Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
owing among other things to a high crime rate. today the original inhabitants,
themselves migrants of an earlier generation, do not recognize the district's new
face; they idealize the poverty and insecurity of the past and regard the changes
as a “deterioration” brought about by the immigrant presence.
The bangladeshi community, by contrast, are settling into the area and cre-
ating forms of social, economic, and community life that they perceive as posi-
tive improvements to the area. it is a form of migration that moves within global
and transnational frameworks; yet it is recreating a “locality” between the lines
of a diaspora's policy that makes use of mainly western values—such as “urban
regeneration”—as a defense of their own national values.
This process is being defined in particular by leaders of the bangladeshi
community who are trying to refound an urban space (with the assignation of
names such as “banglatown”) and to define rhetorically the course to be taken
by the diaspora's political mission: to upgrade a rundown area and integrate with
italian social life, bringing to it “traditional” (national and religious) values of
“morality” and “dignity.”
from the town-planning and social perspective, we can perhaps regard the
settlement of bangladeshi immigrants in torpignattara as a form of “reurbaniza-
tion,” which bypasses the concept of “gentrification,” understood as an upgrad-
ing of central areas of a city by the affluent middle classes.1 even though we are
not considering a central area or the involvement of the upwardly mobile middle
classes, the presence of bangladeshi migrants who are active entrepreneurs and
strong supporters of community life represents a form of regeneration which
throws light on local sociocultural processes of change within the urban fabric,
linked to larger global flows of people, ideas, and values.
torpignattara is an area where the future in present-day italy of policies
that acknowledge differences and “italian-style” multiculturalism is at stake (see
Grillo and pratt 2002). here, perhaps more than elsewhere, processes of regen-
eration, rhetoric about urban upgrading, the policies of the diasporas, and use of
spaces all play a part in mediation and negotiation between the various parties
who make this social space into a frontier zone in italian society.
The bangladeshi Community in torpignattara:
Depopulation and Repopulation
The influx of bangladeshis into torpignattara started in the mid-1990s,2 in a dis-
trict that showed strong evidence of an exodus by the original inhabitants. in-
deed after the progressive arrival in torpignattara of migrants from central and
southern italy up to the 1960s and 1970s, its population started to fall in the 1980s
owing to its bad reputation, petty crime, and the rundown condition of the hous-
ing stock. in 1983, the big fascist-era Cinema impero (empire Cinema) closed its
Search WWH ::
Custom Search