This Really Happened

Luca Picardi’s photoessay focuses on the outskirts of Genoa, Italy, enlightening the lack of any immediately identifiable anthropological dimension that reveals clear urban design failures.

Italy’s city suburbs can seem vast and never ending.

These erratic bursts of urban sprawl reveal insights into clear urban design failures and some remarkable cases of spatial exploitation. In many ways exploring the suburbia feels like encountering an alien entity, the sheer size of some of the monolithic concrete towers combined with their scrupulous geometric finish deprives them of any familiar human touch or sense of ‘place’. The brutalist structures make a stark disjuncture from their surrounding landscape and alienate the urban periphery from city centres heightening their differences.

As a result, many of Italy’s suburbs lack any immediately identifiable anthropological dimension. Passing through some of Genoa’s outskirts from its centre means walking through its jolly daily jostle and slowly descending into a cultural vacuum made up of steel, concrete and smoke. Despite the density of these areas, they aren’t designed to walk in, as the lack of pavements or people throughout the streets will indicate.