Facing urban ambiguity. Transnational networks and neighbourhood rules.

Brigida Proto

Università IUAV di Venezia

 

We have moved from a solid to a liquid modernity (Bauman 2002). The transparency of the tie between state and society, what is supposed from a governance perspective (Balbo 1999), dissolves into the opacity of ever contingent and eventful interaction (Abbott, in Santoro 2003) The change makes people insecure about the norms of the past but does not propose alternative relational models. What is required is to re-articulate the boundaries between background and action through the recovery of spaces forced into the background and considered outside common knowledge frameworks. Thus, what required is to explore urban ambiguity from a  ‘transaction’ perspective (Crosta 2003). In such a way, the tie between state and society is not considered as pre-defined but is mutually determined in a process of tangible and intangible transactions.

This paper reports the provisional output of research work in progress in the framework of the first year of the Phd “Regional planning and public policies” at IUAV in Venice.

The starting point was a fieldwork carried out for the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Catania in the framework of a national research on urban security in 2003. The aim of the research was to detect the contents and modalities of social mobilization for the renewal of public spaces in the old neighbourhood San Cristoforo in Catania ( Southern Italy). This called for a translocal perspective on urban security. As a result, the research work in progress is looking at Catania “with binoculars” to explore the peculiar over time linkage between power, social order and cultural diversity in a ‘dependent’ city of the Southern Italy.[1]

 

Urban security in Italy: the preservation of social order

 

 Cities and insecurity have always been linked together in urban sociology. European sociologists – Weber, Durkeim, Simmel- and North-American ones - the Chicago School - focused on social order in terms both of preservation and transformation: on one hand, crime, segregation and insecurity; on the other hand, conflict, collective action and social change.

 Social order is not the opposite of social change: they have ever been interlinked. It was with the Human and Citizens’ Rights Declaration in the revolutionary France of 1789, that the victors, the bourgeoisie, decided to form a public force in charge of security and order[2]: the modern state arises from the need to defend property against a ‘dangerous’ class. Sincethen, it is with the current crisis of the State-Nation that urban security has again become a political priority. Particularly, the end of the first republic in Italy - upset by Tangentopoli and the mafia civil war throughout the whole Italian region – has made the social need for security grow vertiginously.  Not paying attention to the measures taken in France – the Politique de la ville- and in the United States – Community Policing -   Italy maintains a nationalist and centralist position.

Social need for security goes hand in hand with a great crisis as regards trust in the link between state and society but the institutional answer- whether progressive or conservative- is the  top-down restoration of the social link, by making institutions ‘come closer’ to citizens. While decentralization re-defined the State-Region-Local Autonomy links, security and order are still accentrated[3].

From this perspective, the Berlusconi government (2001-2006) seems to focus on urban security  so strongly as a way of giving new coherence to matters involving democratic participation and, thereby counter criticism of the progressive reduction of the welfare state (Selmini 2004).

First, it confused public opinion: inquiries, false balance sheets and anonymous capital re-entry turned illegality into legality in 2001. Subsequently, as regards citizens’ security, it gave priority to property crime, prostitution and illegal immigration while putting mafia and organized crime in the background (Violante 2002).  With regards to this, the re-organization of the Prefecture carried out by the central government when it had just taken up office, is meaningful. On one hand, it strengthens the political influence of the Premier over local government: the constitution of the Permanent Conference[4], as Prefect consultant body, abolishes other possible provincial and metropolitan committees of Public Administration and subordinates regional development to the Premier’s instructions. On the other hand, as regards the preservation of public order, the Prefect and the Provincial Committee for Order and Public security set up and implement the Coordinated Regional Control Plans. The central government gives the police – through a peculiar mix of public order forces- the role of ‘access node’  (Giddens 1999) between  state and  society. As a result, it acknowledges the police as State body (visibile function): European police and local police, thus, fill up sovra and infra national spaces for the defence of citizens’ security in globalization. By contrast, the central government forgets that the police is also an organized and autonomous system: especially when the state is weak, it has been capable of mediating big interests and conflicts and, as has been seen in the past and more recently, not always controlling cases of hierarchical inversion..

