After the mobilizations of 1968–1969, a new view towards the urban question began to appear in the discourse of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It was a change of perspective, which signaled a significant evolution in the communist culture during the seventies: the city emerged alongside the factory as the main place for the formation of a political identity, while the idea of building a sense of a civic urban community started to undermine the traditional primacy of class consciousness.
Was this evolution just the result of the recognition of the ongoing changes in the Italian metropolises, which were struggling with the effects of the economic crisis, the demographic stagnation and the industrial decentralization? Or was this new vision also influenced by the echoes of a neo-Marxism that, right at the end of the sixties, placed the city at the center of the analysis of the transformations of capitalism? And finally, how much was the new discourse on the city conditioned by the development of a new political strategy for realizing a »historic compromise« between communists and Catholics, working class and middle class, to legitimize the PCI as a responsible force for the national government?
My aim is to reflect on these questions, highlighting some issues and interpretative models that structured the PCI’s discourse on the city in electoral propaganda, political documents and party press during the seventies. The analysis is focused on the view of the PCI’s leadership, which obviously did not necessarily match with the militants’ beliefs. However, this perspective sheds light on the interconnection between the evolution of the political context and the transformation of the idea of the city in communist culture.
The article is divided into five parts: in the first part, I point out the role of the city in the Gramscian tradition; in the second part, I reconstruct some features of the urban paradigm introduced by neo-Marxist theories in the late sixties, which proved to be present also in the reflections of the Italian communists; in the third part, I analyze the new representation of the city that emerged in the Party during the first half of the seventies; in the fourth part, I examine the impact of this discourse on the programs of Left municipal administrations in some major cities after the electoral victories in 1975–1976; in the final part, I recognize a new turn of the Party’s view on the urban question at the end of the seventies, which can be interpreted as a consequence of the abandonment of the political strategy for a »historic compromise«.
It is not surprising that the city played an important role in the political analysis of the Italian communists since the twenties. In a country like Italy, with an ancient urban tradition and a fragile industrial structure, the characteristics of urban development couldn’t fail to attract attention as essential items for understanding the peculiarities of national society. Actually, as is shown in Karl Marx’s analysis, the relationship between the city and the countryside was considered crucial, but in the Italian case this link soon assumed a paradigmatic significance of a late and ambiguous modernization of the country. In this regard, Antonio Gramsci’s reflections were particularly meaningful: they revealed a complex evolution in relation to the effort to harmonize the Marxist theory with the historical Italian experience.84
In January 1920, Gramsci published an article in L’Ordine Nuovo where the relationship between city and countryside was seen as forming an insoluble opposition: on one side is the space of progress, modernity, the »historical and spiritual conquests«; on the other is the place of tradition, conservation, and basic needs. When one prevailed, the other regressed, according to a dialectical model that couldn’t find a synthesis.
Just as the city, this organ of industry and civic life, was the instrument of capitalist economic power and the bourgeois dictatorship, so will it also be the instrument of the communist economic power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian dictatorship will preserve this magnificent apparatus of industrial and intellectual production, this driving force of civic life, from the ruin which is looming so threateningly over it. Bourgeois power, corrupted and devastated by the imperial war and the economic consequences of that war, is now revealing the progress of its decay in the cities, which are steadily declining in comparison with the countryside. […] The proletarian dictatorship will save the cities from the ruin.85
According to Gramsci, if the city had contributed to the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, later it threatened to be overwhelmed by the »decay« of the bourgeois power, which left room for the countryside, for its »usurers«, die-hard opponents of modernity. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat would be able to save the »modern city« and its civilization, ensuring »peace« and »fraternity« with the countryside.86
More than a decade later, in some well-known notes written in prison, Gramsci explored the relationship between the city and the countryside in the Italian experience further. Compared with the previous analysis, a much more complex picture emerged: its meaning was less easily decipherable, even contradictory in some respects. It was no coincidence that Gramsci recognized this relationship as a source of some historical peculiarities relating to the national society.
