Dislocating contested space: resource competition, cultural technologies and migrant space in Milan’s Chinatown
2020; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1469-8676.12950
ISSN1469-8676
Autores Tópico(s)China's Global Influence and Migration
ResumoThis paper explores the need to understand the cultural aspects of the production of space and the use of communications technologies in the Chinatown area of Milan, Italy, centred on Via Paolo Sarpi just to the northeast of the city centre. I argue that although we can understand some aspects of this space and Chinese migrants' production of it in terms of the history of Chinese, largely Wenzhounese, migration with its associated social and economic models and practices, in order to understand the dynamic negotiation of space in the restrictively controlled Via Paolo Sarpi we need also to incorporate the cultural use of contemporary communications technologies – smartphones in particular – into that understanding. Cet article explore la nécessité de comprendre les aspects culturels de la production de l'espace et de l'utilisation des technologies de communication dans le quartier chinois de Milan, en Italie, centré sur la Via Paolo Sarpi, juste au nord-est du centre-ville. Je soutiens que – bien que nous puissions comprendre certains aspects de cet espace et de la production des migrants chinois en termes d'histoire de la migration chinoise, en grande partie wenzhounese, avec ses modèles et pratiques sociaux et économiques associés – afin de comprendre la négociation dynamique de l'espace dans la Via Paolo Sarpi, contrôlée de manière restrictive, nous devons également intégrer l'utilisation culturelle des technologies de communication contemporaines (les smartphones en particulier) dans cette compréhension. In recent years the Chinatown area of Milan, Italy, centred on Via Paolo Sarpi (see Figure 1) just to the northeast of the city centre, has been the focus of political and planning manoeuvres on the part of the Comune di Milano (Milan city government) aimed at relocating established practices of principally Chinese wholesale trade. However, while these manoeuvres have resulted in little spatial relocation of capital – the businesses have largely stayed where they were – it has nonetheless seen considerable renegotiation of space itself. With the introduction of cobbled streets, partial pedestrianisation, traffic control, the levelling of kerbs, tree-planting and other measures, the street has been gentrified, in the sense of 'revaluing property and the desirability of place' (Schiller and Simsek-Caglar 2011: 14).11 This followed an earlier phase of gentrification which had already seen the exodus of the mainly manufacturing Chinese businesses from the area (Cologna 2008: 6). This process might be thought of in terms of what Harvey and Krohn-Hansen have called the 'dislocation' of labour (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018: 12), not so much because of the spatial movement – which has been limited – but in 'other senses of disruption or disorientation, such as the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings or sense of self as things move and change around you' (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018: 12). Such a sense of dislocation directs our attention, in addition to the importance of spatial movement, towards the affective, experienced production of space. I argue that in the case of Via Paolo Sarpi, the 'disruption and disorientation' coincides with the social production of space itself through the use of contemporary media technologies, most notably smartphone and similar devices, in ways that ameliorate the effects of such dislocation. I will suggest that we need to see contemporary media technologies in Via Paolo Sarpi not simply as technological tools for the organisation of local mobility, but cultural technologies (Kavoori and Chadha 2006; cf. Horst and Miller 2013: 13) as much part of a new 'social space' (Xiang 1999: 216) where migrants circumvented and negotiated efforts at control as the surveillance cameras that policed it. Media and communication technologies are now unspectacular aspects of the mundane (DeNicola 2013: 93; Horst 2013), a feature that all too easily disguises the complexity of the social practices that involve them. With this in mind, this paper looks to explore examples of the mundane and unspectacular to highlight the complex assemblage of cultural, technological, political and historical factors that coalesce in the everyday production of a contested urban space. I will explore this mundane production of space better to understand the complexity of the everyday street scenes related to the delivery of goods in Via Paolo Sarpi and the role that the technologically mediated social production of space plays in that complexity. I will argue that what we see in everyday street scenes, such as the delivery of goods to a wholesale merchant, is the negotiation of space as a set of contested resources