Cities Contested E-Book

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 696

Beschreibung

Die 1970er-Jahre gelten in der deutschen Zeitgeschichte als Epoche eines tief greifenden sozialen Wandels, eines "Strukturbruchs " im Übergang von der Industriemoderne zur postfordistischen Gesellschaft. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes widmen sich diesem Jahrzehnt erstmals aus einer stadthistorischen Perspektive und stellen dabei Entwicklungen in Westdeutschland und Italien einander gegenüber. In Fallstudien zu Städten vom Ruhrgebiet bis Sizilien wird untersucht, wie sich die Umbrüche dieser Zeit im Brennpunkt von städtischem Raum und städtischer Gesellschaft verdichten, als "urbane Krise" wahrgenommen und verhandelt werden und sich in Konflikten in der städtischen Politik sowie Kämpfen in und um die Stadt manifestieren.

Leseprobe

Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, Dieter Schott (eds.)

Cities Contested

Urban Politics, Heritage, and Social Movements in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s

Campus Verlag

Frankfurt/New York

About the book

Historians discuss the 1970s as an era of deep transformations and even structural rupture in Western societies. This volume, for the first time engages in this debate from the perspective of comparative urban history. By evoking an alarming »urban crisis«, contemporaries referred to general unease and upheavals which became manifest in urban society and politics as well as in struggles in and about urban space, while ideas about the »city« and concepts of urban planning were being reconsidered. The contributions to this volume comprise a general discussion about the seventies as a »structural rupture« by comparing Italy and Western Germany, and a sample of case studies of Italian and West German cities, analyzing central issues of urban politics, urban renewal and heritage, urban protest and social movements in the city.

Vita

Martin Baumeister is Director of the German Historical Institute in Rome, Italy, and Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Munich, Germany.

Bruno Bonomo, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Contemporary History in the Department of History Cultures Religions at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.

Dieter Schott is Professor of Modern History with a Focus on Urban and Environmental History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Contents

Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, Dieter Schott: Introduction: Contested Cities in an Era of Crisis

»Save Our Cities Now!« The Perception of Urban Crisis in the Early 1970s

The 1970s as a Period of Structural Rupture

»Parallel Histories«? The Comparison between Italy and West Germany

Focal Points and Structure of the Volume

Urban Politics and Visions of the City

The Historic City between Protection and Reinvention

Contested Spaces and Social Movements

Transfer, Convergence and the »Model Italy«

Lutz Raphael: The 1970s—a Period of Structural Rupture in Germany and Italy?

The Events of the Seventies and their Effects in a Comparative Perspective

Long-Term Effects of the Red Years: Political Reforms and Social Change

Converging Continuities: Effects of Longue Durée

After the Boom Years: The Making of a New Political Economy

Conclusion

Urban Politics and Visions of the City

Francesco Bartolini: Changing Cities. An Urban Question for the Italian Communist Party

The Gramscian Tradition

Echoes of Neo-Marxism

The Evils of the Modern City

Ruling the New Metropolis

Rethinking the Urban Question

Conclusion

Roberto Colozza: Nights of Miracles in Rome? The »Estate Romana« in the »Years of Lead« (1976–1979)

Introduction

The PCI in Rome in the Seventies. The Birth of a Political Leadership

The Estate Romana. Redesigning the City Through Culture

The Estate Romana: from Ephemeral Happening to Cultural Landmark

Conclusion

Vittorio Vidotto: Corviale, Rome. An Architectural and Social Utopia of the Seventies

The Genealogy of Corviale

The Project

Life in Corviale

Giovanni Cristina: The »Villaggio del Pilastro«. Urban Planning, Social Housing and Grassroots Mobilization in a Suburb of Bologna (1960–1985)

Introduction

Social Mobilization and Right to Housing (1966–1971)

Building up a Participative Community: School and Public Services

Participation Diversifies, the Pilastro Changes (1974–1986)

Conclusions

Grazia Prontera: Munich–City of Immigration? Integration Policies and Italian Active Participation in Munich Political and Social Life through Italian Organizations in the 1970s

The Origin of Integration Policies and of the Local Consultative Body for Foreign Citizens in Munich

Italians and Their Organizations in 1970s Munich

Conclusions

The Historic City between Protection and Reinvention

Gerhard Vinken: Escaping Modernity? Civic Protest, the Preservation Movement and the Reinvention of the Old Town in Germany since the 1960s

A Threshold Moment

Crisis of the City

Old Town and Historic Ensemble

The Historic City in the European Year of Architectural Conservation 1975

Heimatschutz, Harmonization and Reconstruction

Conclusion

Guido Zucconi: »La Festa è Finita!« The Question of »Centri Storici« in 1970s Italy

Some Catastrophes of the Late 1960s

A New Notion of Cultural Heritage

The Centro Storico as a New Emerging Question

The Bologna Model

The Limits to (Any Kind of) Growth

Harald Bodenschatz: Bologna and the (Re-)Discovery of Urban Values

Preservational Urban Renewal of the Entire Historic Center

A City with a Public Service Agenda

No Displacement of the Poorer Resident Population

Municipal Decentralization: Enabling Social Control

State Decentralization: Founding of the Emilia Romagna Region

The Crisis of the Bologna Model

Conclusion

Jost Ulshöfer: From »Vecchio Nucleo Cittadino« to »Centro Storico«. On Bologna’s Preservation Policies and the Social Cost of Urban Renewal (1955–1975)

Introduction

Plans for the City Center, 1955–1960

Carta di Gubbio, Riforma Urbanistica and Rinnovamento of the PCI

Indagine settoriale and Piano per il Centro Storico

Changes around 1970

PEEP / Centro Storico

Conclusions

Melania Nucifora: Protection of Cultural Heritage and Urban Development. Catania and Syracuse in the Seventies: A Comparative Approach

The Great Transformation Changed the Traits of the Bel Paese

The Conflict Between Protection and Development: From Elitism to the Idea of Heritage and Landscape as a Right

The Sixties as Incubator of the Turning Point. Three Key Points of the Change

Comparing Catania and Syracuse: Economy, Culture, and Politics

After the Mancini Law: A New Way to Create a City

The Statute of Historical Heritage in the Age of Protest

The Idea of Landscape: From Functionalism to Ecology

Conclusion

Contested Spaces and Social Movements

Freia Anders / Alexander Sedlmaier: »Squatting means to destroy the capitalist plan in the urban quarters«: Spontis, Autonomists and the Struggles over Public Commodities (1970–1983)

