The Used City

This article was originally published in Element number 8: hoarders, collectors, 2002.

In contemporary discussions on public space regarding the tendencies of growing privatisation and commercialisation, Naples takes on the role of the outsider. Like no other European city Naples has rejected the influences of modernism. The living reality of the city reveals paradoxically that without embracing modern urban concepts, the need for a modern way of life e.g. the flexibility of space and use have been in practice from the start. In a European context at least, the city will be regarded as a phenomenon, providing an unusually rich reservoir of culturally developed practices, which become manifest in the use of the public space.

Phenomenon Naples

In Naples, past and present are united in such a way that they seem to be melting together. The historical dimension of Naples cannot easily be grasped, because, contrary to many other cities of similar age, the separation of past and present has not taken place yet. The physical structure of Naples, which goes back to the foundation of the city in the fifth century BC (Neapolis, new city) is inescapably filled with the dynamics of everyday life. Street life pushes itself into the foreground of perception, while the historical traces with which the city is interspersed pierce unexpectedly through this thick blanket of the everyday.

In his novel The Skin, Curzio Malaparte writes:

Naples is the most mysterious city in Europe. It is the only city of the antique world that did not decline like Ilios, like Niniveh, like Babylon. It is the only city in the world that did not go down in the tremendous shipwreck of the antique culture. Naples is a Pompeii that was never buried. It is not a city, it is a world. The antique, pre-Christian world that lies undamaged on the surface of the modern world.1

This "surface of the modern world" is found in the dynamics of street life. Every element seems to be in motion, every niche seems to be used. The immutability of its architecture contrasts with the mobility of people and things. This perpetually changing urban realm is comparable to a theatrical production, where new spatial uses are constantly being invented.

A significant feature of the Neapolitan everyday is the furnishing of the street. There are chairs, tables, and shelves everywhere in the public realm. Furniture, in the literal sense of the French and German words meuble and Möbel, is mobile. As elements of the interior they move onto the street, where they are positioned, as if they were a part of a well thought out room design. Each piece of furniture, even if broken or altered, belongs to somebody, even though they are left unattended during the night. Besides their primary function—to serve as a stand, a working place or just a place to spend time—these pieces of furniture also have a spatial function. They are used to define fields within the public realm, thus helping to display the private or commercial activities of their owners.  

Walter Benjamin describes this process of exchange in an essay written in the twenties after having returned from a journey to Naples:

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways. [...] So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the ability to make their bodies into tables). From balconies, house keeping utensils hang like potted plants. From the windows on the top floor come baskets on ropes, to fetch mail, fruit and cabbage. Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, likewise—only much more loudly—the street migrates into the living room.2

In the essay, porosity is the prevailing metaphor and is used by Benjamin to express the specific quality of Naples. He describes the flow of life between house and street as an almost osmotic process through a permeable membrane.

The following research about Via Portamedia/ Via Pignasecca refers to this metaphor and shows in detail, through a set of examples, how such an exchange works. That this is not an arbitrary process, but a system of culturally developed and refined interdependencies is revealed, on one hand, by analyzing the nature of the membrane (the built threshold between interior and exterior), and, on the other hand, by transcribing the practices of the people in using the urban realm.

Collecting and Representing

During several stays in Naples over the past five years, I have made a series of field studies about the use of public space, mainly concentrating on commercial activities. Walking through the city, I started to take notes as well as making sketches of particular places and situations. I visited some of these daily during the period of my stays, which lasted between two- and six-week periods. One of my concerns has been to develop a means of visual representation, in order to make a precise record and to visualize hidden interdependencies. For this I used graphic techniques—means that are part of the architectural language. My aim has been to go beyond the representation of built form and to find ways to represent a process of use within an architectural drawing. In addition I have made videos to record the tactics of individual vendors in the process of interlocking themselves with public life.

The following catalogue of street-usage-strategies found along Via Portamedina/ Via Pignasecca recur elsewhere in Naples, and my studies can therefore be seen as typologies of spatial use in the city. The examples are organized according to their increasing detachment from interior space. Beginning with the description of shops integrated into the existing architecture of the city, further examples demonstrate how vendors occupy a territory situated between interior and exterior space, and the study ends with an examination of the temporary selling activities on the street itself.