An »industrial« city is always more progressive than the countryside which depends organically upon it. But not all Italy’s cities are »industrial«, and even fewer are typically industrial. […] Urbanism in Italy is not purely, nor »especially«, a phenomenon of capitalistic development or of that of big industry. Naples, which for a long time was the biggest Italian city and which continues to be one of the biggest, is not an industrial city: neither is Rome—at present the largest Italian city. Yet in these mediaeval-type cities too, there exist strong nuclei of populations of a modern urban type; but what is their relative position? They are submerged, oppressed, crushed by the other part, which is not of a modern type, and constitutes the great majority. Paradox of the »cities of silence«.87
According to Gramsci, it was the socio-economic profile of the city which determined its relationship with the countryside. In Italy the dualism between modernity (city) and tradition (countryside) would also have developed within the urban world, which would not have had an industrial profile prevalent enough to relegate the rural world to a subordinate role. But, of course, the nature of this opposition was also cultural: the construction of »ideological« fronts capable of gathering different social groups. However, in this process, the sides might have been confused, because sometimes the paradox happened wherein a »rural type« was more progressive than an »urban« one.88
This apparent ambiguity did not prevent Gramsci from using the relationship between the city and the countryside as the main paradigm of the territorial and social divisions of the nation. It also shaped his interpretation of the Southern question: in fact, the dualism between city and countryside stood out as a kind of conceptual matrix of the opposition North-South within Italy.89
In the wake of Gramsci, after the war, PCI secretary Palmiro Togliatti also highlighted the relationship between city and countryside as one of the essential aspects of national history, and inevitably as one of the decisive issues for the construction of the »Italian road to socialism«. But it is significant that he urged the Party to improve its knowledge of the urban world to the same level as that of the countryside, stressing that middle-class support for the communists was higher in rural areas than in cities. In many ways, indeed, the PCI’s leadership was aware of the problems which the communists had in recognizing the progressive forces in urban societies. It was no coincidence that in Emilia, the stronghold of communist power, where the practice of an alliance among workers, peasants and middle classes was considered a success, Togliatti underlined that in some cases the countryside had shown the »tendency to be more socially advanced than the city, precisely because there capitalism has made more rapid progress, while in the city structures of artisan economy continue to be prevalent«.90
This reversal of roles between city and countryside was emblematic of the difficulties the communists had to face in order to reconcile Marxist theory with Italian modernization. The persistence of a mixture of urban premodernity and rural modernity delegitimized the classical theoretical opposition between urban progress and rural backwardness, weakening the idea of a primacy of the city which should foster the communist leadership. For Togliatti, immediately after the war, the city was not yet the appropriate site where one could measure the modernization of the nation and the transformation of the strategies of capitalism. Only in the early sixties, when economic growth and migration from the countryside were changing the faces of many Italian metropolises, would the communist leader also speak of the »big new real estate« as a »class force« (placed after the »big monopoly« and the »big land ownership«), which was born »from the development of the city, the extension and the movement of the industrial areas and the speculation on the land«.91 According to him, it would have been necessary to introduce »expropriation measures of the building sites« to limit this new force.92
Here it is not difficult to identify echoes of the first political conflicts over city planning and urban development, which had involved the communists alongside some liberal-radical groups during the fifties. Especially in Rome, the main example of a bureaucratic and »parasitic« city, the PCI had begun to profile the political struggle based on the contrast between urban land rent and »productive« forces. According to the communists, on the one hand there were big land owners and real estate investors allied with financial powers, the Vatican and Christian Democrat municipal administrators which were all responsible for having fueled an abnormal growth of the speculation; on the other hand there were the down-and-outs of the borgate, the working class and part of the middle classes who were all victims of urban devastation and degradation of living conditions in the suburbs.93 Furthermore, this contrast was matched by allegations of abuse made by some liberal intellectuals against the Roman Christian Democrat municipal administration. In this regard, one of the best examples was the journalist Antonio Cederna, who published several reports on the urban havoc of Rome in the liberal magazine Il Mondo: in these articles he never failed to underline how speculation, which had flourished after state unification, had reached its triumph during the fascist era and again later in the period of Christian Democrat hegemony.94
