It is a documentary entitled “Urban Enclosures“, created by the director Francesco Cerrone in collaboration with anti-gentrification citizen committees.
An investigative film that shows urban transformations following the processes of intensive commercial exploitation of public spaces.
After the screenings in Florence in recent months and more recently in Empoli, the Neapolitan ones are also about to take place.
The theme is that of the process of tourism and gentrification of inhabited centers, with the increase in the cost of living, the precariousness of the right to housing and work, the transformations of commercial activities, environmental pollution and the sell-off of public assets .
Cities without citizens, transformed into simulacra at the mercy of mass tourism, of real «extraction basins» on which to profit, reducing the spaces of democracy to the maximum, given that without the inhabitants everything is simplified.
A rich investigation that starts from Naples and goes up the peninsula, collecting testimonies from activists, journalists and urban planners on the mechanisms that allow such financial operations.
Florence is one of the protagonists of the 70-minute film, through the story of how large international real estate funds, from America to Asia to the Middle East, have got their hands on the city’s large public structures, put up for sale by the administrations for become hotels or luxury residences: the brick like the diamond, a safe investment instrument, protected from market fluctuations.
The theme of airbnbs is addressed by the documentary which also tells how Naples is experiencing a tourist boom which is leading to the transformation of apartments and old shops into airbnbs and into bars, restaurants or souvenir shops: an ongoing process which is expelling the inhabitants, similarly to what has already happened in Venice, Rome and Florence.
A film that is like a seismic shock for Naples, where it will be screened today at Lido Pola in Bagnoli at 8.00 pm, presented by Francesco Cerrone, with Amedeo Colella, Alessandra Caputi (Rete SET and Italia Nostra) and Alfonso De Vito (Campagna Restahabitant).
The president of the Campania Region, Vincenzo De Luca, seems to have finally grasped, albeit with enormous delay, this ongoing speculative phenomenon, yet he does not seem to propose any official “point” but only appeals to citizens to keep a watchful eye on possible dubious operations. His recipe for the city of Salerno is that of more hotels and fewer B & Bs and holiday homes, while he remains silent on Naples: will it already be too late?
