The competition plot is currently used as a parking space for vehicles produced by the multinational corporation FIAT. As we know, in the last twenty years, the latter has delocalized most of its manufacturing facilities in order to cut production costs and increase competitiveness. The process is in line with the global trend. Though, unlike elsewhere, the Italian government has lavished consistent financial resources to minimize the bitter consequences of this painful shift of production mode. Now, we take note that, given the current huge indebtedness of the Italian state, such financial participation in the affairs of the corporation seems no longer possible. We also take note that the controversial piecemeal demolition of FIAT’s industrial assets in Turin has engendered escalating levels of social tension which the local government will hardly be able to handle in the future.
What we are asked here is to rethink the use of one of the FIAT real estate assets in Turin so that it responds more coherently to the obligations of a debt ridden, post industrial economy. The competition guidelines call for the presentation of a plan for an alternative pattern of settlement. This new layout should enable a burgeoning population of semi-skilled migrants and workers to get by through the ever more frequent global economic crises without the help of the public authority. This would be attained by the deployment of facilities promoting self-sustaining activities such as agriculture, craftsmanship, informal economy, and so on. The technology employed would further express the will to promote a self-sufficient, environmentally sustainable community.
We share the content of such a declaration of intents. Nevertheless, we find that the features of the competition topic, namely, the geographical location of the plot, the industrial history exuding from the area, the demand for a different social arrangement, and the visionary effort which is expected to act upon it, open into a different kind of vision in dystopian terms. This vision is the content of our proposal. We found that the competition allows for the conflation of a few relevant themes within the contemporary debates in urban studies. We claim the use of a paroxysmic narrative, holding it a valid strategy to maximize the critical content in discussions on the future of our cities.
As for what concerns the built environment, we acknowledge the fact that the main interests of governments informed by the dominant neoliberal doctrine are the attraction of foreign capital in the form of office space and the progressive withdrawal from direct management of the territory through privatization. These imperatives prescribe a markedly entrepreneurial attitude in urban affairs and the drastic reduction of public expense.
These ruminations suggested us a dystopian version of South Mirafiori, the description of which we will now turn to.
Italy, 20XX: in face of crippling capital flight and uncontrollable levels of social unrest caused by endemic unemployment, the umpteenth government of technocrats decided to experiment extreme forms of neoliberal urbanism. In Turin FIAT has been granted extraterritorial jurisdiction within one of its premises. The local government delegates the total management of the South Mirafiori compound to the corporation, which, in actual fact, has complete sovereignty over it. It is like a Free Enterprise Zone on steroids. Under this new legal status, FIAT is in a position to set third world wages in pockets of territory of a first world country. Hence, South Mirafiori is the pilot project of a new conception of urban space.
The corporation devises a spatial strategy to make the most of this concession. First, the whole area is walled in as a medieval citadel. The external reality is cut off. Then, the entire surface is developed into mixed use units replicable to infinity, a blueprint for XXI century urbanization. This unit comprises a podium for production, high rise residential buildings for social reproduction and a segment of a strip mall for consumption.
FIAT lets these units to other multinational corporations which use it to establish an ultimate form of Fordism localized within the fenced space of the citadel. The ground podium becomes a factory, the high rises house the employees, the strip mall distributes a part of the productive output of the compound. The workforce is drawn from a pool of individuals exhausted by the unbearable lack of material and psychological welfare of the outside world, who come to agree to a Faustian bargain with the corporation. In return for a job and physical security, they will relinquish a few personal freedoms, among which the impossibility to leave the compound while under contract. They will all have a low but steady income, decent housing and the assurance to always access the sphere of consumption. A series of facilitations are offered: free iPhones handed off as a bait, commodities in the strip mall sold at production prices. In exchange for this, they are subject to the will of the corporation, which in fact turns them into voluntary prisoners of a gated community. The whole everyday of the worker is taken care of in a Big Brother fashion. The worker itself enjoys the privileged condition of limited freedom, visual exposure and the relative affluence peculiar to a Big Brother participant. This condition allows him/her fantasies of distinction from those unfortunate individuals excluded by the system, an emotional prerequisite to guarantee their allegiance to the corporation.
While beyond the compound the hard power of a police state secures adequate repression, within, soft power is practiced promoting Foucaldian notions of self-governmentality and through a panoptical CCTV system monitoring the subjects. The strip mall cutting through the compound is the space of negotiation of these two approaches to social control. It is a space of consumption segregated from the rest of the compound by ghetto-like gates, yet accessible from the outside. It is a space, disciplined by both the Camera and the Taser, where authority tests its repressive power in a performative way. It is also the space where the above-mentioned practices of distinction operate under its all-encompassing gaze.
Architecture plays another important role in the creation of this fictitious reality. Its services are called upon to construct a manufactured image of the corporation to be consumed by the outside world, an image which both legitimises the development and increases the appeal of the citadel in the outside public. Thus, the age-old artifice of façadism is summoned up. Purportedly, the scheme envisages that the only buildings visible to the flâneur beyond the wall are the residential high rises. Their façades looking out on the exterior then play a communicative role. Hence, they are cladded with a fancy, colored plastic cladding arranged in a barcode pattern reminiscent of the ubiquitous landscapes of urban regeneration in the age of IKEA consumerism. The cladding disguises the economy of space of the interiors, conceived to boost social reproduction at the minimum expense. Lush green vegetation, also visible from the outside, cooperates acting as a signifier of wealth and welfare.
The condition we have described so far responds well to the exigencies of the main agents acting on the built environment in an age of perpetual spending review, namely, the State and the Corporation. Thus, the first exempts from the burden of territorial control while attracting foreign capital on its soil into pockets of wealth, while the latter is offered a chance to further affirm its legitimacy in shaping the physical and cultural landscape of the subject under late capitalism.
Credits:
Concept: Fabrizio Furiassi, Davide Spina
Fabrizio Furiassi (Images),
Davide Spina (Text)