Making a “decorous” working class: Racialized stigmatization and alienation in a gentrifying neighborhood

Since 2018, the municipality of Brescia (Italy) has been carrying out a large-scale project of urban regeneration targeting Via Milano, a 2.5-kilometer road connecting the city’s western neighborhoods to the historical center. This project, inspired by the Italian government’s approach for revitalizing “decaying urban peripheries,” is transforming Via Milano and the surrounding districts. The area, historically inhabited by the city’s industrial working-class, is now home to many migrant residents as well. Drawing from 6 years of ethnographic research, this paper discusses three dynamics emerging from the regeneration. Firstly, it examines how powerful discourses define racialized conditions of membership to Italian society by mobilizing the categories of “decay” and “decorum,” which marginalize non-White residents and stigmatize their practices, deemed as “indecorous.” Secondly, it explores how these racialized definitions of Italianness are mobilized by public authorities to impose their vision and facilitate the emergence of inter-class alliances between white working- and middle-class residents with a “desired gentrifier,” that is, an imagined subject the municipality aims to attract to the regenerated neighborhood. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing how the “working-class subject” itself has been made “decorous,” complicating the relationships between groups forced to coexist in a gentrifying, yet historically class-segregated, neighborhood.