While globalization makes disorder a permanent condition of living (Bauman 2002), official Italian institutions – as well as European ones – select concepts linked to security only in terms of preservation of order: the key-words are petty crime prevention and suppression of diversity. As a result, conflicts need to be mediated in order to assure stability and preservation of ‘cultural identity’.

 

Catania ‘with binoculars’: the costs of social order

 

Sicilian cities can be seen as particular urban societies in the  Italian context. Despite opportunities arising from Sicilian government autonomy[5], these cities suffer from being subordinated to old and new transactions between local, national and international powers. Catania – the most important provincial capital after Palermo, the administrative centre for Sicily - shows the regional consequences of such mediations to preserve social order. Since the second post-war period, strategic compromises between military and economic interests as well as political and criminal ones have formed compact dominant  groups influencing social and urban development. Catania, thus, has moved from its position as the ‘Milan of Southern Italy’ to ‘Capital of the Mediterranean’ while international interests have silently delegitimised the Italian state and influenced the socio-economic development of  the city.

In the meantime, signs of individual and collective  disenchantment have emerged, declined and re-emerged. The city has been going through a difficult social learning process where cultural diversity emerge only when action is autonomous from institutional frames. 

 

 

Beyond the myth of the Milan of Southern Italy (1957-1989)

 

‘Extending the angle of view’,

 

The North-American military base and the Cassa of Mezzogiorno ‘Four Knights of Labour’: the influence of political power. At the end of the 50’s, while Italy was experiencing its ‘economic boom’, the province of Catania was the subject of an agreement that had to satisfy: a) the North-American need for a European base against the Soviet East, b) the Italian debt to the Allies, c) the Italian State’s need to be legitimised in Sicily. In 1957, while the North-American military base was moving from Malta to the province of Catania, the city, 11 other provincial municipalities and the Camera of Commerce constituted the ASI Association for industrial development to obtain financial facilitations promoted by the Cassa of Mezzogiorno[6].

 

‘Reducing the angle of view’,

 

The political power and the ‘Knights of Labour’ (the 60’s and the 70’s).At the same time, the local political power governed Catania through a compact urban block made with the Church and the CISL (trade union). Moreover, it monopolized the management of council housing and employment in public administration and hospitals (Fava 1991).

Catania, although a dependent city, is, thus, the Milan of the South. In the 60’s the population grew to 400,000 thanks to the immigration of marginal social groups coming from the Sicilian hinterland: immigration that more than counterbalanced the simultaneous emigration caused by the first signs of crisis and reflected by empty plots and signs of degradation in the historical centre. 

Besides, while the master plan imagined a ‘great’ Catania with 700.000 inhabitants, the city was subject to heavy urbanization thanks to the carefully postponed adoption of the plan up to 1964: between 1957 and 1963 Catania grew so much as to reach second place, after Rome, with regard to number of completed buildings (Fava 1991). At the same time, the government policy regarding access to financial resources made the ‘ 4 Knights of Labour’ emerge as  “ an abnormal phenomenon in the nine Sicilian provinces as well as the whole of Southern Italy” (Saladino 1975). They were supposed to be ‘self-made men’ but, indeed, they were strongly protected by mercenary mafia clans. This occurred while Catania – or the Palermo-Catania axis, built up by Cosa Nostra - became the strategic crossroad, maybe the most important one in the Mediterranean area, along the drug-trafficking route (Fava 1991).

The myth of the Milan of Southern Italy began to flicker at the beginning of the 70’s. Public financing having been used up ,  the city emerged as socially and spatially fragmented. Urban ghettos in the historical centre and in the periurban areas segregated the poorest populations; the urban bourgeois urbanization  saturated available areas and attacked vulnerable periurban towns, without a master plan; the demolition of San Berillo in the historical centre 30 years ago, was destined to represent a deep urban wound in the  failed city, symbol of the Milan of the South, up to the present day.

The tie between the political power and the ‘ Fours Knights of Labour’, meanwhile, changed. Thanks to the strengthening and the diversification of activities at both regional and national levels,  the ‘Knights’ became autonomous with regard to political power while the ‘army corps’ mafia clans sought to have  their own political representatives.

 At the same time, the ‘voice’ of urban malaise against the political power emerged for the first time as reflected by the protest conservative vote in 1972, the strike in hospitals for non payment of salaries and illegal housing as a reaction against council housing mismanagement.