with a cultural history. I will argue that while the city government in Milan, Italian media and in some cases local prejudice have challenged the presence of Chinese wholesalers in this part of the city in recent years, these efforts have had only limited success.22 In recent years there have been more efforts at collaboration between the Milan city government and the Chinese community in the Via Paolo Sarpi area to jointly promote cultural events, festivities and activities (Dr Federico Confalonieri, personal communication). To understand why, it is necessary to explore the negotiation of social space in the area ranging from city planning ordinances through policing and media reports to delivery practices. I argue that we can use the work of Henri Lefebvre and more recent anthropological approaches to urban and migrant spaces to explore the competition for urban resources. I argue that the digitality of contemporary migrant spaces in this area of Milan needs be seen as a culturally shaped coming into being that helps understand the limited success of efforts in recent years to displace Chinese wholesalers from the Chinatown area of Milan. The area of Via Paolo Sarpi has been associated with Italy's Chinese population since at least the beginning of the 20th century (Rocchi and Demonte 2017), even if the population then was measured in tens or hundreds and not thousands. This population fluctuated over the decades until the 1980s, when economic reform and greater travel opportunities in China saw a new wave of Chinese migration to Europe and elsewhere (Wu and Latham 2014). Milan's Chinatown saw a great influx of Chinese migrants rising to around 15,000 by 2008 (Cologna 2008: 6). At this time most Chinese worked in small manufacturing workshops or factories until the first gentrification of the area in the 1990s saw most of this business move to the suburbs or elsewhere in Italy. At this time the area became less and less one where Chinese lived and more one where they worked with a concentration of wholesale, import/export businesses (Cologna 2008: 6). My phone is not only my connection to China, it is China for me. It brings family, news, politics, business, everything to the palm of my hand. A lot of the time I am as much in China as Italy. The principle platforms for her, and the majority of my interviewees, were WeChat and Weibo, the Chinese social media and blogging platforms through which she communicated with friends, family, business partners and clients in China, Italy and other parts of Europe (she had relatives and business associates in Paris and Barcelona, for instance), participated in various WeChat groups and gathered information of all kinds. CZX used Weibo largely to follow celebrity business bloggers who she particularly liked, though others used it also for linking up with other individuals for business or work, expanding networks in Italy and China and keeping up with news from both. One of the most popular apps among Chinese in Milan (and elsewhere) was that of the Paris-based overseas Chinese portal huarenjie.com. This Chinese language portal aimed principally at Chinese in Europe with a particular emphasis on France, Italy and Spain was set up in France in 2006 and by 2017 claimed 400,000 users of its app launched in 2014. The website and app offers news, chat, job and other classified advertisements, bulletin boards, personal web pages, dating services, blogs and much more. Younger Chinese were often keen online gamers, either on computers or, for simpler games, on their mobile phones, playing various massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORGs) such as Age of Wulin (九阴真经) or Moonlight Blade (天涯明月刀), two of the most popular China-based games at the time of this research, or perennially popular international games like World of Warcraft. Those who had grown up in Italy often played with Italian friends but for many immigrant workers the main gaming language was Chinese and they played with or against other Chinese around the world, many of them also in China despite the inconvenience of time zone differences. For many of my interviewees this connection with China was more than simply entertainment. There were important social aspects to gaming (cf. Nardi 2010; Pearce 2009) which enhanced notions of identity, kept players in touch with friends in China and kept alive connections to their previous, pre-migration, lives. Video websites, particularly Bilibili (a Chinese YouTube-like platform) were also popular for watching Chinese films, TV series and user-uploaded content. Older users in particular used their mobiles to watch news, current affairs and documentary programmes from Chinese TV stations, with local or regional news from their home provinces generally popular. I'm always stuck in [the salon] even when it's quiet. You don't know if someone might come in. My phone is my lifeline (救生绳). When we are busy there's no problem but when it's quiet I chat with my friends in China. We joke, share