Le Charme Discret de L’Anomie: Contested Spaces and Surfaces in Via Zamboni, Bologna

when it comes to talking about commodification of the city and gentrification, we do not simply have to inflect general concepts to a particular reality, but should also identify the specific ‘unhappiness’ of the place we are discussing. For what concerns Bologna unhappiness is that all the spurs of the process of the so-called gentrification are connected with the mythological machine of being ‘the capital of food’, which makes this process unique in its own way. Nevertheless, my aim is to evoke all the stages, including practices of police repression, inhabitant relocation and place resignification, along with the commodification of a public space ‘in the name of food’, or better on the pretext of food. In doing so, I will focus on the aesthetic and semiotic aspects of the conflict taking place in this very part of the city, which is played over the aesthetic concept of decoro. From Latin ‘decorum’, it indicates etymologically ‘what is good is to be done’, and it has a strong moral meaning translatable as ‘decency’. At the same time, it is interesting how decoro and the relative verb decorare also mean decoration or garnish, stressing their aesthetical tinge. What is decent, in the end, has to be decorated somehow, but how? And who decides which decoration is appropriate?