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Hidden Genoa 

Review by Rachel Heiman 

 

Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization 

by Emanuela Guano 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 

 

There has been an extraordinary amount of public interest and scholarly writing on the dramatic 

transformation of cities around the world through the powerful forces of global capital and state 

intervention. Anthropologists have long appreciated that citymaking cannot be fully understood without 

equal attention to the quotidian practices of city dwellers and the residual historical conditions that 

continue to matter and shape their cities. Emanuela Guano’s new book, Creative Urbanity: An Italian 

Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization, offers an exemplary contribution to this literature through 

providing a theoretically-rich, ethnographic portrait of struggling middle class residents in the 

economically precarious, post-industrial port city of Genoa, in northern Italy. These walking-tour 

guides, street antique dealers, festival organizers, and small-business owners are trying to make do 

through creative outlets that draw on their underutilized academic training and that align with affective 

commitments to their much-maligned city. In the process, they are incrementally recasting the image of 

their hometown—no easy task given Genoa’s legacy of political, state, drug, and gender-based violence 

and its post-1970s population-decline moniker as a “ghost city.” Yet contrary to the familiar story of 

creative production in the shade of corporate and state projects, which assumes standard teleologies of 

gentrification, Guano’s book throws into relief an account of urban transformation that involves equal 

parts sedimented materialities, stalled revitalization, and creative resilience. 

 

Guano is a native Genoese who left in the early 1990s to pursue an academic life that would have been 

foreclosed had she remained. Creative Urbanity is not an autoethnography per se, yet it is written with 



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a diasporic sensibility that infuses intimacy into the ethnographic stories of those who stayed and have 

faced chronic under-employment. As Guano beautifully explains in her introduction, when describing 

how she came to write a book on Genoa after years of ethnographic work in Buenos Aires, “Genoa 

always loomed large as the city that never ceased to intrigue, charm, and disappoint me. It tantalized 

me with memories of my youth and with changes it superimposed on them; it also tormented me with 

its imperviousness, and, most importantly, it marked my personal life through its refusal to host my 

future and its simultaneous unwillingness to let fully go of me” (p. 19). This affective richness is most 

vivid in the book’s historical first chapter, which charts the conditions and spaces of hope and 

hopelessness for Guano’s generation of first-time college graduates. Much of Italy faced uncertainty as 

the economic and political optimism of the late 1960s gave way to radical hopelessness in the early 

1970s, yet Genoa was hit particularly hard. Guano’s childhood memories are infused with the 

normalized violence of those times: of the left battling the right in the streets; of terrorist attacks during 

beach days with friends; of fascist police storming homes; of used heroine syringes littering the 

playground; of public harassment of women and girls by men of all ages. When neoliberal logics 

emerged in the 1980s, Genoa’s enduring left kept at bay corporate development interests, though the 

younger generation found inspiration in the rhetoric of entrepreneurial self-reliance: perhaps 

meritocracy might finally replace Italy’s ensconced gendered system of patronage and nepotism. But to 

no avail. In the 1990s, new immigrants and unemployed college-graduates began to revitalize empty 

city spaces, and along with a marina port redevelopment, Porto Antico, people started to emerge in 

once-feared public spaces. Yet this moment of hope also was short lived. The 2001 G8 Summit’s brutal 

state violence (the focus of chapter two) undermined Genoa’s attempt to enter the global stage as a city 

of promise, and the 2002 introduction of the Euro and related EU policies undercut Genoa’s bedrock of 

small businesses. The 2008 economic crisis was the final nail in the coffin: all remaining hope had 

turned into dystopian resignation.  

 

It is in this context that Guano analytically re-considers the notion of a “creative class,” reclaiming it 

from its much-derided association with Richard Florida’s writings and planning-consultancy empire. 

City planners in Genoa, like so many around the world, use Florida’s measures to determine the 

“creative index” of their city. Yet as Guano’s book reveals, Genoa’s high creative index does not come 

from the entrepreneurial elite hailed in Florida’s story, who are nurtured, encouraged, promoted, and 

invested in by state and corporate interests as a part of neoliberal developmentalism. The people we 

meet in Creative Urbanity are on the economic fringe and have no prospects of mobility or even 



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expectations of economic security. They became entrepreneurs as a last resort and typically hold 

several jobs, yet their modes of entrepreneurial cultural production and their daily movements in space 

are shaping Genoa in ways hailed by city boosters. Guano’s analysis in the ethnographic chapters of the 

book (chapters three to six) thus approaches the city, as she explains, “through the exploration of some 

of the subjectivities, practices, expectations, things, logics, and the built environment that contribute to 

its emergent formation: a process whereby neoliberalism is…only one of the forces at work.” (p. 23). 

 

Genoa’s built environment is the focus of chapter three, which sheds light on “sedimented spatialities 

and deeply ingrained lifeways [that] cannot be just as easily overwritten by comparatively recent—and 

spuriously homogenous—global dynamics” (p. 88). Most vivid is Guano’s discussion of the homes and 

neighborhood built by the aristocracy in the sixteenth century in what is now the gentrifying centro 

storico, a densely woven maze of four-story homes on narrow alleys built to emulate the design of 

Genoa’s Maghreb trading cities. The first floors of these homes, which have grand ceilings and internal 

courtyards, receive no sunlight, nor do the small second floors that once housed servants’ quarters and 

were built with low ceilings and small windows that measure only a few inches square. The third 

floors, where the aristocratic families lived, receive bright sunshine that streams in through large 

windows onto grand rooms with high ornamental ceilings. Directly above the “noble floor” is a small, 

buffer floor under the roof with low ceilings but brilliant light. As the neighborhood gentrified in the 

late 1990s and early 2000s, these homes took on contemporary class heterogeneity: middle-classes 

living on the sunny top two floors (e.g. artists and lawyers), with elderly and low-income immigrant 

families living on the more affordable first two floors. Unlike the common teleological story of 

gentrification, where middle classes displace the majority of long-standing working class and poor 

residents, leading to rejiggered segregated neighborhoods, here we see “vertical stratification” (p. 