videos, just mess around and kill time. It takes me back home. Alongside commonly used apps and functions such as phoning, messaging, search engines, cameras, music players, maps, etc., many Chinese interviewees who spoke little or no Italian also used translation and dictionary apps to interact with Italian-speaking clients, shopkeepers or service providers. In these various ways, technologies were crucial components in the digital augmentation of the mundane space of everyday life, working to connect people to places and networks, friends and business associates, to maintain 'global families' (Krause 2018), facilitate manoeuvring in familiar and unfamiliar environments, manage the social implications of displacement and dislocation and delocalise the experience of urban space. Against this backdrop it is useful to consider some examples of how such technologies featured in moments such as mundane deliveries in Via Paolo Sarpi. On a slightly chilly grey autumn day in 2017, WSP sits on a street bench in Via Paolo Sarpi, Milan, the so-called Chinatown (huarenjie 华人街, literally 'Chinese people's street') just north of the centre of the wealthy Italian city renowned, among other things, for its history, cathedral – il Duomo – connections to Leonardo da Vinci and the fashion industry. WSP, in his late 50s, swipes and scrolls gently down his slightly battered black Samsung smartphone, flipping between order notifications, a number of personal and business threads on his WeChat, China's most widely used mobile instant messaging service, and the occasional photo or news article. In his 15th year in Italy, having navigated a diverse course of better and worse employment opportunities, WSP now finds himself, much as he does on many a day, waiting for a van to arrive in the semi-pedestrianised street. It is 12.00, which means there is half an hour remaining before his awaited driver could face a fine for delivering outside of the two and a half hour window imposed by the Milan city government in 2011 following the pedestrianisation of the street. WSP knows most of the people in Via Paolo Sarpi and the streets in the immediate area, which, like Via Paolo Sarpi itself, are home to large numbers of Chinese-owned businesses, mainly clothing and fashion accessory wholesalers, but including among other things also cheap fashion retailers, grocers, supermarkets, phone and computer repairers, electronics shops, travel agents, bars, cafés and restaurants. More than 60% of the shop frontage is occupied by Chinese businesses with the remainder a mix of traditional Italian botteghe (small shops) such as the delicatessen and cold cuts shop, the butcher or the traditional gentlemen's hat store, Italian-owned bars, international supermarkets or fast food outlets and estate agents.33 In 2014, although officially Chinese residents in the Canonica-Sarpi area constituted only 1.8% of the total, Chinese businesses constituted 68.7% of the total with shop frontage in the Sarpi area, down slightly from 70.4% in 2011 (Cologna 2015a). Eh! … Eh … What shall I do? Feng was supposed to be here five minutes ago but I'm still waiting. He's not answering his phone. It's unlike him. F***. I need to be at P's in ten minutes… 'Huh. There's no problem. I'll have a look', WSP replies, leaping up from his bench, slipping his phone into his tracksuit pocket and heading off down the street. One hundred metres further down, between Via Montone and Via Cambio, WSP meets a young Chinese man heading towards him with a chequered flannel shirt and pushing a barrow, the simple delivery device that has in recent years taken on the value of an ethnic marker in public discourses pertaining to this corner of the Milan landscape. Urging Feng to hurry up, WSP slows and then heads back as another Chinese man joins them en route to GWQ's boxes. Five minutes later all have been barrowed down the road to their destination, a clothing wholesale business operating from a second floor flat above another similar business at street level in Via Cambio. WSP sits down once again on his bench and checks his WeChat. A voice message from the awaited driver tells him he'll be there in a few minutes – though five minutes later than expected. WSP sends out a small flurry of identical, concise texts that mobilise another group of four barrow pushers into action. Their arrival, as if from nowhere, outside the phone accessories store where GWQ, now on his way to P's, had been waiting is meticulously timed to coincide with a battered red van turning into VPS and pulling up just ahead of where the five cardboard boxes had previously stood. A flurry of activity sees the driver, WSP and the porters fling open the back doors of the van, unload another pile of around ten boxes and immediately dispatch them on their way to three more addresses in the vicinity. By 12.29 there is no sign of any of the activity. The boxes, barrows and their porters have all disappeared, as has the red van and its driver. Meanwhile a white and