Lucia Tozzi is a Milano-based journalist and urban researcher known for her incisive critiques of gentrification, tourism-driven development, and the commodification of public space. Her writing spans cultural criticism, investigative reporting, and political analysis, appearing in publications such as Il Tascabile, NERO, Altreconomia, il manifesto, and other journals. She is the editor and author of City Killers. Per una critica del turismo (2023, Libria), Dopo il turismo (2020, nottetempo), and co-author of Napoli. Contro il panorama, (2022, nottetempo), which reframes Naples as a space of potential outside the logic of global urban competition. Her work draws on radical urban theory and foregrounds the defence of the commons, democratic planning, and the rights of residents over speculative capital.

Without critical voices like Tozzi’s, the cities succumb to the dominant narratives. It is essential to confront the contradictions shaped by speculative investment and reinforced by local political agendas. In this conversation, Lucia Tozzi reflects on the manufactured image of Milan, the erosion of the public sector, and the ways in which greenwashing feeds processes of touristification and gentrification.

Your recent book (for now, only available in Italian), L’invenzione di Milano. Culto della comunicazione e politiche urbane, or The invention of Milan: Cult of communication and urban policies (2023, Cronopio), speaks about “the production of a city image” and how Milan was changed with marketing communication during and after the 2015 Expo — the process in which intellectual work of artists, designers and cultural workers was instrumentalized. 

Milan was known as a productive, cultured city, interesting in its own way, but inexorably gray. It wasn’t associated with pleasure and beauty like Rome or nearly all other Italian cities, but with work. A centre-right mayor in the late 1990s, Albertini, launched the vision of a new international and cosmopolitan metropolis capable of competing not with medium-sized cities, but with New York, London, or Paris. It was a disproportionate idea, because Milan is a small city both in terms of population (one and a half million inhabitants, at most three and a half million if you include Greater Milan) and in terms of area, as it is surrounded by many other medium-sized cities that are impossible to include into its urban system.

So when, with Expo 2015, the decision was made to seriously build this new image, a monstrous amount of energy and money was invested in communication, equally divided between blatant propaganda and extremely strict censorship of any criticism. The term “soft power” is absolutely inadequate to describe what happened: for at least a decade, from 2010 to 2020, freedom of the press and information was repressed, and consensus regarding the violent urban transformations underway was bought, which created inequality and displaced less wealthy residents, dismantled urban welfare, consumed land, and destroyed parks and renaturalized areas — in fact, the new “urban regeneration” was a process of wild densification detached from any rules, made up of the usual luxury skyscrapers found everywhere, but advertised as a green revolution thanks to massive doses of greenwashing and socialwashing.

And this didn’t only affect the already troubled field of media, but also — and above all — the world of culture and social work, which were heavily pressured and drawn into the creation of happy narratives: not only were they prevented from expressing dissent or generating conflict, but they had to fully collaborate in creating a new ambiguous language that transformed the principles and objectives of even the radical left into tools for covering up gentrification and the economic exploitation of entire neighborhoods. So artists and intellectuals were forced to produce events that were supposedly “inclusive” and “participatory,” always “sustainable” and green, while helping to “change the narrative” of a place in favour of investors. Those who didn’t conform were pushed out of the scene. This system produced paradoxical situations, such as the one in which the associations involved in a culturally-tinged organic farming project in Parco Sud hid the fact that the land was polluted.

Milan and other cities, especially Venice, are known for their architecture and design festivals that attract many people annually and contribute to the city’s brand. What happens to Venice if there is no more Biennale, what to Milano, if there is no more Salone del Mobile?

Cities, even the most provincial and lethargic ones, are fortunately territories of change, even when their outward appearance remains the same for long periods. In my view, it doesn’t make sense to think of events as an irreversible part of their identity. Milan, for example, would do just fine without Design Week—or at least without the city-wide portion, the Fuorisalone: designers and architects could finally focus on designing and researching things more interesting than a kitsch installation in a high-visibility location.

At the moment, they’re forced to devote much of their year to organising the following year’s Salone: meetings with bland commercial brands, with irritating figures from urban marketing, with potential media partners—an inferno of ridiculous names and exhausting itineraries. Just imagine how much time could be freed up for thinking—or even just for taking a vacation.