At the end of the sixties, along with the student and worker protests, the mobilizations of the unions for the improvement of public services and the struggle for housing, neo-Marxism’s issues and slogans influenced the debates about the urban question in Italy too. A new language was coined, which was different from that of the old communist tradition.95 It became a main feature of the New Left organizations, but also influenced the rhetoric of the PCI. In fact, during the early seventies, in party documents and propaganda, it is not difficult to find echoes of new representations of the urban phenomenon which reveal an affinity with some of the main arguments of neo-Marxism. Above all, there was an influence coming from France, especially from the writings of Henri Lefebvre, which were soon translated into Italian. Lefebvre, particularly in his most political texts such as Le droit à la ville (1968, translated into Italian in 1970), La révolution urbaine (1970, translated into Italian in 1973) and La pensée marxiste et la ville (1972, translated into Italian in 1973), raised and formalized questions which, in some respects, influenced the reflections of the PCI on urban issues: the transition from the factory to the city as an appropriate site for the formation of a political identity, the contrast between urban civilization and industrialization, consumerism as the main connotation of the contemporary metropolis, the essential function of the urban center for the survival of the urban community, the claim for a »right to the city« that reassesses the role of culture even in the imagination of an »ephemeral city« capable of building alternative urban identities to capitalism. Lefebvre recognized the metropolis as a laboratory for experimenting with new ways of capitalist accumulation, but he also called for a cultural interpretation of urban development, which should be reinvented through the affirmation of a new humanism, »the humanism of the urban man«.
The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life. […] Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization. Here again, as a century ago, it denies and contests, by its very existence, the class strategy directed against it. As a hundred years ago, although under new conditions, it gathers the interests (overcoming the immediate and the superficial) of the whole society and firstly of all those who inhabit. Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere.96
Also other Marxist scholars, such as Manuel Castells and David Harvey, insisted on considering the urban question as a privileged subject for measuring the coercive force of new capitalism. Their writings were also translated into Italian, in particular Castells’s La question urbaine (1972, translated in 1974) and Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973, translated in 1978). Through distinctive approaches, different also from that of Lefebvre’s, they drew attention to the function of the city as a device of control and social alienation, of which the middle class would be a victim too. In this perspective, especially Castells described the city as the place of social reproduction and considered urban policy as »an essential element in the formation of class alliances, in particular in relation to the petty bourgeoisie«. In his judgment, indeed, the »more important the class alliance in a particular conjuncture, the more essential is the relation to the urban«, and conversely »the more the construction of proletarian autonomy is involved, the less important this theme is«.97
During the seventies many of the Marxist theories recognized the existence of a new configuration of the relationship between »rent« and »profit« in urban development, but they interpreted it in very different ways. For an Italian Marxist scholar, Vincenzo Bentivegna, these diverse approaches could be summarized in a basic antithesis: on the one hand there were those who stressed that anachronistically »rent« had taken over »profit«, outlining a new conflict between real estate ownership and the rest of the community; on the other there were those who believed in the complete subordination of »rent« to »profit«, reinforcing the main antagonism between capitalists and the working class. According to this perspective, in the first case it was possible to conceive of an alliance between the »productive« forces, capitalists and workers, struggling against the »parasitic« bloc of real estate; in the second case, instead, the insolubility of the conflict between capitalists and the working class left space for the construction of a progressive alliance including the small property owners.98
