Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place

Abstract

Lingotto used to be an important industrial site and a highly symbolic space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memories, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the last decades, following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. The analysis shows that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin's resilience strategies used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Furthermore, it shows how Lingotto is a highly resilient urban fragment and building. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve and stage local urban heritages, this paper offers an account of Lingotto's resilience, which highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingotto thus contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city, stressing the ambiguous role of the often-implicit politics of forgetting and amnesia in a framework of urban resilience.

Shops, food, regeneration and a controversial signature building in Turin, Italy

“…Over the years, PalaFuksas mirrored urban interventions based on the idea of the shopping mall as a space for neighbourhood regeneration; the use of culture in order to attribute meaning and function to unused buildings; the passage from an economy based on consumption of commodities (clothes) to an economic scenario focusing more and more on the consumption of experiences (food cultures); the growing (largely stereotyped) celebration of the diversity and multiculturalism characterizing the neighbourhood as vital elements for urban promotion, touristification and gentrification. All these urban development strategies originated expectations and delusions, ultimately leaving scars, signs and heritages which are still embedded in the materiality of the building, in its biography, physical layout, atmosphere and sense of place, and which can be explored and mapped (for example through fieldwork: see Colombino and Vanolo 2017). In this light, it is potentially possible to reflect on the methodological approaches which may allow investigating the relation between architectures, expectations and urban development paradigms: this paper has mostly focused on qualitative and archive research; other possibilities may include quantitative approaches (see for example Held 2020), the development of building biographies (McNeill and McNamara 2012;Wharton 2015), ethnography and research techniques focusing on emotional geographies (Lees and Baxter 2011), and further possibilities may be explored (Paterson 2011).…”

The work of foodification: an analysis of food gentrification in Turin, Italy

“…As a spatial catalyst, Mercato Centrale mimics the role played by Eataly in another part of the city, albeit with partially different intents. Eataly opened inside Lingotto, the historical former FIAT factory, still the most emblematic site of Turin's industrial past, located in the homonymous peripheral neighbourhood (Colombino & Vanolo, 2017). By spatializing food in certain ways, Eataly performed the official vision of passing from being a one-factory town to leveraging on what was broadly identified as the cultural economy, a symbolic passage from production to consumption, with food in the centre of this passage.…”

Industrial Decline and Resilience in Small Towns: Evidence From Three European Case Studies

“…In the experiences of strong demographic and economic decline (e.g. Sochaux and Ivrea), the risk remains excessively connected -even emotionally -to an industrial past that no longer exists and to provide answers that are anchored to the old development models (Colombino & Vanolo 2017). Instead, a 'realistic' vision of the situation of 'territorial fragility', deriving from the productive and identity crisis, can become a stimulus to re-emerge and re-start through the renewal of the industrial heritage and the promotion of new development paths.…”