Venice, without the Biennale, could devote energy, space, and time to seriously addressing policies aimed at bringing back permanent residents, reversing the trend of its own citizens’ depopulation while filling up with short- and long-term tourists or second-home owners who drive up prices.

The other important insight you share is that cities are always competing. For tourists, for students, for capital. In another book, City Killers. Per una critica del turismo, you write a manifesto. What is a non-competing city, a liveable city — how can a city not want affluent tourists or wealthy international students? 

The idea that cities must necessarily be “attractive,” and therefore compete to the death with one another, is one of the poisoned fruits of neoliberal ideology. Until just a few decades ago, as Neil Brenner writes (see New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood), states redistributed wealth across their territories as evenly as possible, and cities weren’t forced to strip funding from services for residents in order to pour it into marketing, promotion, and strategies for attracting tourism. They could focus on the well-being of those who actually live there, who reside long-term in their territory.

That’s how those democratic systems of governance flourished — the ones that, with mixed results but a great deal of experimentation, tried to reduce polarisation and spread well-being through equitable planning of the urban and regional landscape. They built widespread public infrastructure — schools, parks, hospitals, sports centres, libraries, public housing — designed to reduce class differences, to allow people the freedom to choose their own way of life. They developed care and maintenance systems that worked consistently in both city centres and peripheral or marginal areas, to counteract polarisation. They fought back against rent extraction — the engine behind soaring housing costs and inequality. Even the very need for growth used to be tied, essentially, to population increases.

But ever since the dogma of “attractiveness” took hold, and states began defunding “loser” areas to focus only on those capable of competing, winning has come to mean expanding upward and outward, despite all the promises of zero land consumption. Temporary populations (tourists, digital nomads, and occasional workers are above all instruments defined as valuable human capital because they’re attractive) have been prioritised over permanent residents. Infrastructure for transport and “hospitality” is built just for them, while local residents are stripped of every asset. The right to move, unfortunately — and this is a hard contradiction to admit — conflicts with the right to stay.

This summer in Milan, there will be only one public pool open, even though many people can’t afford to go on vacation, and the heat is brutal, because they’ve privatised all the others. For tourists, meanwhile, they’ve opened the largest urban spa in Europe: the absurdly expensive former De Montel stables. In places where tourism is even more of a monopoly, like Venice, Florence, Naples, or the coastal regions, human desertification is even more visible.

So the first battle to fight is cultural: to break the conviction that there’s no alternative to competition, to fight the TINA — “There Is No Alternative” — as Mark Fisher put it. The second is to wage a political struggle to win back vertical (class-based) and horizontal (territorial) forms of redistribution.

Only after those two fights can we start thinking in terms of design-based solutions: design alone, no matter how well-intended, doesn’t have the power to change things, because any space can be used in the opposite way, repurposed. In Italy, we have fascist buildings and cities that turned out to be perfectly livable environments after the war, and meanwhile, schools and cultural centres that were designed down to the last detail to foster a free and solidary society have been converted into infrastructures of privilege and luxury. I always think of Gilles Clément, one of the very few who actually put his political beliefs into practice, publicly refusing to work for President Sarkozy.

There is a private investment pushing the public sector further and further out of the picture. In Milan, there is Park BAM — the Biblioteca degli Alberi (Library of Trees) — often cited as a good example of public sector participation. Yet at the edge of the park sits the Bosco Verticale. Perhaps you can speak about the public/private sector relationship through this juxtaposition?

The rhetoric of public–private partnership is really just a way to push privatisation, tout court. The Porta Nuova development in Milan is a textbook example, but there are countless others. First, a hyper-dense real estate project is approved, claiming that the private company will build, as a gift to the citizens, a beautiful park open for public use. Then the “public” park (BAM, which is little more than a garden) turns out to be too expensive for the public sector to manage, so it gets handed over to the real estate developer, who then turns it into an asset to boost the value of their skyscrapers. It appears open to all, but in reality, it’s hyper-surveilled, exclusionary, and commodified. In Italy, huge parts of our public assets and services are being sold off or outsourced to private managers — from healthcare to parks, from libraries to stadiums. And as the public sector retreats, it loses expertise. It becomes increasingly incapable of actually doing or managing things directly, and even of making autonomous decisions.