green police car pulls up just down the road and a local policeman steps out to survey the scene. The scene described above is mundane, unspectacular and everyday. It is the description of an everyday commercial practice – the delivery of goods to wholesalers – that could perhaps be found all over the world. However, the simplicity and ordinariness of this Italian street scene belies a rather more complex array of historical relations, public discourses and tensions that have effectively shaped that scene. Via Paolo Sarpi has been the home to Chinese immigrants in Milan for more than a century (Cologna 2008; Rocchi and Demonte 2015, 2017; Thuno 1999). Although in the early 20th century the numbers of Chinese were relatively small, this part of Milan started to build its reputation for being the area of the city where Chinese immigrants were to be found.44 In 1911 there were 45 Chinese residents in Italy, largely in Milan. In the 1940s and 1950s they counted in the hundreds. The real boom in Chinese numbers in Italy started in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1981 there were 700, by 1991, 20,632 and by 2015, 271,330 (Rocchi and Demonte 2017). The vast majority – around 70% – of Chinese in Italy, including the area around Via Paolo Sarpi, come from the Wenzhou and Qingtian areas of Zhejiang Province in Southeastern China. In the 1990s, with the maturing of China's open door policy, greater ease of overseas travel (legal or illegal) and the large wealth differences between China and parts of Europe, the USA and Australia, the number of Chinese immigrants coming to Italy started to boom (Wu and Latham 2014). Although many of the newly arriving Chinese in Italy were headed to other parts of the country, such as Prato, Firenze or the Veneto region, large numbers also came to Milan and the area of Via Paolo Sarpi started to become increasingly Chinese in character. The principal business of Chinese in Milan in the 1990s was manufacturing but as property prices rose, Via Paolo Sarpi became increasingly an area of wholesale trading (Cologna 2008: 8–10) of Chinese-produced goods from China as well as the emerging Chinese manufacturing centres within Italy itself (e.g. Prato, Firenze). It was at this time that more and more apartments in the courtyard tenement blocks in the Via Paolo Sarpi area started being occupied by Chinese businesses, dormitories and offices. The street was renowned in the early 2000s for its chaotic traffic problem as dozens of small lorries and vans jostled for position to be able to load and unload their goods. Many parked haphazardly along the road, sometimes on the pavement, sometimes blocking the thoroughfare to other traffic and although many Chinese were, like others, frustrated at the difficulties this situation posed for themselves, they were nonetheless not particularly concerned about the issue. As one Chinese interlocutor put it to me in an interview in 2014: 'Now the street is nicer and before it was a bit chaotic (you yidian luan) but no-one stopped you coming and going (lailaiququ meiyou ren dangzhuni). Business was freer then (zuo shengyi shi bijiao ziyou de).' However, even if the Chinese were not greatly concerned, the disorderly parking did increasingly draw the attention of local media and the traffic police. Consequently traffic wardens started to patrol the area with greater rigour, issuing fines to illegally parked vehicles, many of them Chinese owned, on a daily basis. The rising tensions accompanying this transformation of the area came to a head in April 2007, when a dispute over a parking ticket erupted into violent clashes between local Chinese and police. These riots drew national and even international media attention to the situation in the Via Paolo Sarpi area (Cologna 2008; Tarantino and Tosoni 2009). They also triggered the introduction of a series of measures that saw increasing pressure placed on Chinese businesses through heavier policing, stricter parking controls and repeatedly hostile Italian media representations of the Chinese community in the area. Anti-wholesale rhetorics, laced with racial overtones, clearly pointed at the Chinese community more broadly. In 2010, new regulations restricted delivery times and introduced 'curfews' for other activities – including the opening hours of Internet cafes, massage parlours and other businesses in the area. These restrictions, many of which were at least perceived to be unique to this part of Milan, were seen by many Chinese and others as deliberately racist efforts to limit the expansion of Chinese businesses in the area, if not to drive them out of business or out of the area altogether (see e.g. di Giambattista 2011). Indeed, this was the precise intention of Mayor Moratti's negotiations with the Chinese community at the time (Cologna 2008: 2–3). Although the newly designed street was seen by many as an aesthetic improvement, it was nonetheless the heavy limitations on parking and delivery times that vexed many Chinese