2023-08-31 15:26:39
“I am convinced that what is happening is the explosion of an unease that has cultural roots and I don’t think it is a problem of undertows of delinquency that can be solved with the military garrison of the territory, which can be good but it is a symptomatic cure”. The Neapolitan writer Maurizio De Giovanni is convinced of this who, speaking with time.news about the rapes in Palermo and Caivano, argues that “the cause of this ‘illness’ is a problematic lack of attention: the suburbs abandoned by the institutions – like Caivano in Naples, the Zen of Palermo, Librino of Catania, Tor Bella Monaca in Rome, and others – have become real ‘non-places'”, says the author of ‘The bastards of Pizzofalcone’ quoting the famous French anthropologist Marc Augé .
Focusing on treating the symptoms, according to De Giovanni, doesn’t lead to much: “We can call the army, the Folgore, all the armed forces and put them on the street, but they can’t stay there forever and what happens when they go away? Everything goes back to normal first. To treat the causes of this disease, it is necessary to intervene on the schools, which are the first institutional garrison in the area”, observes the writer, underlining that “we need more institutes, a greater supply, decent school buildings and not dilapidated as it is now, more motivated and better paid teachers and full-time, because the kids must be taken off the street”.
For De Giovanni it is “an investment that certainly has costs, but lower than those we pay to deal with rampant crime. The identity of the place must be transformed with the institutional presence which is equivalent to a cultural identity. Only in this way can we transform non-places, which are disadvantaged suburbs, in places with an identity”, he concludes.
(by Pippo Orlando)
#cultural #identity #transforms #suburbs #nonplaces #places