Autoriduzione

The Crisis of the Cities

Frankfurt

Public Transport Fare Increases

Squatting in West Berlin

Comparison Frankfurt—Berlin

Conclusion

Sebastian Haumann: »Movimento del ‘77« Perceived. Reinvigorating Urban Protest in West Germany

Urban Issues and the Italian Model

Urban Culture as an Object of Contention

Self-Identification as »Urban Indians«

»Two Cultures« and Urban Lifestyles

Conclusions

Luciano Villani: The Struggle for Housing in Rome. Contexts, Protagonists and Practices of a Social Urban Conflict

Introduction

Tradition and Innovation in the Struggle for Housing in the Early Seventies

Social Embeddedness and the Repertoire of Action in Urban Social Movements Development

The Movement of House Squatting in the Winter 1973–74 and the San Basilio Revolt

Conclusion

Christian Wicke: Urban Movement à la Ruhr? The Initiatives for the Preservation of Workers’ Settlements in the 1970s

Introduction

The Settlement Initiatives and the 1970s in the Ruhr

The »Right to the City«: the Emergence of an Alternative Public

A Conceptual Exploration of the Workers’ Settlement Movement

Conclusion

Notes on Authors

Index of Names

Index of Places

Introduction: Contested Cities in an Era of Crisis

Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, Dieter Schott

»Save Our Cities Now!« The Perception of Urban Crisis in the Early 1970s

In May 1971, the Deutscher Städtetag, the Association of German Cities, held its convention in Munich. Hans-Jochen Vogel, president of the Association, mayor of the Bavarian capital and a prominent Social Democratic politician, gave the keynote lecture under the title of the convention’s programmatic motto: »Save our cities now!« In his speech, Vogel drew a pitch-black picture of the situation of West German cities which, according to his diagnosis, were threatened by a deep crisis after the enormous effort and impressive successes of 25 years of postwar reconstruction.1 He saw obvious parallels to the United States, quoting President Nixon who had recently declared that one would need another American revolution in order to save the country’s cities from the brink of a precipice. Munich’s mayor listed a whole series of symptoms characterizing the difficult situation of the growing cities and urban agglomerations: among others, the decay of older residential areas and historic city centers, urban sprawl and the mushrooming of new faceless districts, traffic congestion and heavy pollution, an increasingly insufficient infrastructure in education and the public health system, growing social inequality and disintegration. Vogel diagnosed a deep urban crisis of epochal dimensions, which, for its part, was a manifestation of profound transformations in all spheres of life. He declared that the future of the cities would be decided not in the sphere of urbanism and by urban experts, but in politics. For Vogel, a pragmatic reformer and certainly not a radical intellectual, the roots of the problems were to be found in the development of capitalism, especially in exploding real estate prices and the disparity between strong private financial power and weak municipal finances.

Vogel’s statement as well as the Städtetag meeting had a considerable media impact at its time. The influential magazine Der Spiegel made it its cover story, transforming the Städtetag’s strong appeal into the rather pessimistic question: »Can we still save the cities?«2 The weekly Die Zeit asked: »Are our cities dying?«3, echoing Jane Jacobs’ famous critique of modernist urban planning and urban renewal in the United States of the fifties.4 For West German experts and politicians the apparently catastrophic situation of the great cities in the United States, plagued by social disintegration, racial conflicts and the impact of mass traffic and anonymous mass consumerism as evoked in the proliferating American debate about the »urban crisis«5, served as a warning of a future threatening their own cities. The West German debate of May 1971—properly speaking the culmination of a longer process of critical evaluation by German intellectuals6—expressed a growing sense of unease about recent urban development and modern urban life. Summed up in the rather vague term of »urban crisis«, this sense of unease gained ground in manifold political and academic discourses of the postwar era, especially during the sixties and seventies.

»Urban crisis« referred to a variety of problems in rather different contexts. In the United States, it was marked by general societal struggles often perceived in categories of race and class, while in Western Europe it was influenced, apart from wider political and social contexts, by normative concepts and ideas of distinctive European traditions of city and urbanity.7 Marxist scholars used the term in order to denounce the strains and social costs of capitalist development which were becoming particularly evident in the urban centers of the Western hemisphere. For Henri Lefebvre, »la crise urbaine« was the »most central« of a whole series of crises affecting French society in the sixties, reflecting the country’s deep transformation.8 Debates on the »urban crisis«—which intensified during the sixties—were closely interrelated on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in different political and ideological camps from the left to the right.9 Focusing on urban problems, on a deeper level they referred to general trends and developments concerning all areas of life, as Vogel claimed in his Munich speech in 1971.10 And all of them expressed an urgent desire to remedy a supposedly menacing, dangerous situation affecting the cities and their respective societies by political means. These could consist either of pragmatic, piecemeal reform, repair measures as spelled out by Vogel or—as the vociferous Left of the seventies hoped—of a fundamental societal change, a revolution which was to take cities as its point of departure.

In Italy, symptoms of the »urban crisis« such as congestion, poor housing conditions, lack of municipal finances, inadequacy of services and increasing social tensions appeared »ever more widespread and acute« over the seventies.11 At the beginning of the decade, Rome, the capital, was seen as a symbol of the degradation and unlivability of the big cities.12 In September 1970, on the occasion of the celebrations for the centenary of the Porta Pia breach, the Christian Democratic mayor Clelio Darida had to admit that »one hundred years after its reunion with Italy« Rome had »grown on itself in a disorderly and hurried manner«. It had not managed to develop »a valid relationship between history, tradition, culture and the needs and expectations of a modern metropolis at the center of an advanced country«: it was, in sum, »a city where problems (some problems in particular) have reached the level of explosion«.13 Rome’s situation, however, was far from unique. Even Milan—the city that more than any other embodied the myth of urban modernity in the years of the economic miracle—in the changed context of the seventies, did not escape the critical, almost apocalyptic, representations of the metropolis in crisis, choked by congestion, decay and lack of green spaces.14 While planners, sociologists and political analysts discussed the origins of the »urban crisis« and its relationships to systems of governance and urban policies15, Italo Calvino masterfully expressed the theme in literary terms. In one of his most renowned books, originally published in 1972, the great writer drafted a series of archetypical imaginary cities out of an evaluation of the contemporary urban world as passionate as it was critical:

What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to live there. It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know.16

The 1970s as a Period of Structural Rupture

In the debates about »urban crisis« cities were often considered exemplary sites, as mirrors and hotspots of deep general transformations of Western societies, then still more felt or anticipated than fully grasped. The deep sense of crisis as perceived by contemporaries fits well with the way the seventies are addressed in current academic debates. Many historians hold that the seventies mark the opening of a profound longer-term crisis-ridden »structural rupture«, though views and opinions about the scope and character of this break differ. While Niall Ferguson considers the seventies »more as the seedbed of future crises than as the crisis conjuncture itself« when »the shock of the global had only just begun«, Charles Maier maintains that the »›West‹ did experience a decade of crisis, comparable to the earlier period of twentieth-century economic hammering in the 1930s and to the geopolitical meltdown that preceded World War I«: »The turmoil of the 1970s provoked a fundamental rethinking of the economic and political axioms that had been taken for granted since the Second World War. It closed the ›postwar‹ era and its policy premises.« Unlike the two earlier turbulent eras, 1905–1914 and 1929–1939, the shake-up of the seventies did not lead to a major world conflict.17 For Hartmut Kaelble the seventies are »one of the pivotal decades of the twentieth century«, a »soft turning point« for all of Europe, a »›silent revolution‹, instead of an upheaval dominated by spectacular political events«, characterized by a paradoxical dialectical relationship of disillusionment and promise.18 For some historians the seventies are characterized as a decade of transition particularly by important transformations in the realm of mentalities and behavior as manifest, among others, in changes of sex, gender and family relations.19 In general, however, more emphasis is laid on the comprehensive character of the »structural rupture« which permeates society, economy and culture and affects Western as well as Eastern Europe, capitalist as well as socialist societies.20 According to this interpretation, the decade of the seventies marked the definitive end of the postwar boom, of an era that has been labeled as »les Trentes Glorieuses« or, in the words of Eric J. Hobsbawm, »the Golden Age« following the dark »Age of Catastrophe«.21 The postwar reconstruction had definitively come to an end, the decades of growth and continuously rising prosperity were closed and the Keynesian consensus dominating the economic policies of Western European countries was quickly eroding.

With good reason, it has been argued recently that the historiographical debates on the seventies, dominated by British, French and German scholars, are for the most part anchored in specific national contexts and shaped by contemporary perceptions, political factors and historiographical traditions.22 A possible solution to this situation could be to promote a transnational dialogue. This volume brings central aspects of the debate about the peculiar character of the decade up for discussion in relation to the urban sphere of Italy and Western Germany as an arena of conflict and contestation. It developed out of a conference held in May 2015 at the German Historical Institute in Rome, aiming to bring German and Italian scholars together in order to compare and contrast, how the »urban crisis« became manifest in cities and was faced by them in Italy and Western Germany during the seventies. Thus it aims to integrate urban history into general history. At best, cities hitherto do play a marginal role in general history or do not feature at all although the twentieth century in Europe has been characterized as an urban century and urban historians stress the role of cities as mirror and laboratory of general historical processes and transformations.23 This is remarkable and even surprising given the fact that both the Italian and West German societies had become thoroughly urbanized societies by the late sixties. Furthermore, the scholarly discovery of the »modern city«, of industrialization and urbanization as a relevant historical subject was actually—and not by chance—taking place exactly when the debate about an »urban crisis« was at its pivot, around 1970.24 Last but not least, urban historians so far have not considered the seventies as an era of transformation and change in and of itself. Friedrich Lenger in his comprehensive history of European metropolises since 1850 mentions the seventies as a structural caesura but without discussing its particular impact and meaning from the perspective of urban history.25 Simon Gunn, however, argues that in the decades after 1970 the ideas about »modernity« as a paradigm dominant among urban experts and politicians between the thirties and the seventies »came under selective attack from preservationists, activists and others. […] One might therefore think of European cities in the 1970s and 1980s as laboratories for new kinds of social and political experimentation, of technocratic intervention, communitarianism and neo-liberalism, developed outside the precepts of the modern.«26

»Parallel Histories«? The Comparison between Italy and West Germany

This volume tackles some of these questions considering Western Europe in a bi-national perspective, discussing changing ideas on urbanism, urban space, urban politics and society in the seventies. The comparison between Italy and Germany in contemporary history has a long tradition and has produced a considerable amount of research with a clear focus on topics like »belated« nation building, the history of fascism and national socialism or cultures of memory and politics of history in the postwar era. The »master narrative« in this kind of comparison tends to be »parallel history« between the two countries.27 The seventies, however, up to now have not attracted much attention and urban history and cities are completely missing.28 If we look at the dominant themes of the national historiographies of Italy and Germany on the seventies, we can also observe a structural asymmetry. For Italy, these are social movements, political violence and the »historical compromise« between Christian Democrats and Communists and its failure; for West Germany, the crisis and eventual failure of the Social Democratic attempt to reform society and the change to a more pragmatic style of government, focused on economic efficiency and performance are dominant themes as well as the still important East-West relations.29

