The many lives of degrado. An introduction

Abstract

In recent years, degrado has become a central concept in the Italian political and cultural environment, and is increasingly appearing in the most disparate places, from parliamentary debates to municipal regulations, from the newsmedia to everyday talk. While it has a peculiar meaning in the Italian context as degrado, understood more generally as ‘decay’ the concept is an important prism to understand the relationship between materiality, aesthetics, normativity, and urban life in the broadest sense, with respect to questions of order, morality, and decorum. Lately, also as result of the appearance of its doppelganger, decorum, in municipal regulations and national security law, degrado has become to be explored by academics (Pitch, Ascari, Pisaniello, Dal Lago) and activists (Bukowski), who have criticised its discriminatory quality, its race, class and gender asymmetries, and the nefarious impacts of policies aimed at counteracting it. These authors have conducted their analysis on what is considered the opposition of degrado, namely decoro, deconstructing its ideology, its policies, and its political economy. The idea of this Special Issue is to turn this point of view upside down, thinking, observing, and analysing degrado in its many lives, with the aim of going beyond its aesthetic-political opposition with decorum. In this introduction we set out to present the theoretical framework informing our proposal, provide a wider contextualisation to the notion of degrado, as well as a justification for our choice to keep it in its Italian form, and present the contributions to this Special Issue.