Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
32
have been renegotiated over the last twenty years. The analysis of how smells are perceived
demonstrates an increasing fear and disgust toward meat, death and decomposition. The
invasiveness of smells poses a threat to the established order and their removal from the
public space implies a desire for odourless places (Howes 1991). Power is imposed on public
places in ‘keeping with the modern regime of olfactory silence’ (Classen et al 1994: 161).
‘While groups in the centre — politicians, businessmen — are characterized by a symbolic
lack of scent, those on the periphery are classified as odorous’ (Classen et al 1994: 161).
Furthermore the tendency to prevent people from touching food on grounds of hygiene speaks
the language of an individualistic neoliberal view (Harvey 2008) in which urban strangers are
feared and bodies are separated and secluded from one another. In Mary Douglas’s words:
‘[r]eflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being,
form to formlessness, life to death’ (1966: 5). The local ideas about cleanliness, dirt and
distance inform a distinctive social order; and yet recent regulations attempt to transform the
market into a ‘safer’ place along the lines of the supermarket model, which embodies an idea
of modernity where everything is clean, safe and controlled. Hypermarkets respond perfectly
to these ideas of hygiene and health regulation. Together with fast food outlets, they are
perceived as the rationalised context
par excellence
for food consumption. The hypermarket,
O’Connor remarks, ‘is an artificial, sanitised “public space” by excluding nearly all
manifestations of collective life as well as those existential aspects of reality which are
sequestered by an abstract systems of modernity’ (2011: 3).
The shift of market organization toward a more formalised structure has provoked a
change in what is allowed to be experienced in the urban space. This transformation has made
the market a more private and secluded space where an active sensory interaction becomes
more individualistic. Local authorities very often interfere with the culturally appropriate way
of interacting with the material world as they endeavour to regulate the sensory experience.
The rationalisation of the urban space involves an increasing control on how space is
experienced. Specifically, the rationalisation of urban spaces and the commercial privatization
associated with urban regeneration threaten the complex and multi-modal experiences offered
by places like La Pescheria (Degen 2008). In the Italian context, however, there is ‘a robust
resistance to forms of political life and to civic values that are seen as intrusive and
unmanageable’ (Herzfeld 2009: 311-312). I would suggest that even in its renegotiation of
modernity, tradition and nostalgia, the market still offers the potentiality of debate and
disobedience. It allows space for irrationality and for active social participation in the public
arena. This resistance is traceable through people’s reactions to the new regulations. A direct
relationship to food remains vital for people who shop in this market and, despite the
contemporary drive towards homogenization of urban soundscapes (Adams et al 2006), La
Pescheria’s voices still resonate loud in Catania’s public space and the vendors’ cries are one
of the many ways in which this local community strives to keep the boundaries of this place
safe. As Bestor remarks, ‘[p]lace creates the perception of spatial (and social) fixity in the
midst of processual fluidity’ (2004: 18).
As a final remark, I would like to highlight that observing how urban space is
constructed and used show us what kind of society we live in. At the moment we are