From the point of view of urban history, it seems obvious that the model of »parallel history« does not work very well. Although Italy and West Germany were both highly urbanized countries in the period under scrutiny here, some important differences regarding patterns and chronology of urbanization can be highlighted.30 The Federal Republic, as part of the Central and Western European region that had experienced massive urbanization linked to industrialization from the mid-nineteenth and well into the mid-twentieth century, saw this long phase of sustained expansion (interrupted by the two World Wars) coming slowly to a halt as early as the sixties when demographic stagnation or even decline started to become visible in several large and medium-sized cities as a result of a range of factors including industrial restructuring and the incipient urban manufacturing crisis, increased private mobility, changing lifestyles and the preference for ex-urban and peri-urban locations resulting in pervasive suburbanization. By contrast, in Italy, a relative latecomer to modern urbanization, urban growth fuelled by internal migration became particularly intense in the fifties and sixties—the years of the »boom« when the transition to a fully industrialized economy was completed. Actually, urban development during the postwar period took rather different forms in the countries examined due, among other things, to the greater extent of war destruction suffered by German cities, to the unequal degree of conservation of the historic fabric in the wake of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban renewal, to the uneven effectiveness of planning and regulation, and to the importance of informal urban expansion in the Italian context. Nonetheless, in Italy it was only in the seventies that urban growth began to run out of steam; major cities—such as Milan, Turin and Naples—started to lose population, or saw much smaller increases than before, as was the case for Rome. It was the onset of »a vast and unexpected movement of territorial deconcentration« that was caused by industrial decentralization linked to the crisis of Fordism and by the spread of infrastructures and services beyond the main urban areas and the most advanced regions. Furthermore, these processes were due to problems affecting most cities in the aftermath of the great postwar expansion: lack of affordable housing and high living costs, congestion, insufficient public services and the increasingly poor quality of the urban environment.31 The outcome was a shift in growth from urban cores to surrounding metropolitan areas, the increasing urbanization of the countryside, the expansion of provincial towns and their merging with nearby centers into wider urban systems. Similar dynamics occurred in most of the industrialized Western world and were accompanied by concerned contemporary debates on »counterurbanization«.32 However, while in West Germany these processes had already started in the sixties, in Italy it was rather the seventies that marked a turning point—the beginning of a longer-term change in urbanization patterns.

If one looks at the local level, differences between the two countries also seem to prevail. In a comparative analysis of processes and practices of political communication in cities in postwar Italy and West Germany, for example, it has been stressed how urban topography and space influenced and molded political debates and conflicts in rather different ways in both post-dictatorial states due to different political and social traditions as well as material conditions. In Italy, political strife and competition were brought out preferably in public space, in the form of direct confrontation in the piazza. In West German cities, in contrast, antagonistic political communication was deliberately kept out of the public space and was characterized much more by avoiding open conflict, while, because of the confrontation with East Germany, communists, unlike in Italy, were widely banned from local politics. When young protesters, willing to break the established codes of conduct for political communication, entered the urban arena from 1968 on, they entered two different settings and confronted two different ways of relating politics to urban space. This situation deeply influenced the appearance of social movements and the dynamics of urban struggles in the seventies.33 It is particularly in the sphere of urban movements, however, where important transnational interrelations and international connections have been highlighted beyond all national peculiarities.34

Lutz Raphael, in his contribution to this volume, proposes a different way of comparing Italy to the Federal Republic of Germany, stressing commonalities and convergences rather than differences. Drawing on the thesis about the »structural rupture« since the early seventies which he developed together with Anselm Doering-Manteuffel35, he situates the urban conflicts and debates in and about Italian and German cities in a wider context of long-term social, economic and political processes, also beyond the seventies, where he sees basic parallels between West Germany and Italy. In many regards such as mass consumption, welfare spending but also social structures, e.g. family relations, Raphael notes long-term trends towards homogenization between the two countries. Thus, by 1990—he concludes—Italy was clearly less strikingly different from Germany than in 1960. Even in fields such as the distribution of power within the political system there is a notable trend towards multilevel governance with the regionalization of the early seventies in Italy, giving access to power also for the Communist Party on the regional (and local) level. What is remarkable from an urban history perspective are, among others, the parallels in terms of economic structure of clusters of industrial enterprises of different sizes and scales organized in networks of flexible production which became dominant in southern Germany as well as in »Third Italy« and generated comparable spatial structures of »semi-urbanized spaces, mixing industrial parks, housing areas and commercial surfaces.«36 Migration provides a further link between West Germany and Italy, generating comparable social structures in both societies on an urban level as well as initiating transfers of social experiences and forms of struggle.

It is evident that the bi-national comparison results in a rather complex picture of contrasts and common traits as well as influences, interdependence and mutual relationships, depending on the perspective and the issues at stake. The history of European cities of the last decades, which in large part is yet to be written, can benefit from a comparative approach which goes beyond self-referential single case studies and reductive visions closed in the frame of national history. The comparison between Italy and Germany, which can already build on some traditions, is a valuable alternative to a narrow concept of »Western Europe« which is generally restricted to the »classical« triad of Britain, France and West Germany. Focusing on cities opens new dimensions to the debates about the »epochal character« of the seventies, while urban history can benefit from engaging in this agenda.

Focal Points and Structure of the Volume

The present volume does not claim to give a panoramic view of Italian and West German urban history of the seventies: rather, it concentrates on some partly overlapping and closely interrelated central topics. Three focal points have been chosen—urban politics, »the historic city«, and social movements. In all three fields the seventies marked a turning point, witnessed significant novelties, and/or saw ideas and programs that had been developed over the previous decades being translated into practice and given a concrete dimension.

The first section deals with »Urban Politics and Visions of the City« with a dominant focus on left-wing parties particularly for Italy. This focus is due to the fact that within the Left, in its broad understanding, a significant shift in perspective occurred around 1970 which gave the city and the urban sphere a new and much higher relevance. In classic Marxist ideology, the factory and the traditional struggle between workers and the bourgeoisie over wages and labor relations, as fought out in strikes and industrial action, had been considered the all-important site of conflict. Now the sphere of reproduction in Marxist terminology, the household and family as well as leisure gained new significance, and thus urban conflicts apart from and beyond the factory were considered to be as important as classical labor conflicts. On the other hand, within Neo-Marxism, after the failure of voluntarist hopes of an imminent revolution, personal wishes and desires acquired a new validity and—paralleling this »subjective turn«—the quality of the living environment became much more important than before. It was basically within the Left that these ideological and political reorientations took place, but the Left did in this period have a strong influence on public opinion and shaped general debates over the city and quality of life therein. Therefore it is a true and sincere reflection of contemporary problems if the papers in this volume focus apparently one-sidedly on the Left.

A second reason is that in Italy »red« administrations were voted into power during the seventies, opening new perspectives in the sphere of urban politics. After winning local elections in 1975 and 1976, the PCI had the chance to govern eight out of ten of the country’s largest cities (Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin, Genoa, Venice, Bologna and Florence), several of them for the first time.37 High hopes accompanied those victories in left-wing public opinion. The question how to exercise the newly won power posed itself urgently: communists and their allies developed programs and strategies aimed at tackling the manifold problems left by the extraordinary urban growth of the previous decades and at using the urban arena for the general progress of society. Innovative policies were developed in some sectors: for instance, urban conservation and social housing in Bologna and cultural initiatives in Rome, as detailed in following chapters. Yet, despite some significant achievements, the overall experience of »red« administrations proved rather disappointing, since elements of continuity and co-management of power tended to prevail over expectations for renewal or radical change nurtured by supporters of the Left.

