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

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

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

Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail gentrification. Theoretically, it suggests that food, together with its spatialities, can produce a “displacement atmosphere” throughout retailscape by enabling privileged consumers to achieve distinction. Empirically, it draws from Porta Palazzo, Turin’s historical neighbourhood and marketplace, where the opening of a branded food hall reveals food’s role in the area’s early-stage retail gentrification. Attending to both the food hall and smaller emerging spatialities, the “work of foodification” is analyzed through three constitutive elements: discourse, materialities, practices. Within the city’s wider geographies and ongoing transformations, the synergy of these elements reveals that the work of foodification is the convert of Porta Palazzo into a device that, first, fixes a displacement atmosphere onto the local retailscape and, then, allows for the gentrification frontier to proceed. The paper responds to calls for re-conceptualizing displacement, contributing to emergent research on marketplaces as gentrification’s frontier spaces