Since 1969 the PCI had been aware that the urban question was acquiring a new political significance. Not by chance, at the end of October 1969, in the aftermath of the first strikes for housing, the Party organized a national conference in Rome on the »right to housing and to a city for men«.99 During the meeting many speeches reiterated a traditional view of the »capitalist city, selective and segregating« but they also introduced new themes and images into the communist discourse: the recognition of the political role of the »neighborhood« as the place where the social alliances of the working class »grow and come true«, the need for a »civic and cultural reform« of urban society, the impossibility of separating the struggle in the factory from the struggle in the city and the mobilization for a »new urban condition« which, in some cases, also meant putting a stop to building development. Although Pietro Ingrao, one of the most influential leaders of the PCI, concluded the conference by reclaiming a more conventional view of the problems of the city, including the primacy of the factory and the denial of an alliance between workers and industrial entrepreneurs against urban land rent owners, there was widespread agreement that, as the former head of the city planning commission in Bologna Giuseppe Campos Venuti pointed out, the struggle for housing and urban development constituted »a whole new battleground« that was different from that of the factory. Furthermore, this »new battleground« was considered essential to planning an anti-capitalist strategy also because the »solidarity between urban land rent and profit«, which until then had appeared as an Italian peculiarity, started to become a significant phenomenon also in England, France and Germany.100
The »evils of the city« began to be a subject much discussed within the Party. In March 1972 the national congress devoted particular attention to it. In an indictment against the damages caused by the »economic miracle«, the secretary Enrico Berlinguer complained about the »monstrous development of the cities as places of speculation and parasitism« and invited the government to »cut the nails of big land speculation and make the structure of our cities more humane and rational«.101 Later Renato Zangheri, mayor of Bologna, emphasized the »exploitation of man not only as an employee but as a citizen«, and stressed the existence of »an urban malaise, urban protest, perhaps even a revolt, so far silent but deep, against the way of life in our capitalist cities« which, in his opinion, would become a source of struggles and alliances for the Party.102 In these discourses the idea of the anti-working class function of the capitalist city still persisted, but the image of the seriously ill metropolis also emerged, degenerated by its mechanisms of development, of which all the citizens would have become victims, except for a privileged few.
This representation became also dominant in the party press who, by the end of the sixties, had already committed to portraying the city as an »unnatural environment«, suffering from the »disease of progress«.103 Gradually a new image of the metropolis emerged, which put aside class logic. If before, as Ingrao wrote about Rome, only »the slum dwellers, the low-income workers, the dispossessed of the squalid suburbs, the people removed from the renewed historical center, the women crushed from two jobs« paid for the »absurd development« of the city, »now these costs overwhelmed everyone«.
Even though they receive many enticements and promises of privileges from the Right and from the DC, the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant, the small producer also pay: in hours of life consumed in traffic chaos, in pollution, in lack of greenery, in severe deficiency of the most basic services. The price is not only material: it is isolation, neurosis, absence of community life, crisis of the family.104
The idea of a widespread urban malaise which involved all the citizens was strengthened by the energy crisis of 1973–1974, the introduction of austerity measures and the new alarm for what was seen as an environmental emergency in the big metropolises. In a conference held in several Italian cities at the beginning of 1975, Zangheri stressed the pervasive effects of this urban degradation. »The whole city is subjected to capitalist use. And everyone suffers, more or less, even the clerk, the student, the merchant, the professional. Sure, some citizens are compensated by higher earnings. But who would say that they escape the difficulties and hardships of urban life?«.105 Zangheri saw the risk of an »end of urban living«, determined by a real »leap backward«, a cultural »regression«, which would have led the Western world from the order of the ancient city to the chaos of the contemporary city. In his view, therefore, everyone would have to fight the »agents that cause cancerous processes«, including the removal of the working class from the historical centers and the urbanization of the countryside.
