Gentrification we know by now, is the term coined to define urban redevelopment that involves a change in the original social fabric.

The small country gentry, in today’s times we could extend the concept to those who fit the description of middle class? Rich? Fortunate?

In short, ‘gentrified’ urban areas are neighbourhoods converted into areas accessible only to those with the purchasing power to sustain a very high standard of living.

Do you find this a positive or negative phenomenon?

The broken windows theory comes to mind.

We had already chatted about Philip Zimbardo on the Lucifer effect. 

Another experiment, again at Stanford University 1969: originally on two absolutely identical cars, one abandoned in Palo Alto, which remained in place intact, unlike the one abandoned in Bronx.

The breaking of the stall coincides with the breaking of a window of the car in Palo Alto, a prelude to looting in line with the car in Bronx.

As if to say that something that already appears damaged presupposes that it is not taken into account.

An idea later taken up by Rudolph Giuliani for New York City, starting with the underground.

Can we define New York as the epitome of gentrification?

Is your city gentrified?

Vigevano is not, in fact I would need a word for the exact opposite.

Degradation?

In fact, a part of the historic centre instead of being gentrified gradually becomes ‘disqualified’.

Several times I have told you about our province, Max Pezzali in the days of the lire had described it in four words: two discotheques, one hundred and six pharmacies. 

The one hundred and six pharmacies are still there, the discotheques are not.

And there is no alternative.

Nothing at all for the youngsters, who find themselves left to their own devices, but in constant company of the risk of being attacked and robbed by packs of peers well known to the police.

On the other hand, we have a number of supermarkets that is trending towards infinity as it keeps growing.

By now we are at the level of card collecting, even the ‘double’ ones have become so many.

The certainty is that one will come out of each supermarket with some kind of dissatisfaction, as well as enormous nostalgia for that now extinct trade.

I invent the definition: supermarketification.

No doubt we have to eat, but by now the need for nourishment of another kind has also become pressing: cultural nourishment, social nourishment, and the hunger to feel free.

Gentrification or supermarketfication?

Couldn’t we simply progress?