Banlieu?

Yesterday I was reading a newspaper on the Internet. It is a newspaper very focused on what happens in Turin, the town where I’ve been living for ten years. I happened to read an article about the recent surge in shops closure in the area of Via Nizza. I was very astonished. It moved from the case of a meat-shop very popular in the city, which had to be closed because of the lack of customers. The real problem lies in the reason why people don’t go anymore for shopping in that area. Actually via Nizza is one of the streets around Porta Nuova railway station, and it doesn’t look like the safer place of the world. The comparison with what’s on in this period in French suburbs was obvious. I don’t know if Torino really risks to face the same kind of situation, but what I really disliked in the article is the equivalence between criminality and foreigners. It seems to me a very ingenuous and misleading view. I know very well that area, and it’s true there are lots of immigrants, but not all of them are criminals, and not all criminals are immigrants. One should spend more time going around in the whole San Salvario to understand that lots of Italians are involved in the illegal activities going on in the area, and mostly in the uppermost positions. May be I’m biased. I’m twice emigrant. I moved from Southern Italy to Torino when I was 19, and now I’m an Italian in New York. If you happen to speak with old Italian people here you can feel the pain the felt as soon as they arrived in the US. I was impressed when they told me that parents prevented their sons and daughters from learning Italian just to avoid them to be discriminated at school or wherever. The life of an immigrant isn’t easy at all. Feeding racism and fears is not the right way to work out a solution to the problem of overcrowding that surely affects Torino. The “banlieu” are very different from San Salvario and Porta Palazzo. It would be instructive having a trip from the Gare du Nord to Charles the Gaulle airport. By RER is even very safe. I think that those can’t be thought as places where human beings can live. The first time I saw them, some months ago, I thought about the landscape Emile Zola depicted in the Germinal. Maybe what they miss in French government, like in the Italian one, is just the respect for human dignity…