I wouldn’t talk of a right to the city, which is equivocal expression, but a right of the city to its liberation, even to the recapture and redefinition of its identity, because the urban sprawl, as it has been observed, leads to the loss of the ecological and cultural peculiarities of the cities. The »urban model« tends to dissolve in the process of urbanization. The metropolitan region is already an element of denial of the city. If this is severe everywhere, it is very serious in Italy, where the city has historically represented an original national character, but it risks, perhaps more than elsewhere, to fail.106
In this dark picture of the dissolution of the modern city, a hope survived: it was Bologna, the city administered by the communists since the end of the war, which strengthened its significance as an urban alternative model in the seventies.107 This was due to the plan of »social restoration« of the historical center, which aimed to protect not only the old buildings but also the native population. Nevertheless, it was also due to a more balanced relationship between city and countryside, based on a plan for the metropolitan hinterland which tried to organize an efficient polycentrism.108 It is significant that, in the PCI’s discourse, on the one side Bologna looked like a successful experience of defense of Italian and Western urban tradition and on the other it seemed a kind of foreshadowing of the postmodern metropolis, well organized and functional, able to adapt the transformations of a post-Fordist society into a regional context. Furthermore, this portrait did not include references to the model of the »socialist city« as experienced in Eastern Europe. Actually, this absence is not surprising because it characterized most of the discussions inside the Party regarding all Italian metropolises.109
As explained by Zangheri on the eve of the local elections of 1975, the aim of the City of Bologna was to combine a regional polycentrism, fueled by the creation of »elements of development« around the small and medium-sized Emilian cities, with a defense of the historical center against speculation.
We try to keep the working class of Bologna in Bologna. This involves a whole series of consequences not only social, but also cultural: the identity of a city is often summed up in the historical center, in the population living there, in its culture, dialect and costume. Maintaining this identity also means preserving its function and its future, defending its original characters. How many times, indeed, their loss helps to create crisis and decadence?110
In this discourse, however, something changed after the electoral successes of 1975 and 1976. The PCI gained an outstanding increase in votes in the big cities, and conquered the leadership of major municipal governments such as Turin, Naples, and Rome. There, confronted by the new responsibilities of government and the complexity of the problems to solve, the experience of Bologna seemed to lose some of its exemplary strength. As the new mayor of Turin Diego Novelli emphasized, his city had very little in common with Bologna, where thirty years of Left government had kept »social structures« and the »collective consciousness« of the civic community safe. In Turin the development of consumerism had been devastating for the urban tradition, causing »failures at the level of consciousness«, even in the working class. There weren’t urban »squares« anymore, along with a »sense of community« and a »spirit of solidarity«. So, in order to build a new city »on a human scale«, it was no longer enough to cope with the transformations of the productive systems, the changes of the social classes, the deficiencies of infrastructure and urban services, but it was also indispensable to work for a regeneration of a »collective consciousness«.111
For this reason, the new administration introduced itself as an interpreter of a »new model of development« which, in the case of Turin, meant first of all to counterbalance Fiat’s dominance over the municipality. For too long, according to Novelli, the big automobile company had placed at her will the instruments of city government, determining all choices. So it was time for the municipal power to take over the leadership of the urban development, downsizing the influence of economic and financial groups, and encouraging greater participation from below.112 On the one hand, the new administration tried to rethink the localization of the industrial areas while preventing a working class exodus from the city. On the other, it engaged in the creation of neighborhood committees (consigli di quartiere) and in a welfare policy, which had as its primary objective the protection of disadvantaged social groups, especially the young and the elderly, as Novelli continually repeated.113 In this regard, the municipality introduced a whole series of measures to improve the functioning of primary school and support services, creating new initiatives such as Estate ragazzi, a program of activities for children and teenagers who remained in the city during the holidays, or a volunteer campaign for defending green areas and planting hundreds of trees in the city.
