Contested Urban Bodies

“Through a decolonial feminist lens and activist ethnography, Locorotondo offers a powerful intervention into urban geography. By centering the everyday labor of Naples’ abitanti attive, this book challenges dominant narratives of tourist urbanism, revealing the city as a contested, lived space shaped from below. A vital contribution to critical urban studies and the geographies of resistance.” 

— Luís Mendes, Invited Assistant Professor and expert on touristification, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, Portugal.

The historic centre of the southern European city of Naples has been shaped by opposing urban processes throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s. On the one hand, touristification has led to the financialisation of housing, the displacement of inhabitants and everyday commerce, and the enclosure of public space. On the other, the proliferation of commoning practices by the Liberated Spaces or Beni Comuni—and the parallel experimentation with a distinctive form of new municipalism—has reclaimed urban space for collective use and social functions. The Liberated Spaces are a network of communities that have emerged since 2012 through the occupation and reappropriation of abandoned public buildings. Today, they are self-governed by inhabitants through assemblies.

Through in-depth ethnographic research with these communities, this book explores the everyday production of liberated spaces in the heart of the tourist zone. Moving from the bodies of activists to the body of the city and back, and with an eye to its past histories as recalled through the memories of its inhabitants, it traces the emergence of urban bodies contested between diverging trajectories and possible futures for Naples.

Martina Locorotondo has completed her PhD in Urban Studies at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA), De Montfort University of Leicester (UK), and is in a Postdoc position at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila (Italy). Her research focuses on current processes of urban transformation, resistance and alternative space-making.