The political power reacted to the changed power ties and to the social malaise by using new pervasive methods of approach. After the use of cudgels and tear gas against the city voice, 17 Neighbourhood Constituencies[7] were placed on the 36 old ‘parochial’ neighbourhoods: the ‘great’ city was a threat to social order and needed to be split up (Tosi 2001)

 

 

 

The ‘Business Contract’, the Mafia’s  urban protection and the first action network (the 80’s).  In the 80’s, the ‘Knights of Labour’, tacitly a continuation of the mafia[8] and autonomous with regard to the local authorities, constituted the ‘Business Contract’[9] and a new social block between ‘entrepreneurs and  masses” by submitting ‘red’ cooperative societies. This occurred  thanks to the new public financing given by the Regional Board of Agriculture from 1976 to 1981. The result was the building conquest of the Pedemontana areas. Thus, the great city turned into the ‘great’ agglomeration: the population of Catania dropped from 380.328 in 1981 to 333.075 in 1991 while Mascalucia, a town in the northern hinterland, grew by up to 80%, Pedara, San Giovanni La Punta and Misterbianco by up to 40/50%, and other towns by up to 20%  (D’Amico 1999).

While tortuous arrangements between the authorities and the ‘Knights’ were the cause of vacant positions in the  judiciary, the mafia clans faced urban insecurity in a characteristic way. On one hand, they set the city free from kidnappings and ‘red’ terrorism; on the other hand, they terrified the city with a mafia war on the city streets, with almost 100 dead each year. In the 80’s Catania was seen as a violent city, with high levels of juvenile delinquency: San Cristoforo, San Berillo in the historical centre as well as Montepo and Librino in the periurban areas were ‘dangerous neighbourhoods’, organized crime estates. While part of the city was stigmatised, Catania, however, was, unlike Palermo, still considered a city where transactions were completed without the mafia,.

Conversely, mafia interests, transactions and politics were tightly woven together. In the first half of the 80’s, three events shocked the city and forced the central government to break silence:  the explosion of the ‘Catania Case’ in the city’s prosecuting attorney’s office in 1982, the murder of the Prefect Dalla Chiesa in Palermo in 1982 and the one of the journalist Fava in Catania in 1984. Firstly, the inquiry carried out by the Superior Judiciary Council into the prosecuting attorney’s office of Catania denounced the mediation between an internal and external world in the judiciary, where ‘the risk is the enslaving of the jurisdictional role to the dominant forces in Catania’ (Fava 1991). Secondly, the two murders had a double effect. On one hand, they stopped both the attacks of Dalla Chiesa on the business Palermo-Catania axis and the revolutionary urban adventure of the local magazine ‘I Siciliani’ in Catania ; on the other hand, they stimulated the need for an extra-political, autonomous and action-oriented dialogue on urban issues. In 1986 ‘Citta Insieme’ was the first anti-mafia urban movement and, connected to it, other initiatives emerged such as the Association ‘I Siciliani’, the Tribunale per il Malato (the Court for the Ill) and GAPA (Young people absolutely for action) for children’s education in San Cristoforo: it was thus that the first urban action network  came into being.

 
The ‘Spring’ of Catania (1990-2000)

 

‘Extending the angle of view’,

 

The military intruder and Etna Valley. In the second half of the 80’s the central government expressed perplexity as regards the impact of the American military base on the province of Catania and the nation as a whole; then, the end of the ‘cold war’ caused the base to lose its justification in the region. By contrast, the regional law on the constitution of metropolitan areas[10] and the institutionalisation of the Regional Province made the cooperation between the American government, the Region, the Province and municipalities of the metropolitan area stronger. Contracts managed by mafia clans produced an American silent ‘sprawl city’ made up of arms storehouses and residential compounds - in violation of any master plan prescriptions in the metropolitan area.   At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that the American presence broke up the Italian State monopoly of security and public order: ‘Security Blotter’ and ‘Crime stopper’s hotline’ were security programmes for the base and residential compounds implemented only by the American police (Mazzeo 2004). This occurred while Thompson, a giant multinational microelectronic company, merged with Sgs Microelectronics in Catania. The national media and local press  focused on the successes of Etna Valley, the innovative industrial district in the South of Italy, while institutional problems in the Catania province – as in many other Sicilian provinces - were ignored: for instance, in 1992 the municipalities of Misterbianco, San Giovanni La Punta, Adrano and Mascali were all dissolved because of mafia control.