In the communist strategy all of these actions were supposed to strengthen social cohesion, drawing the periphery closer to the center, improving the environment and the quality of life, but also defending the industrial mission of the city, which remained an essential feature of any productive city in the PCI’s discourse. »Turin won’t be Detroit«, Novelli proclaimed proudly.114 In 1978 the municipality launched a long-term program, Torino anni Ottanta, which included massive investments and changes to the overall plan to relieve congestion in the city and heal the social and economic imbalances in the metropolitan area. The focus was on education, public parks, sports facilities, transport, public lighting and social services. But they also included measures to enhance the production structure, starting with the rehabilitation of municipal companies.115
A similar perspective was supported in Naples, where the communists felt called to a great battle, mainly cultural. That was because, as the regional secretary Antonio Bassolino explained, there was »a tangle of social classes with different interests, even within the working class, put together by the paternalism of Christian Democrats«, and therefore it was necessary to »create a new sense of collective responsibility«, indicating the purposes for which it was worth fighting.116 Not surprisingly, in Naples, unlike Turin, the new administration led by the communist Maurizio Valenzi initially presented its plan for the city’s revitalization as a moralizing campaign against the abuses of power: especially those of the municipal offices, which became subject for new programs of reorganization and control against waste and inefficiencies. In general, Naples appeared, from many points of view, to be in a situation more alarming than that of the northern metropolises: rampant unemployment, sanitary conditions below European standards, ungovernable traffic and municipality debt at record levels.117 Even though Novelli envied Valenzi for what seemed to him a better preserved social cohesion in the Southern city compared to the Northern one, very few believed that transforming Naples could be an easier task than revitalizing Turin. In the public discourse, indeed, complaints of the previous mismanagement of Naples were intertwined with the belief of a real impossibility to change the city. Meaningfully, Valenzi used the image of »cleaning« (pulizia) as a means of urban regeneration. »Naples can be cleaned«, said the mayor, meaning the opportunity to rebuild a healthy urban environment and a positive image of the city.118 This idea resulted in an attempt to curb political patronage in municipal offices and public companies, which together totaled nearly 31,000 employees; to fight illegal building expansion, fueled by a chronic shortage of housing; and to ensure regular cleaning of the roads, which was essential in a city still struggling with the damage caused by the cholera epidemic of 1973. The administration was also engaged in an effort to rethink the urban structure, stimulating the realization of social housing complexes in the peripheries, reworking the plan for an administrative and business center (Centro Direzionale), supporting the construction of the subway and the decentralized university branches.119 Despite the different context, however, even here the basic idea remained to consolidate the industrial structure of the city: a guarantee for a working-class presence, which was considered essential to strengthening the links within the urban community. This prerequisite, however, could clash sometimes with the ambitions to live in an ecologically sustainable environment. In the area of Bagnoli, for example, the Left administration avoided a decisive action against the big industrial complexes to reduce the impact of pollution in order to protect employment.
Also in Rome, the need to enhance the civic consciousness was a priority for the communists. Moreover, the capital appeared to be rapidly changing and many of its traditional representations looked obsolete. As the city secretary, Paolo Ciofi, wrote later, in 1978:
The plebeian, and even the bourgeois, have changed. The borgate of Pasolini no longer exist, replaced by large and composite neighborhoods, where the unemployed, the municipal employee, the teacher, the retired and the resident student live together: social groups often ambiguous, in a stratification difficult to untangle. There is no longer even the Via Veneto of Fellini. Today the managers of public companies and banks, the directors of institutions associated with the State intervention in the economy, the fixers of the Welfare State have a growing weight in the higher society. Even the working class is changing: there is, along with aging, the decline of the construction workers, in an irreversible process, due to the impossibility of repeating the building boom of the past years and also the introduction of new technologies. Meanwhile classes of skilled workers and technicians, related to the most advanced sectors of industry and research centers, grow. At the same time a new social figure, the mass intellectual, is spreading. Moreover, there is a whole underground Rome to bring to light: double and »black« work enormously widespread in public and private sectors, thousands of trades precarious yet somehow stable, thousands of small businesses officially non-existent, but which are however productive.120
Since August 1976, when Giulio Carlo Argan, distinguished art historian and member of the PCI’s indipendenti rank, was elected mayor of Rome, »rehabilitation« and »unification« became keywords of the new political course, which aimed to regenerate a city depicted as degraded and divided.121 In this regard, great attention was devoted to the periphery. In order to counter the illegal construction activity and the proliferation of shacks and makeshift shelters, the Left administration pledged to revive the social housing programs, promoting the realization of local plans (piani di zona). For this purpose, in 1978 a pact was signed between Rome’s City Council, unions and builders for the construction of a number of new residential complexes. The results of these efforts were contradictory. On the one hand, in fact, some of these new districts soon became degraded areas, ghettos of poverty and distress, which blatantly contradicted the municipal programs for the birth of a different periphery which was modern, functional and integrated to the city center. On the other hand, after decades of inaction, the demolition of thousands of shacks was started and the urbanization of entire areas, until then forgotten, was realized.