Description

The menswear shop is a complex system of flexible parts, situated in the courtyard of a palazzo. The courtyard is separated from the street by a huge wooden gate. As with most other Neapolitan palazzi, the gate is opened from morning to lunchtime, closed during the siesta (2-4 PM) and is reopened from afternoon till evening. The shop in question is located at the back of the courtyard underneath the main staircaise that leads to the apartments above. A series of fixed, illuminated glass cases form part of the shop. Two of these sit in front of the gate and address the street. Two others are positioned along the walls of the gateway. When the gate is opened, these two glass cases are unfolded and flapped over the gates. Thus the entrance of the palazzo becomes the window of the shop. The shop, which is set back from the street and operates in a narrow space underneath the stairs, unfolds during business hours into a maximum surface reaching out to the street. The courtyard, otherwise locked by the big gates and falling within the private sphere of the palazzo, is suddenly transformed into a room adjoining the street open to be observed and entered.

The Salumeria is a grocery shop at the corner of the piazza Pignasecca. Behind two roller-shutters, which close the shop front entirely during the night, there is a second façade consisting of show cases and two glass doors, which form the entrance to the shop. The glass cases, which can only be opened from the pavement, serve as a shop display, and as an extension of the shop interior. They are used as shelves for goods that are on sale, such as pasta, wine, and cheese. Hence the physical separation of shop interior and the street is broken up by the sales activities of the shop keepers, who fluctuate between inside and outside, in order to take goods out of the cases and place new goods in again.

The Tripperia, sells tripe and hot soup and is situated in a one-room basso, the basic unit of the city structure relating back to the time of the city’s foundation that is still used for both commercial and residential purposes today. The basso is raised slightly above the level of the pavement and addresses the street, its only source of natural light. Similar to a garage, the whole front of the room can be opened by a roller-shutter. During business hours, the shop remains open and is entered by customers directly from the pavement. Inside the room are chairs and tables. A small area at the entrance is separated from the room by a transparent stub wall: this is where the soup is prepared. As a substitute for a shop window, a kind of mobile case, where the tripe hangs and is displayed on salad leaves, is pushed out of the opening in such a way that it juts out half onto the pavement. To span the step between the pavement and the inside room, this sideboard is supported by a little platform. What seems to be important, and is practiced all over the city, is that the case sits on the threshold between interior and exterior and penetrates the vertical plane of the façade onto the pavement. This piece of furniture is detached from the interior and directly addresses  the street so that sales activities happen in-between the pavement and the inside room.

The Pesceria represents another form of use, which occurs in a space even smaller than that of the basso. This consists of a niche of approximately 3 m2, that is integrated into a recess of a palazzo. Like the basso it faces the street and is opened with a wide roller-shutter. The niche contains an aquarium, a scale, and a cash-box. The walls are covered with tiles and marble, on which are fixed objects, such as a fish and an anchor, photographs, signs, and the image of a Madonna. The actual sales area, where the fish is presented and sold, projects into the street in the form of boxes, buckets, and basins. On those days when the Pesceria is open, the space for passing traffic is reduced to half of its normal size. The Pesceria appears to be an intermediate form of architecture, half way between a market stand and a shop. The niche secures its permanent location and anchors the business in the urban network. When closed, one could assume there to be an ordinary fish shop behind the roller shutter, because the shopfront, the signs, and sunshades resemble those of the other shops. However, in its opened state, the niche seems like a fragment of an interior space, which is turned to the outside. This impression is created through the use of materials and objects, such as white tiles, an aquarium and photographs, which are usually used to familiarize interior spaces. The niche is like an anticipation of a space which can only be completed through the sales activities on the street.

