Avanzi di città. Una lettura antropologica della marginalità urbana.

Urban leftovers. An anthropological reading of urban marginality Fear of what is “different” increasingly lurks in modern cities. This fear leads to fragmentation and the creation of barriers whereby “the other” remains confined in the most marginal zones of the city. Marking borders is reassuring: on the one side there are the “good” people (people like us), on the other side the “bad” people (immigrants, outcasts, the Roma). This favours a criminalisation of poverty and a punitive approach against the most underprivileged section of society, with an impact upon the lived experience of the city. Stigmatised neighbourhoods become isolated from the rest of the urban context, and their bad reputation even pushes some districts further away from the town centre. Social distance matters more than spatial distance. The representations and narratives surrounding such stigmatised neighbourhoods become internalised by the inhabitants. The peripheral neighbourhoods become a lifestyle, an anthropological condition where social and physical space overlap. An anthropological reading of urban marginality can help us realise that what looks so different is actually more similar than we ever imagined and can help us discover that we not only have to fight against those who commit crimes, but also against the structural causes that promote these types of actions. Punitive measures are not a solution when it comes to dealing with crime, instead a greater investment in social programmes and policies is needed.