Barrio San Siro: Structural Violence in the Peripheries of Milan

Barrio San Siro: Structural Violence in the Peripheries of Milan collects the results of five years of ethnographic research in San Siro, one of Milan’s largest public housing neighborhoods. It is a study that moves from a relational conception of urban space to analyze the structural violence that affects the margins of the Lombard capital, among the folds of the rhetoric of its development, its ＂rebirth＂, and its regeneration. Alongside ＂second-generation＂ youngsters, ＂abandoned＂ elderly people, struggling committees, associations, politicians, and officials, ＂Barrio San Siro＂ develops a multi-level interpretation that moves from everyday practices to local, regional and national policies. Like other Milanese peripheral neighborhoods, San Siro emerges - page after page - as a multicultural socio-spatial configuration, at once the epitome of global conditions, the intersection of diverging interests of social and institutional actors, the result of a local history that has led to a post-Fordist and neoliberal present. A critical and reflexive narrative, a monograph that from an urban margin elaborates its idea of the anthropology of the city.

Paolo Grassi is assistant professor in the Department of Human Sciences for Education at the University of Milano Bicocca.