business owners in the area. Indeed, a number of legal challenges were made against the city government which were initially upheld by the courts in 2014 and 2015, forcing the city government temporarily to backtrack on several measures, only to be subsequently reversed. All vehicles were banned from the street except for a two and a half hour delivery window between 10.00 and 12.30 (see Figure 2).55 The legal challenges managed at one point to bring about the introduction of a second afternoon delivery window in addition to the morning one and also envisaged some early morning deliveries to restaurants and other food outlets. These efforts [to self-organise as a 'Chinese community' and identify their own leaders] have nonetheless set in motion a negotiation process to discuss the city government's proposal to 'delocalize' most – if not all – Chinese wholetrade [sic] shops, i.e. to move them from Milan's downtown Sarpi district to some other location in the city's suburbs. The Sarpi district was to be soon transformed into a 'restricted traffic zone', and eventually turned into a pedestrian area: a form of urban restructuring thought to be wholly incompatible with a thick cluster of wholesale trading shops, and in line with the demands of Sarpi's Italian residents, who make up about 90% of the people who actually live in the so-called 'Chinese district' and hope that a pedestrian area will force local shops to cater to local needs again, helping the district regain some of its bygone charm as a revamped middle class shopping district. (2008: 2–3) Media rhetorics focused on the discontent and discord in the area with the implementation of the ZTL (zona di traffico limitato – limited traffic zone), often with implicit criticism of the Chinese community for creating the problems. Competition arose for the identity of the area, with various signifiers, from barrows to wholesale businesses, becoming negative ethnic markers in local and national media (Gigante 2008; Guerri 2010; Mingoia 2008). This was competition for the urban resource of space itself – who should have access to it, when, how and for what purposes, who should or should not be able to live or operate what kinds of businesses in the area. Those who sought to put pressure on Chinese wholesale businesses to leave were seeking to reclaim the space for other businesses and residents.66 As one local politician put it: 'Without relocation and requalification of the roads surrounding Via Sarpi, every solution to the difficulties in the neighbourhood end up being partial and temporary. The movement of the wholesale activities to another, more suitable, area is not only useful but necessary for the liveability of the neighbourhood' (Giambattista 2011: np). In recent years, the tensions between the 'Chinese community', local Italians and the city administration have improved considerably with the organisation of joint cultural activities for the Milan expo in 2015, the choreographed celebration of Chinese New Year with a parade, street decorations and traditional foods becoming an increasingly important tourist attraction as well as artistic and cultural exhibitions. However, the ZTL remains and this competition over urban resources continues to be played out, however subtly, on a daily basis in Via Paolo Sarpi, in scenes like that described above. The timing of WSP's delivery and the use of barrows and bicycles was shaped by this competition for resources. In this story of contestation we can identify what Dragos Simandan, referring to urban contexts, has called 'delayed asymmetric counterforces' (2018: 4). For Simandan, competition and cooperation 'are fundamental features of social and ecological processes at all scales of analysis, from neighbourhood dynamics, to networks of global-city regions' (2018: 5) and such competition, he suggests, can be imagined in terms of forces and counterforces between actors such as, in the case of Via Paolo Sarpi, the city government and Chinese traders. The notion of asymmetry (not knowing how others will react) draws out the inevitable imbalance between the actors involved in terms of actions, capabilities, strategies and resources, while the possibility, even likelihood, of delay (not knowing when others will react) offers an alternative way of conceptualising necessity and contingency in the development of such competitive relations (Simandan 2018: 7). 