 

‘Reducing the angle of view’,

 

‘Bricolage’ of institutional practices and the ‘territoires circulatoires’. While the United States were drawing their metropolitan geographies, Catania was searching for a new social frame of reference. Italian political events destabilized local ties and this led to the need for a new institutional mediation between old and new dominant groups as well as between the political world and society. Ahead of the national law, the first universal suffrage election of the progressive centre-left Mayor re-constituted a bridge between the old groups linked to building activities and the new ones representing commerce and the local press. Subsequently, the interaction between the Mayor, and the conservative President of the province – also elected with universal suffrage - made Catania emerge as a bricolage (Weick 1993) of institutional practices coming from three different networks.

The first was a new formal network, under the banner of transparency[11]. It was constituted by the Major and organized socio-economic forces and based on the Regional Contract  Catania Sud for the renewal of the Waterfront: the city had access to the European Community Support Framework 94/99, as a potential area for tourism and the service sector. The second was an informal network and re-proposed old ways of interaction. It was constituted for new public works,  intersected the previous one and involved national politicians, the Province, the Municipality, new and old pressure groups, and mafia clans. The third network, new and of an uncertain nature, was constituted with regard to the new Master Plan instructions on the renewal of degraded neighbourhoods. On one hand, the European ‘Urban Programme’ for the historical centre was based only on the interaction between the Mayor and the University without any enactment of social mobilization; on the other hand, the nationally supported Integrated San Cristoforo Programme and the Neighbourhood Trappeto Nord Contract, only permitted the setting up of private partnerships strongly influenced by local authority directives (La Greca 1999).

With regard to such networks, the 10 Neighbourhood Municipalities instituted in 1995[12] played a very modest role. On one hand, they were ambiguous administrative units. Decentralization simplified rules for the existing government levels and made programmes more manageable but did not produce urban innovation:  no action was taken to stimulate a political community building process. Secondly, the division of Municipalities seemed to be based on the idea that cities can be ‘re-founded on place’ (Donzelot 2003). As a result, it did not pay attention to the ‘ territoires circulatoires’ (Tarrius 1993), namely, to how different temporalities, collective memories and practices were building a multiplex Catania. A local young and low-income population was leaving the historical centre to live temporarily on the edge of the city, while waiting for stable accommodation; a population coming from the Southern hemisphere was catapulting into the most degraded part of historical centre to be trapped by the mafia rules of the rent market. Furthermore, a mixed low-income population, both local people and immigrants, was moving from the city centre to the most productive towns in the hinterland while another immigrant population  was moving from the city to the coast agglomeration and mixing with the high-income resident population. Moreover, a disobedient population was coming from the ‘other’ city to the degraded neighbourhoods for reasons of  social solidarity and, finally, a military American population was imposing itself in the metropolitan area. 

 

Towards the Capital of the Mediterranean (2001-2004)

 

‘Extending the angle of view’,

 

Military population in the metropolitan area and the Net Economy in Catania. The national electoral win of the conservative coalition and the events related to the 11th September and the war in Iraq  have strengthened the bonds between Italy and the United States. As a result, at local level, there has been greater collaboration between the American government and the Province of Catania. With regard to anti-terrorism security and control of illegal immigration, an agreement was signed in 2003[13] regarding expansion of the military base and the building of new American residential compounds in the metropolitan areas. At the same time, the impact of the base has been kept secret: for instance, American water waste deprives the poorest neighbourhoods in Catania and in the other municipalities of the province and, moreover, local governments  and the Sicilian Region are financing the development of the electrical installation for the navy base (Mazzeo 2004). Meanwhile,  the existence of private police, American autonomous  courts, American contempt for Italian judicial authorities and  mistreatment of Italian employees  highlight the de-legitimisation of the Italian State and the seriousness of a conflict kept secret from Italian citizens: rather than a  welcome, the presence of the base can be considered to reflect the  subordination of the Italian State to that of America. This should be seen in the light of the fact that the KPGM, an international consulting multinational, states that Catania is the ‘ideal’ European city for investment in the Net Economy. Indeed, the Etna Valley has not produced a socially- rooted industrial development: endogenous and old technology-based units live with exogenous and more innovative ones while external economic capital, - whether private or public, national or international- is directed only to large industrial units (D’Amico 1999).

