Essere (in)appropriate. Rigenerazione delle periferie e forme intrusive di violenza urbana

This paper explores how and why specific forms of everyday intrusive urban violence could be understood as consequences of the local implementation of the Italian approach to urban regeneration. This approach is structured around the category of decaying periphery, a label that condensates the discourses on urban decay and decorum - and that produces institutional forms of territorial stigmatization. The example shown by this paper is drawn from an ethnographic research focused on the regeneration project called “Oltre la Strada”, presented to the government by the Municipality of Brescia. The goal is to show a specific form of intrusive urban violence, that is institutionally sustained and legitimated by class, gender, and racially polarized urban (self)representations and narratives – namely, definitions of urban (im)properness. These stigmatizing representations constitute the interpretive frame through which residents (particularly women and transgender) experience their everyday life spaces of the neighborhood, that has been labelled as a decaying periphery by the Municipality and by the Government.