The news has been reported by all the sites with great prominence. What can be said? How can we comment on this episode? First of all by bringing it back to its real dimension. It is an event that must be ascribed to that suffocating phenomenon that is urban violence. Characteristic, alas, of all metropolises. This observation does not intend to diminish the criminal significance of the fact. Nor to downgrade it to a practice to which we must resign ourselves. We cannot and must not get used to violence of any kind.
But it must be fought with all the tools that a democratic country has at its disposal. However, it is necessary to avoid even the slightest risk that episodes of this kind cause damage to the image of the city. Precisely at a time when in many respects the city is progressing. Unemployment is falling. Construction sites are opening. Projects are being formulated. One might say to the two scoundrels who attacked Neres “you are the past. The city is something else”. Even if problems remain that affect the quality of daily life of citizens and determine their perception. Such as urban hygiene. Waste. Regularity of transport. Disorderly traffic and parking (the news was the day before yesterday that firefighters and ambulances had difficulty reaching the site of the explosion in a lower Forcella area due to unauthorized parking) … and urban violence. But what can actually be done on this last front? The answer is complicated.
Certain deteriorating phenomena are neither right nor left. They are simply delinquent aspects that nest in the complexity of large urban agglomerations. A city cannot be suffocated by continuous acts of aggression. Otherwise, in the long run, people will prefer not to leave their homes. Not to go to the cinema. Not to sit at a bar table. The first thing that is needed is for the police to increasingly gain widespread control of the territory. “Also organizing, as far as possible, a disarmament campaign” as Marco De Marco argued some time ago. Too many weapons around. Too many guns, too many knives in the hands of young people. Is it repression? It is stupid to make it a semantic issue.
Delinquent phenomena are repressed. But without the excesses of control becoming themselves a way to discourage the free movement of citizens. There are experiments in the world that have been successful. For example in Ksansas City. Or in New York with the application of the broken window theory. “… the existence of a broken window (hence the name of the theory) could generate emulation phenomena, leading someone else to break a street lamp or a fire hydrant, thus starting a spiral of urban and social decay”. (James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling)
The goal is not to eliminate violent phenomena altogether. This is unfortunately wishful thinking. But at least to contain them. Individual safety is an indicator of the level of civilization of a community. It is a primary asset. And together with the tactical side of interventions (repression) we need to encourage a strategic side. Which, as Roberto Esposito argued some time ago in a wonderful piece, can be the push to create a community. People should be encouraged to find places to gather. Where the presence of the community is itself an antidote to violence.
In deserted neighborhoods, criminal phenomena thrive more. This is why I have always thought that the much-criticized movida should be regulated but not suppressed or hindered. It is clear that all this does not solve the problem. In Naples, as in Rome, as in Milan, as in Paris, as in New York. But it is the most that can be done. The problem is present elsewhere in more acute forms than in Naples. Where, analyzing data and statistics, it manifests itself perhaps with less, but still intolerable, intensity.
I believe that, despite the undeniable problems, the real Naples is better than the storytelling that wants it prisoner of a malevolent narrative that is hard to die. And Neres will also realize it.
I close by resorting (once again) to the words of Giancarlo Mazzacurati: «Perhaps there is no city in the world that speaks so much (and so badly) about itself: searching, investigating, regretting, condemning itself is almost a fixed topic of conversation, as frequent as observations on the climate, in England. A superficial signal of a deep and real problem that envelops, often suffocates life, even that ritual lament is ultimately a word of unsatisfied love, a verbal aggression that underlines unfulfilled expectations… it is a denunciation that waits and paradoxically dreams of being denied».