Places for Leisure. Places for City

Giovanni Maciocco maintains that leisure is to all effects an urban activity, in that to sustain intellectual growth and development it presupposes participation in the formulation of symbols and rites within one’s own area of social and cultural life, which is indeed the city. In this sense it can contribute to the project for the city, for it constitutes a concretely operative possibility of a necessary retrieval of individual and social spaces, times and relations. Places of leisure are often considered places where it is possible to free ourselves from work, take our distance from reality and open ourselves up to desire, and holiday landscapes become a projection of desires. The landscape as desired product marks a distance from reality, as “repetitive, foreseeable and reassuring familiarity”, an aesthetic ideal that has to do with “kitsch” in that it eliminates from our visual field all that in human existence is basically unacceptable, but has an appeasing effect on the inhabitants of a world that is becoming increasingly insecure. This completely changes the economic bases of landscape construction and favours involution of the concept of landscape towards commodification. But in the heart of commodification, in the advanced economies, vast alternative spaces also exist, where commodification is not present or has a slow, irregular process of penetration, spaces of hope, where leisure can play a fundamental role in the dialectic processes of construction of identity. Commodification becomes an important part of leisure activities through tourism economics, which has become a key aspect in local economics for many urban areas and has produced tensions and conflicts between managing the city as a tourist destination on the one hand, and as a space of work and residence on the other. 4 Giovanni Maciocco, Silvia Serreli In the age of “urban redevelopment” art and entertainment are also used as instruments for renewal of the city, or often of its caricature, through “fantasisation” of the everyday context, as a company strategy to exploit “commodity fetishism” and extend the life of a brand geographically and symbolically. Branding projects may be of great importance for cities, but are also accompanied by great risks that are linked with the lack of social control of the accessibility of art and culture as an instrument of collective growth. Maciocco concludes by upholding that, if leisure is understood as intermediate space or frontier between these tensions, it may take on the form and function of a neutral zone, where reciprocal identities may be attested, remaining separate but beginning to each have experience of the other. Where differences, the different ways of seeing the world and the various styles of thought, are defined, ultimately, the basic elements of a collective consciousness of the city.