 

‘Reducing the angle of view’,

 

The strong tie between the Province and the Municipality. The Waterfront and the proximity police. The population of Catania, meanwhile, has declined - it was 313.110 in 2001 - while the large metropolitan polycentric agglomeration has grown. The city, although financially dependent[14] and suffering from high levels of tax evasion, is proposed as capital of the Mediterranean Sea in the economic Euro-Mediterranean space.

Thanks to the special powers given by the Premier, the new conservative Mayor cooperates strongly with the President of the Province[15] for the renewal of the Waterfront and the improvement of the urban transport network. It has to be acknowledged that after almost 10 years of European financing, a modest waterfront renewal and big hotels has made only new stakeholders emerge: big traders and old entrapreneurs linked to the service sector and the local press. On the other hand, the national cut in the welfare state has stopped urban renewal policies for degraded neighbourhoods. The Urban programme for Catania not having been confirmed and the Trappeto Nord and Librino  Neighbourhood Contracts having been stopped, local authorities focus on the Integrated Programme for San Cristoforo, a strategic area with regard to the port, the waterfront (and the new ‘Knights of Labour’).

On the other hand, the cut in the welfare state goes hand in hand with the strengthening of security through the implementation of the coordinated regional control plan and, at the same time,  the action of urban clearing in the historical centre.

The experimental phase of the control plan highlights its own limits. Four areas in the city centre are controlled by mixed patrols with a policeman, a carabiniere and a local policeman: visibility of the public order forces and restoration of the link between State and society are the plan key-words while ‘participant security’ seems to concern only an ‘arena’ for Police, Carabinieri, Customs and Inland Revenue Office and local police.

Beside, the urban reclamation of San Berillo – the failed city of the 70’s after the demolition in the historical centre – again highlights the limits of repressive action. It has set it free from prostitution but is leading to the emersion of new and illegal networks managed by mafia clans in the metropolitan area. Indeed, what seems to lie behind the reclamation is the new big urban business.  Waiting for long and ambiguous contentious jurisdiction regarding the future of the area to be settled, MetaCatania is the new civic association of young professional people, still linked to old groups and formed by the previous centre-left Mayor, formed to prepare the transition of the new urban business from the current coalition to the future one in 2005.

Meanwhile, the city has the most juvenile delinquency in Italy, and, above all, pays little attention to the failure of  racket complaints, the increase in  mafia crime and the strong tie between mafia, politics and economy, especially in the last four years.

 

Disobedience and the powerless city. It is Case Catania again: two magistrates have declared the enslavement of judicial power to the dominant political one. Twenty years after Case Catania ’82, the political actors have changed but an autonomous network governs the city discretionally: there are close relationships between investigators and the investigated, judicial protection for politicians and big traders near the mafia, political protection for contracts for public works managed by mafia clans.

On the other hand, the powerless city lives on the line between obedience and disobedience to the ‘neighbourhood’ rules. After ten years, decentralization has re-centred power, stiffened routines and produced more extreme segregation. 

Neighbourhood rules corrode the social personality (Sennett 1999), limit collective action and reduce socio-economic diversity. In a city 46,1% supported by trade (D’Amico 1999), rules of violence applied against the ‘little man’ have caused the urban monopoly of big traders to emerge and gradually substitute the ‘little man’. The big traders are strongly protected by mafia clans and by the use of political discretion in the management of commercial licences. Moreover, the ‘rules’ exploit people’s personal situations. An unemployed couple with four children may agree to keep a pitbull in exchange for  two rented rooms; money for recruitment in the electoral roll assures votes from large family networks;  only mafia networks help people to find a job not declared to the inland revenue as an alternative to unemployment and bad company; disobedience to mafia rules is punished by exile in other countries, not by murder anymore; mafia control on juvenile exploitation and prostitution traps Albanian children and African women into the most degraded spots in the historical centre. This city does not identify itself with the Neighbourhood Municipalities and draws up new urban plans where reference points are neither official institutions nor mafia clans. The powerless city has trust in the disobedient Catania and is building up extra-political cooperation with it. This is hindered by formal institutions but is made up of dialogue, financial and cultural autonomy and contexualized actions. For instance, Gapa was evicted from Catania municipality premises but funds for itself the purchase and the restoration of the new premises: as a result, they are going to open an anti-mafia library in San Cristoforo while the Municipality gives its social centre to the Neighbourhood Church. Mani Tese at Monte Po is on the street while the local authority gives empty and large premises in the neighbourhood to extra-local uses. Moreover, Iqkbal Masih, an informal group, has been working on social malaise in Librino for 10 years and Babilonia , another autonomous group formed by architects and doctors, attempts to organize a bottom-up voice against the big urban businesses involved in the restoration of the San Berillo area in the historical centre.