91)—a spatialization of class inequality guided by the venerable built environment of centuries before.  

 

The next two chapters shift our attention to entrepreneurial practices, which like spaces of home are 

produced within local conditions of possibility. Guano brings us into the everyday lives of antique 

dealers (chapter four) and tour guides (chapter five) whose spatial practices are enmeshed too with the 

legacy of Genoa’s aristocracy but also Italy’s patriarchal gendered politics. Tour guides, for example, 

are largely women, who are leading tour groups of mostly other Genoese and are, as Guano suggests, 

“both empowered and restrained by Genoa’s own marginality” (p. 135). Unlike that of tourist havens 

Venice, Florence, and Rome, Genoa’s aristocracy was reluctant to flaunt its wealth publicly, so Genoa’s 



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urbanism is muted, with few iconic landscapes and grand piazzas for promenading. The city’s cultural 

wealth was largely hidden. Most tour descriptions use the language of “hidden Genoa,” a double 

entendre, Guano notes, for unseen aristocratic relics and an old city obscured by enduring discourses of 

crime and decline. Yet as Guano demonstrates, what also is made visible through these tours are 

Genoa’s entrepreneurial women, who have carved out a niche in what is typically a male profession in 

other Italian cities. They are creatively narrating Genoa’s lore on streets where women have long 

walked in fear and are conducting preparatory historical research with notebook in hand in its nooks 

and crannies. “As they do so,” Guano argues, “they sustain their business by proposing ever-new 

perspectives on sites that are often taken for granted, conjuring a range of emotions, ideas, and 

experiences that cast a different light on the urban everyday” (p. 153). They are altering the “urban 

imaginary of Genoa’s publics” (p. 118)—a feat celebrated by the state—and yet run up against 

regressive and undercutting forces including from the state itself, as when undercover police interrupt 

their tours to warn of criminal activities in the area. 

 

Guano’s final ethnographic chapter (chapter six) turns to Genoa’s Suq multicultural festival, which 

might seem at first glance a cliché of orientalist consumerism, with its location in touristy Porto Antico 

and its attention to the sounds, smells, tastes, colors, and textures of Genoa’s diverse urbanites from 

Morocco to Ecuador to Genoese regions. But Guano encourages us to view the Suq as a site of 

“political pedagogy” (p. 187), when understood in the context of Italian festival history, Italy’s 

nationalist fervor regarding food and the sensual, and practices within the festival itself, which includes 

a stage that doubles as a platform for cooking demonstrations and activist discussions of immigrant 

rights and ethical shopping. Guano is careful not to imply that the Suq and its booths of wares are free 

of orientalist logics. Rather, she suggests we view this popular festival as a site of “strategic orientalism 

and subversive hybridity” (p. 187). In a xenophobic moment when economic precarity is blamed more 

often on Ecuadorian youth than neoliberal policies, to place on equal footing Italian terroir and the 

culinary feats of ethnic others is a radical disruption. As such, relevant here, Guano argues, is not only 

the history of orientalist World’s Fairs but also the Italian sagre, a fascist era festival of local goods, 

services, and affective politics retooled for the current political economy. A particularly poignant 

moment is Guano’s discussion of “the basil man,” who dresses in medieval garb and marches through 

the Suq with aromatic flair. He is not there to protest the festival’s cultural pluralism, but rather the 

common enemy of all who have booths there: corporatization of local goods like basil and the growth 

of nearby malls that undercut small businesses. Guano convincingly articulates how we can 



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acknowledge the contradictions intrinsic in these spaces and view them as “a polemic alternative 

against the backdrop of [the] transformation of the Italian economy and its urbanscapes” (p. 185).  

 

It was a great pleasure to read Creative Urbanity. With Guano’s remarkable ability to vividly describe 

and interrogate a vast range of academic texts and theoretical arguments, it is an excellent book for 

graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in anthropology, urban studies, gender studies, and 

political economy. Readers may question Guano’s use of unnecessary strawman arguments for the 

inclusion of Mediterranean cities like Genoa in urban theorizing. She seems at times to suggest that the 

literature on urbanism is still dominated by discussions of North American and North Atlantic modes of 

gentrification and revitalization, when there has been a surge in recent years of writings on cities 

ranging from Mumbai to Cairo to Shenzhen. But this overplay in no way takes away from what is a 

remarkable book: Creative Urbanity renders visible people, places and practices that have until now 

not been given their due place in urban anthropology and the anthropology of the middle classes. 

 

Rachel Heiman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Urban Studies at The New 

School. She received her B.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and 

Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her research is driven by an interest in the 

cultural and spatial politics of class, particularly the interplay of political-economic changes and 

everyday lived experiences. Her most recent book, Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American 

Suburb (University of California Press, 2015) explores middle-class anxieties and suburban life in the 

United States. Her previous book, The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (SAR 

Press, 2012) is a co-edited volume with Carla Freeman & Mark Liechty of ethnographic research on 

the middle classes from a global perspective. Her current project, for which she has received grants 

from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, explores emergent 

subjectivities and modes of governance amid efforts to retrofit suburbia in the United States for a more 

sustainable future. 

 

 

 

© 2017 Rachel Heiman 


