Seminar: "Exploring Up Town. Financialization, urban change and smart-and-green urban futures in periphery of Milan", by Filippo Borreani

Filippo Borreani will be giving a seminar at ICTA-UAB. This seminar will be a hybrid event, with attendees having the option of attending via Zoom (emailed to you following sign up) or in person at ICTA-UAB.

Title: "Exploring Up Town. Financialization, urban change and smart-and-green urban futures in periphery of Milan"

Speaker: Filippo Borreani,  University of Torino

 

In this talk, the author presents the preliminary results of an ethnographic research in a peripheral area of the city of Milan. the research focuses on the exploration of a border space between two neighbourhoods: a new smart-and-green district, indirectly conceived and directly financed by the most important bank in the country, and the largest public housing intervention in Italy after World War II, across the street. The research analyses socio-biographical trajectories, atmospheres, discourses on 'smartness' and 'greenness', and social practices carried out by formal and informal organised groups. In this way, this joint exploration allows to outline an ethnography of the financialised residential space, in juxtaposition with the latest outcomes of a project deeply rooted in the Fordist system of social regulation. The research employs a theoretical framework based on the analysis of forms of class segregation and the study of the relationships between housing and global political economy, while also emphasising the role of urban imaginaries as sources of representation of the ideal society and forms of inclusion/exclusion from it. Moreover, this work criticizes smart-and-green housing projects, widespread in Milan, in the political context of controlled degradation and fight against public housing, squatting and low-income people not in the condition or in willingness of be performant in the contemporary financialized economy.

Researcher description

Filippo Borreani is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research (SOMET), jointly promoted by the University of Torino and Milan within the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political studies (Nasp). He is affiliated to the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society (University of Torino). He holds a BA in Classical and Medioeval Literature and an MA in Sociology and Social Research, both from the University of Torino. His research interests focalise on the relationship between social change and urban transformation, with a particular attention to urban imaginaries, social classes and global political economy. His last article is dedicated to trap music, territory and violence in the context of Barriera di Milano e Aurora, the poorest parts of the city of Torino.

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