed.
Roberto Saviano, author of the Mafia exposé Gomorrah, wrote
an especially scathing critique of the law for La Repubblica. As he points out,
the actual crimes that could be covered by the law already have punishments and
sanctions attached to them, making the Daspo Urbano crackdown an unnecessary
overreach.
We are witnessing the criminalization of the man who
rummages through the trash to take what others have thrown away. Can you be
banned for consistently dressing in a way that the mayor and city police deem
“indecorous”? Are punk mohawks decorous or indecorous? On what will the
morality of behavior be evaluated? If I am dead drunk in the street, there are
already [official] tools for intervention. If I hawk counterfeit goods, I’ve
already committed a crime… We already have tools to counter these crimes, so
what end does the decree serve?
The law does seem to be living up to fears that it offers
authorities a license to discriminate. Earlier this month, two trans women in
Naples were fined and banned for 48 hours in accordance with the new
regulations from the environs of a central square for soliciting, even though
they insist they were simply having a drink in a bar. LGBT organizations
protested the move, pointing out that it was carried out not because a crime
had been committed, but because police had decided they had a hunch something
was amiss.
Another critic of the crackdown is Dr. Ugo Rossi, a
geographer at the University of Turin and author of the book Cities in Global
Capitalism. He points out that the law is a response to fundamental changes to
the underlying character of Italian city centers. “It's a structural problem”
Rossi says, “one that is particularly evident in Rome and other
tourist-dominated cities.” Thanks to the deregulation of the housing market and
the rise of home-sharing services like Airbnb, the hearts of many historic
Italian towns have become increasingly oriented towards tourist accommodation
and businesses, “emptying” them of local residents. “What increasingly replaces
them are tourists—or in cities such as Bologna, students—who are not respectful
of public space,” Rossi says. “As a result city centers are now just places of
consumption rather than residency—ones that are no longer used by local
people.”
Not all cities suffer equally from residential displacement,
however. “The city centers that have survived this kind of transformation are
those in southern Italy's major cities, such as Naples, Palermo, Bari” Rossi
says, “where despite some touristification many people are still living in the
city core. So reflexes like [the Daspo Urbano] are on the one hand related to
anxieties about security, and on the other about fears of a loss of
authenticity, or local people who are more protective of their environment.”
Seen in this light, the idea of addressing a complex knot of
problems with a set of loosely defined bans on people and practices the police
don’t like the look of seems both ineffective and discriminatory. “There should
be within the public more reflection over this issue, rather than resorting to
measures like the new law,” Rossi says. “When you try to simply repress
something, it’s like trying to empty the sea.”
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