77 In 2017, the city government launched a call for tenders for €96,500 to develop the cultural identity of the area encouraging the participation of members of the Chinese community (see https://web.comune.milano.it/dseserver/webcity/garecontratti.nsf/WEBAll/291D257E2ED05DF6C12581BB0027E461?opendocument). In the case of Via Paolo Sarpi, we have both an 'asymmetrical' imbalance between the players – the Chinese community and the city government – and the temporal play of delay. The Comune, at the end of the day, has ultimate jurisdiction, but the Chinese community has been able to delay, divert and eventually defuse contention in the area through legal appeals, negotiations, compliance and adaptation. The Italian legal system, with all its attendant bureaucracy, also introduces its own elements of delay. Against this backdrop we have to see WSP's organisation of the deliveries in Via Paolo Sarpi as part of this continuing process of compliance and adaptation through the constantly evolving social production of space. Writing about village enclaves in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou where former peasant farmers have become the landlords for thousands of migrant workers moving in search of work, Helen Siu (2007) argues that the notion of displacement needs to be detached from that of physical mobility. 'Grounded displacement' as she calls it 'could be a most intense form of displacement without the subjects moving anywhere' (Siu 2007: 331). For Siu, the production of village space – its spatiality – is about the social and political relations that constitute it, such that the displaced quality of village space is dislocated from the territory itself, from the city which is at the same time so near but yet so far. This slightly counterintuitive conceptual separation of displacement from physical mobility is useful for considering what is happening with the cultural contestation of space in Via Paolo Sarpi. We are confronted not by one social space but by many – indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as 'social space'. No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local … Considered in isolation, such spaces are mere abstractions. As concrete abstractions, however, they attain 'real' existence by virtue of networks and pathways, by virtue of bunches or clusters of relationships. Instances of this are the worldwide networks of communication, exchange and information. (1991: 86; original emphasis) Space is no longer a category of fixed and given ontological attributes, but a becoming, an emerging property of social relationships. Put somewhat differently, social relationships are inherently spatial, and space an instrument and dimension of people's sociality. Social life is no longer to be seen as unfolding through space but with space, that is, spatially. Space is no longer 'out there', but a condition or faculty – a capacity – of social relationships. It is what people do, not where they are. (Corsín Jiménez 2003: 141) In this light, WSP's mundane spatial management of deliveries itself produces a congeries of spaces that weaves agency into the material reality of Via Paolo Sarpi. However, this formulation lacks attention to technology, mobility and the importance of time. WSP's production of space was not static. It was mobile, historically and culturally situated and, in part, mediated. Not only are media technologies now mobile, but they play key roles in our experience of, how we engage with or, in the terminology of this paper, how we produce space (García-Montes et al. 2006; Kleinman 2007; Moores 2012). In fact, we should argue that space is now itself as mobile and dynamic as the technologies and the people that are producing it. WSP, and others like him in Via Paolo Sarpi, slipped effortlessly between different spaces through his mobile phone. One moment he was checking pictures from relatives in China and other Italian and European cities, the next picking up information on the whereabouts of his delivery, the next reading news about his hometown in Zhejiang province. All of this is regardless of his specific location in the street or whether he is himself actually moving or not. What we have to consider, however, beyond the obvious ability to multi-task on a mobile phone, is that each of these activities constitutes a mobile production of social space understood in terms of lived, practised, culturally and historically situated relationships. The moment of social action as a point in the flows of temporal and spatial coincidences is neither contingent nor necessary but is the point of articulation of various spatial/temporal planes. Compared to contingency,88 'To say that an event or process was necessary means that it was inevitable, inexorable, or "bound to happen": nothing could have been done to prevent its occurrence. Conversely, an event or process can be labeled "contingent" if it resulted from an improbable, chancy alignment of events, such that in a theoretical re-run of history its occurrence would happen only in a small minority of alternative possible worlds' (Simandan 2018: 3). which suggests a certain randomness, this moment of social action/space, laced with the tensions of asymmetrical forces and expectations, is situated, planned for, the outcome of past actions and takes on a fleeting relationship to the future. Just as for Heidegger the relationship between causality and technology is less one of effecting than one of being responsible for, of 'bringing forth' (Heidegger 1977: 9–10), so we need to think of
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