Creative Uses of Urban Space in Italy

A substantial body of research has now emerged on several practices centred around uses of urban space classed as informal, alternative and potentially illegal. However, this research is markedly fragmented. This pathbreaking text develops a comparative analysis that enables a broader, but empirically grounded, reflection on the creative uses of urban space, focusing on three specific practices – skateboarding, parkour, and graffiti.

Based on qualitative interviews conducted in Italy with graffiti writers, traceurs and skaters, the book explores how creative uses of urban space shape interpretations of the city and its places, fostering distinctive urban cultures and alternative lifestyles. Author Carlo Genova focuses on four key analytical dimensions - the individual journey of the practitioners, the dynamic interaction with the urban environment, collective and identity-related aspects, and relationships with the external context. With rich insights for international audiences, the focus on the national context of Italy as a stimulating site of investigation due to its convergence of historical and industrial pasts and strategies of urban regeneration – emerging as a privileged vantage point for observing processes of spatial reuse and re-signification, transgression and critique of institutional regulation, as well as those of control, institutionalisation, commodification and containment that today characterise skateboarding, parkour, graffiti writing.

In an era marked by increasing urbanisation, expanding systems of control, and a growing debate on citizen participation in public life, this is an original and necessary contribution to understanding increasingly visible and debated practices within wider urban publics and institutional actors. Offering new lenses through which to understand the complex dynamics of contemporary urban life, this is valuable reading for scholars, urban planners, and policy makers.