The newspaper kiosk in Cesano Boscone is for rent. In a forlorn attempt to rise above the bleak surroundings, red ‘Rent me!’ signs have been stuck to its shutters. In 2014 Cesano Boscone became part of Greater Milan, which now includes 134 municipalities, is home to three million people, and styles itself as Italy’s economic capital. But on this side of the ring road, just a few kilometres from Milan’s historic centre, the city is a dormitory suburb, home to immigrants and the elderly. And its small shops are disappearing.
Italy’s family-run shops began to close in the 1980s, later than in other western countries, and initially the rate of decline was slower. But the 2008 financial crisis precipitated what experts now call ‘desertification’. Italy lost 13.2% of its small shops between 2008 and 2016. In 2013, the worst year, over a hundred closed daily. There are now more than 600,000 vacant retail premises across the country, 25% of the total. Luca Zanderighi, an economics professor at Milan University, said: ‘Some areas have been spared so far. But in mountainous regions and on the sparsely populated plains, the number of shops is so inadequate that some basic services may soon no longer be guaranteed.’ Mariano Bella of Confcommercio, Italy’s largest business association, worries about the historic centres of middle-sized cities such as Perugia, Parma and Trieste, which he believes could become ‘museums for tourists or entirely filled with bank branches, insurance companies and international fashion chains.’
Many shopkeepers attribute their problems to over-taxation and distrust a state they see as nothing more than a technocratic tax system. But the closures stem more from Italy’s economic situation. The fall in household incomes after several years of recession has reduced consumer spending, which has hit independent retailers hardest since they cannot compete with big chains and discounters. The economy returned to growth in 2014, but despite optimistic prognoses from Matteo Renzi and his successor as prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, the situation is still fragile. The growth rate in 2015 and 2016 remained below 1% and 4.7 million Italians (out of 60 million) currently live in absolute poverty. The young are worst affected: 10.4% of 18-34 year-olds are below the poverty line, compared to 4% of over-65s. Since the banking crisis, credit has been less readily available and housing costs in northern cities are spiralling.
Online shopping grows
Online shopping is another major factor. It grew by 18% in 2016, reaching an annual turnover of €20bn, though this lags behind France, Germany and the UK, where it has between two and five times more market share. Changing lifestyles and consumption habits have affected some sectors particularly badly: Italy’s press is in unprecedented crisis, so it’s unsurprising that kiosks are closing. The loss of interest in reading has also caused problems for bookshops.
Cesano Boscone’s pedestrian zone is all run-down shops and vacant premises. Andrea Gabriele, who is in his 30s and belongs to the precarious generation, quit his job in advertising to open a bar to re-inject life into Cesano Boscone. ‘Like in the rest of the suburbs, there was nowhere here that attracted the young. So I did up an old café and turned it into a modern, lively place that stayed open in the evening. But it didn’t work out and after two years I went back to marketing.’ Social activity here has shifted from the back streets to the main arteries.
There’s nowhere here to attract the young. So I did up a café and turned it into a modern, lively place that stayed open in the evening. But it didn’t work out Andrea Gabriele
After the second world war, Milan was still surrounded by fields and farms. Its suburbs were little villages whose focal point was a busy square with many small shops. Then, during decades of industrialisation, the population exploded. Cesano Boscone’s went from 5,000 in 1961 to 26,000 in 1991, after which it declined slightly. Without any overall authority to plan development, Milan’s suburbs grew haphazardly: groups of low-rise buildings and tower blocks were built alongside existing working-class homes with no mod cons.
Shops sprang up along the main roads, US-style, making a car a necessity. Hypermarkets arrived in 1971, a decade later than in France, and had reached saturation point in northern cities by the 1990s (1). A huge Auchan hypermarket opened in Cesano Boscone in 2005, with 200,000 potential customers in its catchment area, but closed in 2015 after several years of losses (€16m cumulatively between 2011 and 2014). Sociologist Vanni Codeluppi says ‘the American phenomenon of “dead malls”, shopping centres that have gone bankrupt, has reached here,’ and is attributable to aggressive competition between hypermarkets, oversupply, unaffordable rents, and impractical architecture.