Contributions in this section deal with urban policies and the respective underlying notions of the city—they discuss changing visions of the political, social, cultural meaning of cities; efforts to use the means and instruments of architecture, urban planning and cultural politics in order to resolve deep social conflicts and inequalities as well as to foster social integration and realize an »urban utopia«; furthermore, contributions also consider the agency of neighborhoods, of local residents, and immigrants in their own dynamics and their sometimes paradoxical effects.

The second section »The Historic City between Protection and Reinvention« tackles the tensions between the deep changes that Italian and West German cities experienced in the wake of the processes of urbanization and urban renewal from the postwar period to the seventies, and the new policies of heritage protection fostered by newly emerging ideas of »old town« and »historic center«.38 The focus here is on the specific value attributed to the pre-war, particularly the pre-industrial, city and on the dialectics between modernization and the conservation of urban identity.

The fifties and sixties witnessed major developments in the debate on urban heritage both on a national and an international level. Overcoming artificial distinctions between monuments and »ordinary« buildings, protection was claimed for entire portions of the city or whole towns of high historical value which heritage conservationists and planners suggested be seen and treated as complex unitary organisms. Building on this, the seventies brought a comprehensive reappraisal of the aesthetic and use values of the »old« town as a cherished and highly valued habitat, culminating in the European Architectural Heritage Year, 1975. A forerunner and vanguard in this debate—indeed an international model in those years39—was Bologna. There the communist administration launched highly ambitious urban renewal schemes which were intended to preserve the old built fabric together with its traditional residents, especially low-income households, rather than proceeding via a comprehensive demolition of the old housing stock, as had been general practice within modernist-inspired redevelopment schemes in many European city centers over the previous decades.

Contributions in this section look at the emergence of new understandings of the historic city in this period and their cultural and political implications, as well as at planning debates and practices in selected cities—first and foremost Bologna—through case studies.

The third section »Contested Spaces and Social Movements« reconsiders the social movements of the seventies as particular urban phenomena. In both countries under scrutiny in this volume, the seventies stand out as a period of intense political activism developing in the wake of 1968 and at the same time reflecting the changing context of the twilight of the »Golden Age«. Italy, in particular—where the student revolt had been followed by the workers’ »hot autumn« of 1969—experienced a longer and deeper cycle of social mobilization than any other European country over the whole decade.40 A peak in this cycle was reached in 1977 with the explosion of youth protest known as Movimento del ‘77, which merged militancy and creativity, violence and irony in a unique blend that represented an international peculiarity and—as will be seen in the following chapters—attracted considerable attention from abroad.41

With the already mentioned re-discovery of the city as a strategic arena for conflicts about social reproduction, struggles about the use of urban spaces and resources acquired a new dominance. In numerous cities and neighborhoods across Italy and West Germany, activists, radical groups and voluntary associations sought alliances with local residents to oppose redevelopment schemes and preserve traditional settlements, to fight for the right to housing, to defend living standards through self-reduction of utility rates, to have access to improved infrastructure and public services, and so on. These struggles saw new actors taking the stage, the diffusion of innovative practices and the re-emergence of revolutionary horizons, bringing about a wider reconfiguration of the political scene. A lasting legacy of the seventies in Germany, and to a considerable degree also in Italy, has been the formation of an »alternative milieu«, particularly in those large cities where fierce urban conflicts did take place and activists from new left groups succeeded in embedding themselves in the urban environment. The city has been both the site and the object of contention in this formation of an alternative milieu which contributed to changing the political culture for the following period in a decisive way.42 Contributions in this section analyze some of the most significant social movements and conflicts of the seventies in their urban dimension through an array of approaches, ranging from the focus on local initiatives to the study of transnational transfers and recontextualization.

In the following, we briefly summarize the contributions to each section before moving on to some concluding remarks.

Urban Politics and Visions of the City

The perception of the strategic role of cities for and within political programs changed significantly in the seventies, particularly in Italy. Francesco Bartolini traces how the Italian Communist Party (PCI) developed a new discourse on the city under the combined influences of Neo-Marxism and contemporary urban struggles. Cities became regarded as key sites of conflict as much as the factory, with the backdrop of the strategic realignment towards a broad alliance between working and middle classes, which the PCI pursued in the form of the »historic compromise«. Initially, Bologna played a major role in this reorientation, but it lost much of its shine when the PCI took over municipal leadership in several of the largest Italian cities and their different problem scenarios came to the fore. The initiatives of the PCI-led administrations in these cities met only with partial success, and in reaction to the deepening economic crisis of the late seventies and the failure of the »historic compromise«, eventually the PCI had to readjust its view of the urban question.

In this context, Rome evolved into a crucial testing ground for the Communist Party. The Estate Romana, an innovative cultural festival launched in the summer of 1977, became one of the flagship projects of the Italian capital’s »red administration«. Film screenings and other cultural events staged in the archaeological settings of the »Eternal City« served, for one, to try to overcome the antagonistic atmosphere of the »Years of Lead« and, on the other hand, to create a new kind of urban mass culture. Roberto Colozza shows that this initiative was a major influence in changing cultural policies in Italian cities and beyond, ushering a new emphasis on mass cultural events staged in evocative urban contexts. For the PCI this cultural policy—massively criticized by exponents of traditional culture as »ephemeral«—implied a significant opening towards the elements of a less authoritarian, more libertarian youth culture and paved the way for the advent of a new generation of leaders more in tune with youth movements and democratic principles.

What turned into another symbol of the urban policies of the Left in Rome was Corviale, an imposing social housing complex located in the western outskirts of the city. Vittorio Vidotto considers issues of architecture, built space and social life in his account of the planning process as well as the appropriation by inhabitants of this nearly one-kilometer-long building. He highlights the utopian aims of the involved architects, supported by the commissioning agency IACP, to create a new urbanity conceived as a radical alternative to the ubiquitous suburban sprawl of postwar Rome. Huge problems arose after residents started to move in due to an unfortunate coincidence of missing services, the inability of the IACP to manage the complex in an efficient way and a lack of political will to terminate the self-help activities of illegal occupants, which led to the »Gordian knot« which Corviale still presents itself as today. Nevertheless, a new identity has developed and most residents would oppose the slogan »Demolish Corviale« used by the political Right to denounce the alleged failure of the Left.