The projects for the renewal of the whole urban system instead remained on paper. There was not significant progress on the realization of an administrative and business district in the eastern periphery (Sistema direzionale orientale), which would have nevertheless continued to be the starting point of any reflection on the future of Rome, or on the development of the great archaeological park, which was meant to revolutionize the center and the south-eastern sector, extending from the Forum area to the remains of the Via Appia and including the hill slopes around the city. In general, indeed, the problem of coexistence between the needs of ancient and modern Rome remained unsolved.
This relationship, instead, found a successful synthesis in the experience of the Estate Romana, a program of cultural events organized by the culture assessor, Renato Nicolini.122 It included the staging of an outdoor cinema in the Forum ruins, the organization of concerts and artistic shows in the city center, the opening of exhibitions until late evening, and many other initiatives which drew thousands of Romans out of their homes, encouraging new forms of socializing and stimulating an unprecedented curiosity about unfamiliar places and entertainment. Beyond the controversy over »ephemeral« (in other words the excessive spectacular connotation of these initiatives), the Left administration managed to liven up and democratize the cultural profile of Rome, bringing out a new modern urban vocation which even became a model for other cities.123
In all these different municipal experiences, since the traditional economic and social categories no longer worked as interpretative keys of the new metropolis, the discourse of the PCI increasingly came to rely on cultural values which were also useful for designing an alternative vision of urban development. The Party leaders talked more and more about »integration« (with a significant reversal in the positive, compared to the rhetoric of the previous decade which denounced »integration« as subservience to capitalism), reinforcing the sense of looking for a civic identity more than a modernization of urban life. This idea of the city, ruled by the Left, fitted in well with the political strategy of the PCI for an alliance between working class and middle class, communists and progressive Christian Democrats, »productive« forces and the »new marginalized and excluded groups« (i. e. youths, women and the unemployed) in the name of a new development model which considered waste, individualism and insane consumerism as the main enemies.124 So the metropolis was profiled as a place of education for a new urban life, where the keywords »historic compromise« and »austerity« would have played a pedagogical role for the working class too. But, at the same time, the metropolis also emerged as a highly complex organism, where it was increasingly difficult to match the demands and needs of residents with ideological categories and dualistic interpretations of social conflict.
Not by chance, one of the most disconcerting surprises for the communist administrators was finding ever-increasing difficulty of dialogue with those urban working classes which were supposed to form the core of the most solid consensus for the PCI. In Turin, Novelli complained of the selfishness of a large part of the working class: according to him, it was concerned only with protecting its interests without any regard to the general context.125 In Naples, Valenzi was discouraged by looking at the growing protests against the municipality not only by the unemployed, who the communists claimed were at the center of their concerns, but also by the sectors of municipal employees, especially among the waste collectors, who had benefited from massive recruitment promoted by the new administration.126 In Rome, Argan’s municipal government was in some cases criticized by the borgatari organizations, which urged a greater boost in cleanup operations of the more marginal suburbs.
These tensions, fueled also by the initiatives of the New Left groups, undermined the action of the PCI administrators.127 Moreover, at the national level, after the experience of the governments of »national solidarity« and the collapse of the strategy of the »historic compromise«, the idea of a re-foundation of urban civilization based on the dominance of production interests over property and consumption had weakened. This was due, first of all, to the results of the general elections in June 1979, when the communists suffered a setback in the voting percentages, especially in big cities (Tab. 1).