Detached altogether from the permanent architecture of the city is the kiosk of a water vendor that sits in the square in front of the Monte Santo station. The kiosk is located at the corner of the square, where train passengers come down stairs leading from a side exit of the station at regular intervals and where cars pass before entering a narrow street leading into the Quartieri Spagnoli (the most densely inhabited quarter of the city center). The kiosk occupies a minimal area of about 1.5 m2. In an adjoining house, the water vendor has a small, lockable storage place under the main stairs. During the night, the kiosk serves as a container for goods and during the day as a base for the vendor to set out his field of operation: Water bottles, cans and crates—mainly elements that are part of his trade—are placed at strategic points to mark out this area. His ‘salesroom’ unfolds between these elements, which simultaneously serve as his display. The piling up of six-packs of water bottles into a shaky tower some 5 meters distant from his kiosk, that consequently must be carefully driven around by vespas and cars, is the most astonishing aspect of his way of dealing with the street. Longer observation of this daily practice made clear that this spot was precisely chosen in order to make cars park at a distance outside his field allowing just enough space for traffic to pass.

A vegetable vendor runs a bancarella during the weekdays at the corner of a building, where a small street turns off towards the market. The street is one-way and leads into the Quartieri Spagnoli. In the morning, the salesman arrives with his three-wheeled van loaded with goods. He turns into the minor street, shuts off the engine and then pulls the van back by hand to the exact corner of the house wall. To arrange his stand, he stacks fruit cases like stairs around the corner of the house, so that he addresses the market street. The loading platform of his van is integrated into the display and used a sales desk.

At another corner of a side-street, a small table projects onto the pavement of the main street. In the side-street, two chairs are set up next to the table, close to the wall; the table and chairs look like school furniture. On the table are two sets of lighters, which are sold for 1000 Lire each. The lighters are a signal that the vendor sells cigarettes too, which in case of demand he collects from a hiding-place. Usually both chairs are occupied and often there are acquaintances or neighbours hanging around. Consequently, during the day this stand is both a place for working and for passing time.

At a crossing on the market street, a chair stands in a recess next to a shop-window that projects on to the pedestrian footpath. This chair is the place for a woman who also sells cigarettes illegally. The cigarettes  are disguised in a plastic bag. She collects fresh supplies from a near-by building. From the chair, the woman has a view into the two cross streets, which allows her to observe surrounding activities. She is a well-known figure in the neighborhood, and another example of how a place of work is also commonly a place for pausing and chatting in the street.

A third cigarette vendor is situated at the crossing of a crowded main street. For the display of his cigarettes he uses a minimalist steel rack, consisting of a vertical shaft with a base and an approximately 20cm long U-section on its top. Into the U-section, which has exactly the thickness of one cigarette-box, he stacks the cigarette-boxes, one beside the other. When this sales rack is prepared, the man first looks around the corner to ascertain the situation, and then puts the rack out into the pavement so that the labels of the boxes are clearly visible to passers-by. He himself leans back on a traffic sign and observes the street. In case of danger, the rack is either pulled back behind the corner, or simlpy turned  around so that the narrow end, which is hardly visible, faces the activity of the street.

These examples demonstrate that public space in Naples is not a homogeneous space, that guarantees everyone the same rights; on the contrary, public space is subject to negotiation—negotiation between individual users and the general street life and certainly a negotiation between the user and other forces, such as the municipality, family clans, the Camorra. The territorial appropriation of the street for self-interest is the determining force at work, and the physical border between interior and exterior is blurred  through this process of spatial appropriation. There is no clear separation of private and public space; instead there are fields of different character, that are overlaid and interrelated. In the case of shops, their fields are marked out by flexible elements that mediate between the interior and the exterior. The spatial depth of this field varies. In one instance, it is the area around a glass-case, which projects onto the pedestrian way, and in another, it is the whole depth of a courtyard. In the case of the venditori ambulanti, it is the profile of the buildings, which creates recesses and corners that can become places of exchange. Here the people of Naples participate in niche economy on two levels: the vendors occupy niches within the free market, as well as physical niches within urban space. Their very existence depends directly on their surroundings.  If there are economic or spatial changes, it is the street vendors who are to realize this and react to new circumstances.

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