The chapter by Giovanni Cristina on Pilastro, a satellite neighborhood on the outskirts of Bologna, can be seen as a complement to both Vidotto’s study on large social housing estates and Bartolini’s analysis of the urban policy of the PCI. Focusing on the initiatives of a tenants’ committee, Cristina shows how activists, most of them affiliated with the PCI, tried to develop a grassroots movement to represent the essential interests of the new community. In a context of the new settlement’s severe technical and planning disfunctionalities and a problematic inhabitant social structure, including many immigrant households from the Mezzogiorno, the committee established itself as the leading voice of the suburb, fending off attempts by far-left groups to mobilize the residents to more extreme actions. Remarkably, here PCI members and sympathizers acted on both sides of the conflict as representatives of tenants as well as members of Bologna’s urban administration and housing agency. This chapter also indicates that, when seen from the outskirts, Bologna can tell quite a different story from the widely recognized »Bologna model« that is examined in the following section.

Issues of migration and a transnational perspective lie at the core of Grazia Prontera’s contribution on the associational culture of Italian migrants in Munich of the early seventies, then the German city with the highest percentage of foreign immigrants. The city administration at first developed little initiative, but then established a consultative foreigners’ council composed of the different migrant groups. Since the law for foreign residents interdicted the formation of political groups, Italians formed cultural associations which were de-facto political groups as well as regional associations in order to organize the social intercourse of migrants from the same regions of origin. On the whole, the associational culture of Italian migrants was more inward-oriented, trying to strengthen contact with home regions. In the seventies, however, the newly established regional administrations in Italy became active supporters of such ventures, and there were arenas, such as trade union activities and partly housing struggles, where migrant associations did interact with the German political and public sphere.

The Historic City between Protection and Reinvention

The seventies saw a major transformation in the perception and significance of the »historic city« in both countries. Analyzing the German scene of monumental conservation, Gerhard Vinken reconstructs the trajectory of monumental conservation as an academic discipline as well as an administrative practice, going back to its first origins around 1900. Referring to social struggles linked with historic city districts of the late sixties and early seventies, Vinken shows how the original preoccupation of activists with preserving affordable living space was complemented by conservationist arguments, which led to more highly regulated legislation for dealing with historical built heritage. Experts in monumental conservation, however, continued in the mold of anti-modern thinking as it had developed in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, insisting on the material substance and eventually even promoting the reconstruction of historic buildings no longer in existence without joining forces with urban planners.

In a complementary contribution to Vinken’s, Guido Zucconi traces the ideological and political background of the »discovery« of the centri storici in Italy. Partly influenced by natural catastrophes which raised public awareness of the threat to the built environment and national heritage, a new and more comprehensive notion of »cultural heritage« was developed in the sixties which encompassed also artifacts of historical and not only of artistic value. Italy was clearly path-breaking with this new notion of bene culturale which was adopted and turned into conservation legislation quite quickly in several other European countries. The experts’ discourse on »historic centers«, emerging from the Gubbio Charter of 1960, opened itself under the impact of left-wing democratization and particularly the »Bologna model« to a new policy of public intervention for historic centers which, contrary to the ideas of certain anti-modern West German conservationists, included social considerations, particularly the prevention of gentrification. Thus, by the first half of the seventies—reacting to Bologna but also to parallel initiatives in other cities—the question of centri storici had become an important issue of national politics.

The following two papers deal with one of the most prominent cases of the (re-)discovery and renewal of »historic centers« in Europe—the »Bologna model« of the seventies. Harald Bodenschatz writes as a distanced scholarly observer and at the same time as an eyewitness and former activist. He had been among those young city planners who saw the »Bologna model« as the progressive future of urban planning policies and emphasizes the importance of Bologna for the 1975 European Architectural Heritage Year while stressing its political and social significance: in Bologna, the preservational urban renewal of the entire historic city transcended the hitherto limited conservationist approach, which had been restricted to buildings of outstanding artistic value. Furthermore, the city was now seen as a network of public services and residential modernization was conceived in a social perspective. Despite still noticeable enthusiasm about the courageous departures undertaken in Bologna, Bodenschatz also sees the downsides, particularly the defeat in the issue of dispossession and the abandonment of Keynesian financial policies in favor of austerity which severely curtailed the room-of-maneuver of the PCI-led Bologna administration.

While many scholars like Bodenschatz emphasize the »Bologna model« as a break in politics regarding the historic city center, Jost Ulshöfer highlights essential elements of continuity in urban planning. He traces the influences towards change from Bologna’s Piano Regolatore Generale of 1955, the Gubbio Charter of 1960 and the subsequent reevaluation of urban heritage, and finally, as an important political factor, the strategic reorientation of the PCI towards a reformist agenda including riforma urbanistica. The PCI leadership tried to transform Bologna into a communist model city by the means of planning policies, propelled by the outstanding social mobilization of 1969, in which the claim for affordable housing had a high priority and by making use of new housing legislation. This strategy, however, met with fierce resistance among the frequently lower-middle-class rank and file of the Bologna PCI itself, who massively opposed dispossessions of houses and land in the centro storico. Ulshöfer makes the important point that Bologna’s Piano di Edilizia Economica e Popolare of 1973 was an attempt to deal with a long-standing contradiction in the debate over centri storici: how to save the stones and the men?

With her contribution, Melania Nucifora adds further insights to the relevance of the local arena for different trajectories of urban heritage protection policies by presenting two case studies from Southern Italy, a region that, until recently, has remained relatively under-researched within contemporary urban history. She sees the seventies as a turning point when the ambitious plans born out of a largely functionalist planning approach in the sixties were challenged by new environmental concerns and new sensibilities towards cultural heritage. Nucifora shows how, despite the identical legal and general planning framework, the two Sicilian cities under consideration, Catania and Syracuse, took quite different trajectories due to the role of local politicians and experts as well as such factors as the social structure of the respective PCI-membership and the significance of the local construction industry. Furthermore, for the case of Syracuse she confirms the eminent role of Bologna as a model.