Auchan reopened in Cesano Boscone in 2016 after a major revamp intended to improve its ‘social function’. It now styles itself ‘Auchan City, a city hypermarket, a local hypermarket’. Codeluppi says it is no longer a ‘non-place’, as defined by anthropologist Marc Augé, but a ‘hyper-place’, a comfortable, patrolled, sterile substitute for the public square and now the sole focal point of a town that has lost its traditional centre. In its shopping mall, there are a council office, an accountant, a dental surgery and a children’s play centre.
Halal butchers and Egyptian bazaars
Milan’s design district is just 4km from Cesano Boscone, along a wide boulevard that Milan’s town planner Gabriele Rabaiotti divides into three segments, reflecting three contemporary urban realities. At the far end of the Via Giambellino, half an hour by tram from the cathedral, bags of rubbish lie by the roadside. The grass between the tramlines is untended. In this working-class district, different populations coexist but have little contact: the older inhabitants, often from Italy’s south and east, have been here for decades, while the immigrants from outside Europe (6,000 families, 18 nationalities) have arrived in the past 20 years, and have helped stem the commercial die-back by setting up businesses in vacant shops. Rabaiotti said: ‘They’re shops for the poor that have adapted to surviving at low cost. Halal butchers, Berber rotisseries and Egyptian bazaars function as places where people can meet. They’re always open. Customers buy on credit or pay in instalments. People help each other out as they did in post-war Italy.’
Nearby Lorenteggio covered market has had serious long-term problems. Like most of Milan’s municipal markets, Lorenteggio, which opened in 1954, was having trouble finding traders to rent its stalls (2). But the market was saved from demolition or conversion into a discount store by Sicilian horse butcher Vito Landillo. The group of traders he organised won financial concessions from the municipality and developed a regeneration plan based on ‘hybridisation’. The food stalls now share the space with local associations, cultural events and an Italian language school, which have brought new life to the market.
Rabaiotti is more concerned about the second stretch of the Via Giambellino. Here, as in Cesano Boscone, there are few shops and vacant premises are more common. The businesses that do remain – bars with plastic furniture and slot machines, dusty haberdasheries, Thai massage parlours with frosted glass windows – seem to have changed little in decades. This district is home to many low-income retirees, who often shop in hypermarkets beyond the ring road. Artisans’ workshops were common here a few years ago, but the joiners, carpenters and upholsterers, a feature of working-class Italian towns since the Middle Ages, are gradually disappearing.
The American phenomenon of ‘dead malls’, shopping centres that have gone bankrupt, has reached here Vanni Codeluppi
Italy has lacked a coherent plan to revitalise run-down districts and has generally opted for ineffectual short-term fixes, often fronted by famous architects (3). Stefano Sampaolo, a researcher at Rome’s Centro Studi Investimenti Sociali (Social Investment Study Centre, Censis) says: ‘In the past 20 years, we’ve counted over 700 programmes aimed at run-down districts, at a cost of €200m. But there’s no ministry or ministerial committee to coordinate them, so the policy has remained highly fragmented.’
With the final section of the route, when the Via Giambellino becomes the Via Andrea Solari, the character changes again. This is the entrance to Milan’s design district. There’s a Belle Epoque merry-go-round in an immaculate park and a multitude of independent shops – well-stocked kiosks, groceries, wine merchants and florists – alongside luxury brand stores. Amid the fashionable shops, Giulio Velati still runs the ironmongery his grandfather set up in 1927. He says he misses ‘the fabulous 1960s’ when Italy’s middle classes were almost guaranteed a job, and wonders if his son, watching from the room behind the shop, will be able to continue the business.
In 2010 sociologist Giampaolo Fabris called for new consumption behaviour that would enable the emergence of a post-growth society and achieve a balance between frenetic consumerism and giving up the goods of the modern world. Since the crisis, the polarisation of businesses has become more acute in Italy: while some of the better-off can afford quality goods, the rest have no alternative to low-quality products that are disposable, cheaply assembled, and thrown away and replaced almost as quickly as they are made.