|
Cities |
Parliament 1972 |
Regions 1975 |
Parliament 1976 |
Parliament 1979 |
|
Turin |
30,5 |
38,6 |
40 |
34 |
|
Milan |
24,2 |
31 |
31,7 |
27,7 |
|
Genoa |
34,3 |
41,6 |
41,5 |
37,5 |
|
Venice |
27,5 |
34,9 |
35,5 |
31,8 |
|
Bologna |
42 |
47,5 |
46,7 |
45,5 |
|
Florence |
35,1 |
41 |
40,9 |
38,4 |
|
Rome |
26,7 |
34,8 |
35,8 |
29,7 |
|
Naples |
27,8 |
35,3 |
40,8 |
30,6 |
|
Bari |
19,5 |
27,9 |
28,8 |
22,4 |
|
Palermo |
17,1 |
– |
24,4 |
16,8 |
|
Catania |
18,2 |
- |
28 |
18,2 |
Tab. 1: Voting percentages of the PCI in general and regional elections. Source: Rinascita, 22 (1979), 28.
Then the sociologist Aris Accornero wondered if the big cities were »an effect or an anticipation« of the problems of the Party: »But the metropolises, these large concentrations of workers, white-collar, proletarian, marginalized and privileged are not Sodom. They don’t perish because they are consumed by an internal illness. Maybe they are just a piece of society that gets out of our hand«.128
However, beyond the electoral defeat, the PCI started to feel that its interpretation of the urban phenomenon was no longer functional to the new political strategy for an »alternative« government. In July 1979 Berlinguer complained about some »errors of political line«, especially the »attitude towards home owners or small land propriety«.129 Three months later, the Central Committee underlined the importance of building development, and highlighted unambiguously the social value of home ownership, also as an investment tool.130 Two years later, at a new national conference on housing organized by the Party in Rome, senator Lucio Libertini opened the meeting with fierce criticism of the strategy of the previous »struggle against speculation«. In his judgment, indeed, it had been hegemonized for too long by »radical, Jacobin inspiration«:
[…] the punitive and repressive measures, while necessary to curb speculation, were privileged over a careful and positive consideration of the social needs. Rather than fighting for the right to housing, city and territory, removing obstacles made by rent and speculation, the primary goal became too often hitting rent and speculation even at the cost of crippling production. The market regulation issues, even though vital, have taken over the development issues.131
The Party turned to promoting the expansion of the building market, which was not to be overshadowed by the necessity to halt speculation. As Berlinguer claimed, the governance of the urban development meant not only the defense of weak interests, but also of »those groups of citizens that are small home owners, as well as all entrepreneurial forces, public, private and cooperative« that could contribute to »solving the problems of housing and directing a new regional development«.132
During the seventies the PCI’s discourse on the city overlapped, in some aspects, with the neo-Marxist view. It was a significant change of perspective, which emphasized the idea, already present in Gramscian and liberal-radical traditions, that it was necessary to defend the value of modern urbanity against capitalism. However, this exaltation of an anti-capitalist function of the city was connected to the Gramscian awareness of the complexity of urban life, especially in Italy where the impact of industrialization had not completely erased old social structures. Hence also the rejection of all »urban utopia«, of the city as a place devoted to a revolutionary advance, which was in contrast with some slogans of the New Left.
Nevertheless, in the political discourse, a new dialectic between real estate rent and urban civilization emerged, which tended to obscure the conflict of interest between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Moreover, what had long appeared as an Italian peculiarity became a common feature of a more general evolution in a new capitalism which, in some opinions, would have enhanced rent over profit.
This view was functional to the strategy of the Party which, through the keywords »historic compromise« and »austerity«, tried to build an alliance between workers, middle class, women, youths, the marginalized, with the ambition of creating new models of urban life. According to the PCI, victims of the capitalist city were no longer only the working class, but the entire citizenry, apart from a privileged few.
This discourse slumped at the end of the decade, along with the rise of mass unemployment, social protest and political violence in many Italian cities. Above all, the metropolises appeared to be the epicenters not only of the economic crisis, but also of the political instability which affected the Italian Republic. After the electoral successes between 1975 and 1976 and the emergence of new problems in the administration of big cities, the communists discovered that their interpretative criteria of the urban question did not work. Already in 1979, in the aftermath of disappointing results in the general election, the PCI encouraged a rethinking of urban policy for a new recognition of the importance of metropolitan development and the social role of home ownership.