{"id":1255,"date":"2012-05-20T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-20T13:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1255"},"modified":"2014-06-20T14:18:16","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T20:18:16","slug":"europes-mean-streets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1255","title":{"rendered":"Europe’s Mean Streets"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the delights of being in Bologna recently was meeting, courtesy of my colleague Gabriele Manella, other scholars doing urban research in the University of Bologna\u2019s Sociology Department<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019m honored for our anthropology department here at DU to be an Associated Partner for grant proposals that have been submitted by these UNIBO colleagues to their country\u2019s Ministry of Education for research on urban sprawl and sustainable growth.\u00a0 While in Bologna I learned about some other work that UNIBO sociologists are doing on the uses of public space.\u00a0 One project is a detailed study of Bologna\u2019s Piazza Giuseppe Verdi<\/a>, a public square that symbolizes the relationship between the city and its university and that\u2019s famous for the diversity of its local user population (e.g., see here<\/a>). Another is a study of the material strategies\u2014in the form of new urban furniture\u2014being used by civic officials to exclude the homeless from the use of public space.<\/p>\n

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Piazza Giuseppe Verdi (courtesy Gabriele Manella)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s the latter theme that focuses this post.\u00a0 I first encountered these homeless exclusion strategies\u2014the \u201cbum-proof\u201d bench, the fortified dumpster, the gated civic building\u2014in Mike Davis<\/a>\u2019 <\/strong>classic study of Los Angeles. \u00a0They are now the stuff of frequent\u00a0commentary in the blogosphere (e.g., here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and here<\/a>). \u00a0A 2006 report by the European Observatory on Homelessness<\/a> details some of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that architecture and street furniture\u2014and their far-from-innocent decorative elements\u2014are being used to control the lifeways of people who are homeless in Europe. \u00a0According to this report \u201canti-homeless\u201d benches, gates and fences have been spreading all over the continent.<\/p>\n

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Parisian Banc Publics (From G. Pat\u00e9, Sociologique sur l\u2019ordinaire des Espaces Urbains, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 159, 116-120, 2005)<\/p><\/div>\n

UNIBO colleagues Marco Castrignano<\/a> and Maurizio Bergamaschi<\/a> presented a very interesting and richly illustrated paper about the Italian context called \u201cThe Street Furniture Law: How Homeless Can Be Excluded from Public Space\u201d at the 2010 meeting of the International Visual Sociology Association<\/a> held in Bologna. Castrignano and Bergamaschi note that in the last several years 800 local ordinances on the safety and management of public space have been implemented in some 400 Italian municipalities. These ordinances are designed to combat the \u201cillegal occupation of public space\u201d and maintain the \u201cdecorum\u201d of the city.\u00a0 The use of particular kinds of street furniture figures prominently as way to enforce this urban decorum.\u00a0 In some instances (Treviso, Trieste, Padua) public benches have been completely removed from city streets.\u00a0 In others (Verona, Bologna, Savona) they\u2019ve been replaced by forms having intentionally anti-homeless designs; e.g., barrel-shaped benches or conventional ones with bars that prevent lying down.\u00a0 The new furniture has been placed in parks, squares, and streets with heavy pedestrian traffic.<\/p>\n

Some anti-loitering interventions recently observed in Bologna are akin to the anti-roosting spikes<\/a> used to keep pigeons from perching on window ledges:<\/p>\n

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And then there are tactics such as these that likewise keep people off of ledges and out of doorways:<\/p>\n

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Castrignano and Bergamaschi note that anti-homeless street furniture very often goes unnoticed by the average Italian citizen.\u00a0 The foreign traveler is even more likely to miss it given the many seductive and distracting charms of “Old Urbanism.” The material tactics of habitat that socially-divide and exclude are a revelation for my American students once they know to look for them.\u00a0 Economic downturns and insurgent movements for social change are likely to produce increasingly sadistic street environments in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere (e.g., Japan<\/a>) until we figure out ways to better mesh the need for urban decorum with the right to the city.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the delights of being in Bologna recently was meeting, courtesy of my colleague Gabriele Manella, other scholars doing urban research in the University of Bologna\u2019s Sociology Department.\u00a0 I\u2019m honored for our anthropology department here at DU to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-kf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1255"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3264,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions\/3264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}