The disobedient Catania, thus, can be considered the only bridge (Granovetter 1973) linking urban ‘ghettos’ to a new and larger affective urban space, breaking up stable local order and acting for cultural diversity.

 

 

Bridges for self-subversion

 

We have begun to look at the metropolitan space as a “set of problems”(Dente 2000) of variable scale and temporality and it is useful to explore the ambiguity of  the government’s transformation processes. Beyond the pre-defined levels of government, transactions - be they tangible or intangible- should be dealt with in order to make empirical government layers emerge.

Catania is certainly not governed by rules of the State but, probably, it is influenced by carefully built social frames. This leads one to think about the link between power, social order and innovation and, as a result, about the sense of democracy.

Sociological theories have faced power and social order without acknowledging the link between action and the cognitive dimension. Relying on the former, power degenerates into a struggle against any form of determination; relying on the latter, what emerges is the question of control and the preservation of social order. Indeed, by acknowledging the link between action and the cognitive dimension, what emerges is the ambivalence of power. Power is manager of the contradictions arising from the link between the need for symbolic-normative determination and the indeterminacy of the complexity of action (Crespi 1999): it lies on the border between coercion and consensus, between structural and emotional elements. The interwoven events related to Etna Valley, the growing north-american immigration and the city reflect the ability of the institutional power to be mobile. On one hand, the title “Capital of  the Mediterranean” succeeds in filling up the emptiness of a no man’s land, the metropolitan area, where limited local and international interests deprive the State-Nation of authority as well as attacking the sense of a ‘national’ democracy. On the other hand, decentralization after 10 years has simplified the rules of existing powers but complicated those between existing powers and citizens. Decentralization has led to a progressive hierarchisation of  capabilities and the predominance of exclusive groups. Moreover, the re-centralization of power at a local level – more than decentralization – has perpetuated, in the most marginalized urban contexts, a cognitive dissonance between what one is socially defined and what one is and, as a result, limited individual and collective action.

The multi-temporality of globalization, by contrast, takes ‘the world out of frames’ (Nancy 2003) and reduces the ambivalence of existing powers. Will the title “Capital of the Mediterranean” last as long as that of ‘Milan of the South’ ? The less effective social frames are, the more the State-nation is reduced to a local police district, the less capable the government is of managing the conflicts. Globalization is changing the nature of conflicts: from the +/- form , characterising the  last 40 years after the  second post-war period, to the new o/o form (Hirshman 1997).

This calls for new treatments of conflict and, as a result, for innovative forms of democracy. But cultural diversity does not arise from  an “arena” where people can compare each other freely nor from the visibility of the link between State and society nor from the preservation of cultural identities. Cultural diversity comes  from an extra-political cooperation based on the joint action of individual resources as an answer to specific problems (Pellizzoni 1998).

Thus, a new form of democracy, maybe, should ‘mix’ the ‘territoires circulatoires’ (Tarrius 1993) and invisibly move  powerless social groups from the neighbourhood space to a greater space of belonging: give time for engangement, for disengangement (Elias 1988) and, finally, for self- subversion.

