Whose Street Is This? Commercial Gentrification, Symbolic Ownership and Legitimate Uses of Public Spaces in a Changing Neighbourhood of Turin, Italy

This paper aims at investigating the interactions between commercial landscape, symbolic ownership and everyday practices in upgrading neighbourhoods. Focusing on the neighbourhood of San Salvario (Turin, Italy), it argues that commercial transformations have a major role in challenging established uses and representations, and in framing claims, visions and actions of different sets of actors over the same urban space.

Despite a long tradition of studies on gentrification and neighbourhood’s transformations, only in recent times the role and the socio-cultural impacts of changes of commercial and recreational landscape have been taken under careful examination. Processes of commercial upgrading should not be read only as markers but as active agents of change. New stores, cafés, clubs and night spots embody a powerful discourse that legitimates some uses, images and users while excluding others. In this frame, the street becomes a crucial space of friction, contestation and negotiation where broader dynamics constantly interact with everyday practices.

Right next to the city centre and the central railway station, San Salvario’s neighbourhood has recently turned from a multicultural, mixed, problematic area into the new core of leisure and consumption of Turin. The opening of new cafés, clubs and night spots has challenged the identity of the neighbourhood and the established uses of public spaces. In this setting, relying on almost two years of ethnographic research, the observation of via Berthollet allows us to examine dynamics and everyday practices of contestation, claims and negotiation over the legitimate uses and representations of public spaces. The analysis highlights the relevance of both space and time dimensions and it unveils the constant interactions between complex sets of actors, such as the established users of the street (mainly foreigners), the new users (mainly university students and young urban middle class), the residents, the commercial entrepreneurs and the local authorities.