The role of vernacular creativity in urban civic and political renaissance: an ethnography of NoLo

Today «creative economy» (Florida, 2012) constitutes a powerful buzzword at the core of contemporary discourses and policies for economic development at urban scale. Its relevance is the result of a long-lasting historical process rooted in political discourses (Reagan, 1968), economic transformations (Bell, 1976; Fröbel, Heinrichs, , Kreye, 1981), cultural changes in bohemian culture (Mcguigan, 2006) and gentrification processes in urban environments (Zukin, 1982). Recently, it is exerting its influence on an expanding number of areas, as creativity became a skill and an immaterial asset required for every worker, independently from the sector (Von Osten, 2007): in particular a trend is observable in which creativity from knowledge, high tech and innovative sectors has colonized also the economic imaginary of more traditionally laborintensive, low-skilled and low-status jobs, as the ones in popular food and beverage economy (Ocejo, 2017), promoted also by urban policies (Grodach, O’Connor, Gibson, 2016). This contribution, developed starting from an ongoing ethnography part of my doctoral research, seeks to analyze the potential role of this kind of «humble creative economy», when concentrated in localized urban zones, in the generation of an economic and cultural milieu (P. Hall, 2000; S. Hall , Jefferson, 2006) that through processes of vernacularization of creativity (Edensor, Leslie, Millington, , Rantisi, 2009) influence also everyday civic and political practices and lives (Berger, Cefai, Gayet-Viaud, 2011), that needs to be accounted not only at a general and collective level but at an individual level of analysis too (Pink, 2012). The case study of our research will be Milan, in particular the area at north of Loreto between the two vial axes of Via Padova and Viale Monza that has recently been re-framed by some inhabitants as «NoLo», a term that has rapidly spread in the area as well as in local media. Via Padova can be better defined as a zone than a neighborhood for its vastness and the plurality of its centralities, but can be considered an observation field characterized by some historical common key features: to be an area of movement, a belt between the city and the territory, to be from a long time ago a popular zone, inhabited by workmen and small commercial and artisan bourgeoisie, to be a stable «harbor» for different immigrant flows to Milan (Novak , Andriola, 2008). The affordability of the rents made possible the arrival of a last flow of principally young creative people, partly expelled from other gentrifying neighborhoods of Milan and other cities, that experience a hiatus between their cultural and economic status and the birth of «NoLo» as new identity of the zone based on the idea of a diffuse creativity (Guerrini, 2017). The taking over of activities managed by immigrants has meant that the commercial and nature of the zone did not died under the competition of the shopping centers and supermarkets, also maintaining intact the city’s ground floor composed by small businesses (Novak, Andriola, 2008), favoring the diffusion of the aforementioned «humble creative economy» in strict contact with the area. Interpreting the city as a stratification of visibilities (Brighenti, 2010) re-articulated by modalisations of human gazes, the humble creative economy of «NoLo» can be analyzed as a veil superimposed on the one of «Via Padova», characterized by immigration and insecurity, and on the precedent popular neighborhood lived by workmen and small artisans and traders. These stratifications do coexist and are porous one to another in ways that can be made visible and explored through the affordances of spatial and physical elements experienced in urban interactions (Brighenti, 2010). Food and beverage shops are not only places of economic production but also places of everyday social and cultural public interaction, a feature that favors the diffusion of a vernacular creativity, intended as the ensemble of everyday «creative» practices embedded in the local zone and enclosed in a general and collective cultural and creative milieu. This milieu is synthesizable in the concept of realization of an «authentic urban life», a process that can give a new sense of place to the neighborhood (in particular in the case of the publicly infamously frame of Via Padova) but bears in itself the seeds of top-down gentrification (Zukin, 2011). The ongoing ethnography, following established models of ethnographies of everyday and microsocial life (Burawoy, Burton, Ferguson, Fox, 1991) , is composed by interviews to traders and cultural mediators, participant observation to social events organized by shops or networks of inhabitants and discourse analysis of podcasts of a local webradio as interactional local media (Bonini, Monclús, 2014). We propose, from first results by this corpus of data, that a network of individuals composed principally by young people that has used cultural creativity and innovation as a way to build their life projects after 2008 crisis (Orlandi, Leonini, 2017), but also from traders of foreign communities or of older generations, can form a tribus distinguished by their members shared lifestyles and tastes ethos (Maffesoli, 1996). Through everyday tactics and «microbic practices» (de Certeau, 1988) , performed principally in physical and digital social spaces (Glass, 2010), this tribus is also politically expressive and prefigurative (Yates, 2015) and builds a sense of community that starting from simple pulses to sociality and to «live together» and individual needs of economic sustenance develops political actions devoted to community cohesion and urban renaissance – facing and exorcising the aware risks of gentrification – and a vernacular version of local authenticity and distinctness.