 

References

 

M. Balbo M., 1999, L’intreccio urbano. La gestione della città nei paesi in via di sviluppo, FrancoAngeli, Milano

Z. Bauman, 2002, La società individualizzata. Come cambia la nostra esperienza, il Mulino, Bologna

F. Crespi, 1999, Teoria dell’agire sociale, il Mulino, Bologna

P. Crosta, 2003, Reti translocali. Le pratiche d’uso del territorio come ‘politiche’ e come ‘politica’, Foedus, N.7

B. Dente, 2000 Il governo delle aree metropolitane. Note per un progetto di ricerca, Territorio, N.13

R. D’Amico, 1999, Catania: I quartieri nella metropoli, Le Nuove Muse, Catania

J.  Donzelot, 2004, Faire Societè, Seuil, Paris

N. Elias, 1988, Coinvolgimento e distacco, il Mulino, Bologna

C. Fava., 1991, La mafia comanda a Catania 1960/1991, Laterza, Bari

G. Fava, 1983, I quattro cavalieri dell’apocalisse mafiosa, I Siciliani

A. Giddens, 1999, Identità e società moderna, Ipermedium, Napoli

M. Granovetter, 1973, The strenght of weak ties, University of Chicago Press

A. Hirschman,1997, Autosovversione, il Mulino, Bologna

P. La Greca, 1999, Catania. Le radici del rinnovamento urbano, in P. Palermo, Il programma Urban e l’innovazione delle politiche urbane, II Quaderno, FrancoAngeli/DIAP, Milano

A. Mazzeo, 2004, La Mega Sigonella, Militarizzazione, mafia e conflitti, www.terrelibere.org

J.  Nancy, 2003, La creazione del mondo o la mondializzazione, Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino

L. Pellizzoni, 1998, Conoscenza, deliberazione e cooperazione, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, N.4

G. Saladino, 1975, L’impero edilizio dei fratelli Costanzo, L’Ora, 11

M. Santoro, 2003, Il positivismo narrativo di Andrew Abbott e l’eredità della Scuola di Chicago, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, N.4

R. Sennett, 1999, L’uomo flessibile: le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale, Feltrinelli, Milano

R. Selmini,, 2004, La sicurezza urbana, il Mulino, Bologna

A. Tarrius, 1993, Territoires circulatoires et espaces urbains, Les Annales de La Recherche Urbaine, N. 59-60

A. Tosi, 2001, Quartiere, Territorio, N.19

L. Violante, 2002, Il ciclo mafioso, Editori Laterza, Bari

K. Weick, 1993, Organizational Redesign as Improvisation, in G. Hubert, W. Glick, Organizational change and Redesign, Oxford University Press, New York

 

 

 



[1] The research work is going on thanks to the bricolage of different perspectives - mainly, those of neighbourhood residents, the association GAPA working in San Cristoforo, the Anti-racket Catania surgery, the two magistrates of the ‘Catania Case’.

[2] Police, in a modern meaning, comes with the judicial body and the institutionalization of prison.

[3] Thanks to the Safer Cities Programme in Italy, urban security has been faced with a decentralized approach. Regions and cities attempt to break up the centralism of security in two ways, firstly by involving the Mayor and making him responsible for security issues and secondly by linking social, situational prevention and control/sanction with regard to local policies (Selmini 2004)

[4] formed by representatives of peripheral State bodies, unions, universities, managers of public services and public utilities, experts.

[5] Sicily has a special constitution  in  the Italian government framework.

[6]the Cassa of  Mezzogiorno gave financing without security up to 85%    

[7] regional law 84/76

[8] “ Their link with mafia was agnostic: we do our business you do yours! We want to build roads, buildings, bridges, to be owners of banks and agricultural firms. This is our business. You want to manage drug-trafficking: this is your business! And you want subcontracts for excavation works and transport: and so be it! But we want neither bombs nor criminal persecutions, nor extortion, nor do we want our sons, brothers, relatives and friends to be kidnapped”  (Fava  1983).

[9] “last September (1981), we met Costanzo, Rendo (…) and we decided on a binding  agreement: we’ll leave the small works for one or two billions to the little men, so that they can grow or at least live. We’ll deal with the rest! (Francesco Finocchiaro, interview with D’amico 1983)

[10]  regional law  9/86 ahead of the national law 142/90 on metropolitan cities

[11] The first Protocol for legality was signed by the Major and the Prefect.

[12] following  national law 142/90 and the subsequent regional law 48/91

[13]  In the framework of Mega III Programme for the infrastructure development and the Pi-esse (Proliferation Security Initiative) USA-Europe, a plan of interdiction for transfer of arms of mass destruction or their components (Mazzeo 2004)

[14] New  European community  Framework, national laws on research and tourism.

[15] ex-vice Major, twice arrested.