What would be truly transformative is strengthening the public sector, not just by giving it more money and more workers, but by giving it legal tools to defend itself from the large financial entities that are reinstating a quasi-feudal order, as many now say, from Varoufakis to Piketty. With a strong public sector, it then becomes possible to imagine cooperation with private actors, large and small, but only if their power is clearly subordinated to the public interest. Only in that kind of context can bottom-up organisations also flourish, while in a competitive context, they cannot help but compete and, in turn, devour each other.

Are cities gaining some sort of supremacy over the state, autonomy despite the legislation? I wonder what makes people choose wrong city-running representatives time and time again.

The problem of representation is extremely serious. Electoral laws have almost everywhere abandoned the principle of proportionality and favor the neoliberal left, which proposes the same social and environmental content as the right, but disguised through greenwashing and social washing (and all the other rhetoric about inclusivity, diversity, etc.). In Italian cities, the less wealthy hardly vote anymore, and thus we see a rotation of politicians who represent the interests of the ruling classes, differing only in the slightest shades of pseudo-progressivism.

I’m not sure that cities can truly gain real autonomy from states, but in my opinion, it would be important to oppose their aspiration to do so, because as things stand, they are much less democratic entities than the states themselves. Our states, though unstable, still have well-written constitutions aimed at ensuring equality and the redistribution of resources, while regional laws and municipal plans have absorbed the supremacy of neoliberal rationale principles. Decentralisation (in Italian, “sussidiarietà, subsidiarity) has not brought power closer to the citizens in municipalities and regions, but rather has made them subordinate to increasingly autocratic forms of government detached from voter control.

In Naples, the problem of a lack of public or private investment left the city behind the competition. However, this could be its advantage. How can cities develop while not compromising the integrity of the public sector and its citizens?

Unfortunately, this Neapolitan “advantage” was a political opportunity that has already been lost. The disinterest of real estate developers, seen by most as a disgrace, was something I wrote in the book Napoli. Contro il panorama, as a kind of freedom, a situation that could be grasped politically to imagine — and realise — a happier urban future, one more rooted in collective well-being, freed from the imperative of endless and unsustainable growth. Once investment funds take root in a territory, it’s incredibly difficult to uproot their predatory logic, because they reshape its culture, rewrite its laws, and infiltrate its institutions. And unfortunately, the new mayor, a former minister and former university rector, is working tirelessly to attract them.

The latest news is that Naples will host a major event, the America’s Cup 2027, and the main reason for this is to override the city’s zoning plan, which had envisioned a large public park and a free, public beach in place of the former Bagnoli steelworks: a massive area now being leveraged to finally attract financial players. Now, how to maintain a balance between development and respect for the environment and people — that’s the million-dollar question. But one thing is certain: no city needs to consume more land or green space, or build new structures that will remain empty alongside the hundreds of vacant apartments that already exist.

Urban transformation can slow down, become less violent, less consumption- and image-driven. It can focus on creating more qualified work and better spaces for living and socialising. There already exist rich and vivid imaginaries of alternatives to the vulgar urban landscape of Dubai, expressions of other forms of society and civilisation, but to bring them into being, it’s essential to understand that they are not compatible with the logic of rent extraction.

Despite alternatives, I am pessimistic. It seems, as in Naples, that due to privatisation and erosion of the public sector, most is irreversibly lost. When does the city die, losing the balance between the public and private, citizens and visitors?

Your pessimism is well-founded: cities are one of the prime targets of financialization, and the attack that major funds like BlackRock and the thousands of companies they control exert on urban life is ruthless. They literally buy up buildings and parts of cities, corrupt politicians, but above all, impose the dismantling of urban planning, economic, and tax laws that curb their power. Everything seems to point toward a future of inequality and war in general, and of urban segregation.

However, I also see signs of critical analysis, protests for housing, opposition to the urban regeneration projects of the wealthy, resistance against major brands like Amazon or shopping malls, against short-term rental platforms, and in favor of parks and rewilded areas—things I hadn’t seen before, and that sometimes yield results. I think of Tempelhof in Berlin (now under pressure), of the restrictions on Airbnb in New York and Barcelona, for example. Of course, these are still marginal victories, but they show that awareness is spreading and that struggle pays off. Perhaps it’s the beginning of a new hot season.