Contested Spaces and Social Movements

The last section deals with urban movements and presents evidence of transnational relations between West Germany and Italy. Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier show that in the early seventies there was a keen interest among groups of the New Left, among Spontis and Autonome, for forms of struggle such as autoriduzione and squatting as used by their Italian counterparts. To a certain extent, groups of Italian migrants also participated in the actions of the Frankfurt Häuserkampf (struggle for housing). The fascination with Italy, however, took on the guise of a »romantic illusion« and the real conditions of struggle differed significantly between Italian and German cities. When in the late seventies struggles in Berlin about planned demolition of tenement houses were rather successful, Italy was no longer the place of reference; quite the opposite, Italian left-wing activists looked to their neighbors north of the Alps for inspiration in the wake of the 1981 youth protests in cities like Zurich, Amsterdam and Berlin.

The late seventies and the discovery of the »city as an object of contention« figure prominently in Sebastian Haumann’s article. In contrast to Anders and Sedlmaier, Haumann highlights the continuing role of Italy as a point of reference for urban movements in West Germany until the early eighties. Similarly to what had already happened in the early seventies, according to Haumann the reception of Italian models in the German left-alternative milieu, in this case the Movimento del ‘77, played an important role in turning attention from classical sites of »class struggle« such as the factory towards conflicts in the sphere of reproduction and contributed significantly to the reinvigoration of urban protest in West Germany. Analyzing protests against concert halls and sites of »high culture«, Haumann shows how struggles about culture led in the longer term to an integration of alternative lifestyles within a new understanding of urbanity, while the activists’ claims were slowly being stripped of their political implications.

Luciano Villani focuses on the struggle for housing, an all-important social conflict in Rome during the seventies, when grassroots initiatives acquired a new quality and new practices were developed on a large scale. A range of radical left-wing organizations took the lead in the movement, but also dissident Catholic groups were involved. Neighborhood committees had a central role, frequently succeeding in mobilizing inhabitants of borgate and lower-class suburbs for occupying vacant social and private housing or reducing rent payments as well as bills for electricity and telephone unilaterally. Squatting was no longer meant to be a symbolic form of protest and political struggle as in previous campaigns organized by the PCI, but a direct means to obtain housing. The mid-seventies as the highpoint of the movement were followed by a partial retreat, while the PCI-led municipal administrations launched new policies aimed at eradicating shantytowns and building more social housing.

Finally, Christian Wicke shows how the initiatives for preserving workers settlements in the Ruhr cities dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were, despite their apparently parochial focus, part of a wider and encompassing »urban movement à la Ruhr«. Settlement residents mounted resistance to demolition plans supported by a heterogeneous coalition of local social-democratic city government, trade unions and regional state government. Left-wing advisors and elite activists gave the initiatives skills to successfully run political and legal campaigns; furthermore, they established networks of public communication and support by linking local initiatives to region-wide networks of critical newspapers and groups. Their success, however, also depended on a paradigm change in the evaluation of industrial culture: the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society challenged the dominant regional Social Democratic party to develop a far greater appreciation of the physical and social remnants of that vanishing industrial past under the notion of »industrial culture«.

Transfer, Convergence and the »Model Italy«

Contributions to this volume clearly show that cities increasingly became the arena as well as the subject of contestation in Italy and West Germany during the seventies. In the case of Italy, the dominant political force of the Left, the PCI, came to attribute a strategic role to the city and urban conflicts in its attempt to bring a broad popular coalition together. Within this strategy Bologna, a veritable showcase for the Italian communists, who had already controlled the municipality since the postwar period, was of outstanding importance since the PCI-actors there attempted to reconcile social strategies—aimed at keeping traditional residents in the old and to-be-refurbished quarters of the city—with strategies of planned urban renewal in quite innovative ways. Equally important, urban issues and movements played a key role within the extraordinary cycle of social mobilization that swept the country during that decade.

For the case of West Germany, the articles in this volume demonstrate the increased interest, awareness and transfer of forms of urban struggle, slogans and patterns of mobilization from Italy to cities north of the Alps which were fostered also by the presence of a large minority of Italian Gastarbeiter migrants in the Federal Republic. Young activists, especially from the New Left, adopted political practices like autoriduzione and appropriated political labels like indiani metropolitani, while the »Bologna model« was welcomed enthusiastically and studied as the aspired future of European urban planning. When the youth movement of the early eighties emerged in the Federal Republic, the direction was also reversed. Although in these processes of transfer and reception not everything was fully understood, and projection, idealization and romanticization were part of the game, this strong interest in the other country and its urban movements demonstrates that both countries shared similar preoccupations as well as common political and social agendas in the seventies, notwithstanding their considerable differences for example in their manifestations of »urban crisis«. This can be seen as supporting Lutz Raphael’s observations about a convergence on many economic and social indicators taking place between 1960 and 1990.

One can also discern a clear transfer in terms of urban cultural policies: the Estate Romana, initiated in the Italian capital in 1977, was widely received and became an influential role model for later events and practices in many European cities—eventually to be summarized under the label of »festivalization« of urban politics. It was part and parcel of a European-wide process of enlarging and democratizing the notion of »culture«, including other practices and events under this notion, which had not been considered as proper culture before, particularly in countries with a predominant elitist idea of »high culture« like West Germany. This and other points illustrate how mutual influence, exchange, and transfer between Italy and West Germany are to be considered in a wider European frame which in certain spheres probably bridged also the East-West divide. This could apply, for example, to changing ideas about urban planning, historic centers and heritage. The notion of bene culturale, as Guido Zucconi maintains for the Latin countries, began to be adopted in many parts of Europe at an astonishingly fast rate, which shows, inter alia, that tendencies towards a wider, more inclusive idea of culture had been underway for some time in many countries and cities of Europe. One could argue that it was the temporal coincidence of a mature conservationist approach, rooted in an elitist understanding of »monuments« and the built environment driving the policies towards the European Architectural Heritage Year 1975 with a new popular appreciation of the qualities of old urban environments as it developed not only in social movements such as the squatters in Frankfurt or Berlin but also in the population at large, which gave the »turn« of 1975 such a thrust and sea-changing quality.

