Neighborhoods with multiple identities: the birth of creative communities and new orders of inequality in NoLo, Milan

«Creativity» constitutes a powerful buzzword at the core of contemporary discourses in global as urban economy. Today, a tendency is observable in which creativity from high tech and innovative sectors has colonized the economic imaginary of more traditionally labor-intensive and low-skilled jobs, as popular food and beverage economy (Ocejo, 2017). Young creative workers live a hiatus between their high cultural capital and their modest economic capital, and are suffering too from expulsion processes to cheaper neighborhoods themselves (McWilliams, 2015). This contribution, developed starting from my ongoing PhD project, is an ethnography of «NoLo», the way in which some creative workers re-framed the name of a neighborhood in Milan, historically characterized by a high share of immigrants and criminality issues (Novak & Andriola, 2008), that has recently undergone a great amount of internal immigration of young creative workers. We seek to analyze how creative workers, forming a creative milieu through a diffuse aforementioned «humble creative economy», favor the building of a sense of community through everyday tactics and «microbic practices» (de Certeau, 1988), starting from simple pulses to sociality and to «live together» and individual needs of economic sustenance. From these simple pulses and needs, the formation of a community becomes a strategy to live together and cope to face the obscure side of creative economy, composed by individualization, precariousness, fatigue from overwork and tensions to the uncertainties of entrepreneurial work. This process also triggers urban transformations: interpreting the city as a stratification of visibilities (Brighenti, 2010) re-articulated by modalisations of human gazes, we argue that NoLo, as a veil co-existent and superimposed on the one of «Via Padova» characterized by immigration and insecurity, does include new and old inhabitants excluding others, generating new hierarchical orders of visual and social urban inequality based on the membership to it.