EMPTY CITY

by ELEONORA BRISSI

At dusk in the nineteenth century – the century that witnessed the birth of the Nation-States and the Industrial Revolution – Charles Baudelaire walked through the streets of Paris and observed how the city had changed around him.

The streets were teeming with the first shops and the streets were crowded with the largest categories of people. As he wandered aimlessly through the city, like a flaneur, he wondered how much those modifications fascinated him and how easy it was to succumb to that fascination.

Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher of the early twentieth century, argued that the great impact of capitalism was identifiable in the transformations that the city had undergone following the Industrial Revolution and the consequent industrialization of work. He saw in the passages, still visible today in Paris, the first symbol of this epochal change. These are iron and glass constructions that aim to connect the streets of the city with roofs, under which commercial activities are developed, which displayed their goods in the window. Benjamin takes up the Marxist vision of the commodity, that is: artifacts that hide the charm of consumption in their apparent beauty. This commodity is strongly criticized by Marx in the text Capital, as its phantasmagoria, or the aura of mystery that hides the true nature of artifacts, leads us to forget the work of those who produced it and to erase the bond between people.

The city becomes for Benjamin the receptacle of the commodity and its phantasmagoria and Baudelaire tries to escape it while being attracted by it.

Have we really forgotten what bonds between people are?

Walking through the center of Gorizia, as of any other city, we are enchanted by sparkling shop windows that are always the same. The shopping streets of large urban centers are invaded by multinationals that enchant us with their apparently cheap goods, but which often find themselves at the center of investigations that have as their arguments the lack of work ethics and the environment. Yet, we succumb to the offer, the sales, the black friday, not giving the slightest importance to how the reduction in prices negatively impacts the wages of those who produce it and those who resell it.

We complain about high prices while ignoring the cost of raw materials that weighs on citizens as well as on traders, who are forced to impose high figures to ensure the quality of the product sold. The latter, however, cut them off from the market, because in order to save money, consumers go to large shopping centers, where work is exhausting and alienating, thus emptying the city of its shops, its artisans and the sparkling life that a town with shop windows can offer.

We are sadly prisoners of the phantasmagoria of the commodity and we cannot escape it. The proposed alternatives are thinning and struggling to defend themselves from yet another Calzedonia, Burger King or Tedi that will steal the place of the haberdashery, the baker or the grocery.

People who know our tastes, who advise us with care and attention are replaced by workers who are forced to grab some money, with precarious contracts and undeniably this has a negative reflection on the way of working and taking an interest in the customer. In the meantime, citizens will be left with nothing but empty streets, without knowing who to blame for this misery.

Perhaps to give life back to our cities and stop entrenching ourselves in shopping malls or filling digital carts, we should detach ourselves from our greed by admitting that it is not essential to own everything right away, but that a single garment, perhaps unbranded, produced in a sustainable context has much more value. The latter can be reflected in the eyes of those who sell it to us, of those who believe that objects and above all people are worth more than vile money.

And perhaps, in walking aimlessly through the streets of the center, we would rediscover the beauty of the goods, which exert that forbidden charm on us, but which forces us to ask ourselves if we are only bewitched by them or if by buying, we will give dignity to the profession of many artisans.

In the last century, Benjamin criticized the passages which, by changing the urban layout, forced passers-by to watch the spectacle of the goods.

Today we should remember that the city is made up of people, not just buildings: in our tired wandering we observe our neighbors and also value their being, not just the structures that contain them.