It goes without saying that the topics of urban history concerning Italy and West Germany discussed in this volume are also part of a European and even wider international history. As far as the seventies are concerned, besides particular aspects of transfer and direct interrelations between both countries, one could highlight that in this decade, perhaps for the first time in the contemporary era, Italian cities rose to the rank of a model and provided examples to follow on an international level. In those years, in fact, the Italian urban realm advanced to the forefront of European debates and trends in sectors such as heritage protection and historic centers, urban cultural policies and urban social movements, while figures such as Leonardo Benevolo and Aldo Rossi strongly influenced the architectural and planning debate. This could also be seen as a reversal of a trend that had marked the previous century or so when models tended to come from other European countries, be it Haussmann’s Paris for urban renovation, the English garden cities for urban expansion, Red Vienna for social housing, the Bauhaus for modern architecture, Dutch cities for urban planning or swinging London for innovative lifestyles. This is, however, only one of the questions that this volume might raise for further research in a debate which is still in its beginnings.

The 1970s—a Period of Structural Rupture in Germany and Italy?

Lutz Raphael

The Events of the Seventies and their Effects in a Comparative Perspective

Any historical comparison of urban West Germany and Italy during the seventies may start from a list of converging events and facts during these years.43 The seventies were largely dominated by political mobilizations initiated by the Left in both countries and both countries experienced a »red decade«—»un decennio rosso«.44 It began in the second half of the sixties and combined social protest with political confrontation in parliament and in public. These high levels of political participation were combined with a series of culture wars, putting older and younger generations, conservatives and progressives in confrontation over the definition of social roles and norms of daily life. Particularly in Italy, political mobilization was closely linked to social protest and industrial conflict, producing what has been labeled a cycle of social mobilization whose climax was reached in 1973–74 but levels of conflict were still high until 1976–77.45 In both countries the younger generations were particularly active in these movements and were in high profile in the cultural and social changes behind the spectacular events. And in both countries the mid-seventies saw trade unions at the historical height of their bargaining power. What distinguishes the Italian from the West German case is the strong ideological but also personal and organizational links between the worlds of industrial conflict and of social protest and movements, links that were much weaker in West Germany where Social Democratic trade unions and their own working-class members kept much more distance from the New Left and the student movement than their counterparts in Italy. Nevertheless, from a comparative perspective, the problems resulting from these mobilizations and faced by the two main parties of the Left were similar. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Federal Republic both gained new and more voters for their programs of social and institutional reforms and had similar problems in coping not only with the radicalism of parts of their own rank and file, but particularly with that of the new organizations on the Left taking shape during the second half of the sixties. In Germany, the Social Democrats could take over government in a left-liberal coalition after having shared power with the CDU/CSU between 1966 and 1969 and started their own agenda of reforms in 1969. In contrast, the PCI developed a strategy of external support and parliamentary pressure for larger reform programs in the sixties when various center-left coalitions (Christ Democrats, socialists and other smaller parties of the center) were governing the country. The PCI shifted towards the so-called historical compromise, a reform government in a great coalition with the Christian Democrats, formulated in 1973, but this strategy of governmental cohabitation of the two dominant political parties finally failed in 1978. In both countries the political moderation of the two main parties of the Left delivered opportunities for ideological propaganda, defending political violence and terrorism deployed by the far Left since the early seventies. Italy and West Germany (together with Northern Ireland) were the operating grounds for the most violent and most spectacular forms of political terrorism in the Western world during the seventies.46 Thus the political history of both countries invites us to separate the »red« Left-dominated seventies from the individualistic or »hedonistic« eighties, as they are even called in Italy, when in both countries the culture wars and the political mobilization faded away and gave birth to other political and cultural moods.47

Many chapters in this book deal with episodes from these parallel histories of political strife and social mobilization that left a particularly strong mark in a number of large cities that were the epicenters of these upheavals and became something like the »showcases« for the movements.48 It seems that in the case of Italy more cities were involved than in the West German case but that may need further empirical inquiry. In Italy we may list cities like Turin, Genoa and Milan as centers of mobilization, where the connections between the different forms and groups of protest and revolt were particularly strong, but other urban centers like Bologna, Trento or Rome with large or active student populations were also important centers of these movements. In West Germany, the most visible centers were West Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt—other industrial urban centers like Cologne or the cities in the Ruhr were much less involved in these years. Smaller university cities like Heidelberg or Marburg were more touched by the »red decade« because of their large student population. From an urban history perspective, the most striking difference between Italy and West Germany may be seen in the strong ties, in the Italian case, between social movements mobilized around problems of social housing, town planning or public transport and labor disputes and student protest (in Turin, Milan among other Italian cities) and the much looser connections seen in many West German towns. Here only Frankfurt or West Berlin may be cited as cities presenting comparative levels of interaction between the different groups of the Left.

We should not forget, that the bi-national levels of exchange and of connectedness between the different protagonists of these »red« years were rather high, even if we must underline that this »histoire croisée« was restricted to a minority, particularly among students and intellectuals speaking or understanding the other language or reading the translations of pamphlets, booklets or larger publications. In West Germany a new kind of »Bildungsreise« (»Grand Tour«) towards the centers of left-wing mobilization in Italy was invented in this period, adding a new clientèle of younger Germans to the »numerous other Germans travelling south in search of sun and art, but also authenticity and a better sense of life.«49 The other direction was still chosen by Italian labor migrants and a very small group of political activists seeking refuge in West Germany, particularly in West Berlin after the end of the great mobilization.

Seen from an international perspective, Italy and West Germany present two very interesting national cases in these years of social mobilization worldwide.50 On the one hand, they are quite different from one another if we look at the modalities of industrial conflict, its themes and forms; in Italy the series of strikes broke all records and put the country at the head of international statistics of industrial conflict; in West Germany trade unions were also very successful in their wage bargaining but achieved many of their goals of social reform and welfare thanks to the reforms initiated by the Social Democratic-liberal government.51 Both countries are again situated at the different ends of a continuum of positions. If we look at the interplay between social mobilization and political system on an international level: we see that West Germany is clearly part of those countries where government and parliament responded to social protest movements and industrial conflicts by quickly initiating reforms. Italy, on the other hand, was a particularly striking case of powerful veto power coming from the conservative forces in economy and politics against any strategy of far-reaching reform. Nevertheless, part of these reforms such as the Statuto dei lavoratori, the law on divorce (1970), or later the new family law (1975), the Servizio sanitario nazionale and the equo canone