Out of sight, out of mind

[Like something out of a Star Trek flashback]

Authorities in Padua have decided to seal off a crime-ridden estate from the rest of the city rather than tackle its problems, reports Barbara McMahon

Monday August 14, 2006
Guardian Unlimited


The wall built on the outskirts of Padua to seal off the Serenissima housing estate. Photograph: Marco Bruzzo/EPA

The Serenissima housing estate in the suburbs of Padua was once a place that lived up to its name. It was a tranquil location with doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists and students populating the 273 apartments spread out over six blocks.

A former resident remembers the friendly atmosphere. "When one of the youngsters graduated, the whole staircase would go into action," she said. "One person brought the pasta, someone else prepared the salad and we all had a big party in the yard."

Those days are over. Nobody seems able to pinpoint exactly when the area began to change but slowly, local people moved out and groups of immigrants, mostly from Africa, moved in. Many Italians took advantage of the new arrivals, snapping up multiple apartments and renting bedsits at speculative rates of up to 1,000 euros a month.

Six, seven or eight immigrants shared each space and slept in shifts to reduce the rent even further. Unable to work legally, and with little money, the new arrivals hung around with nothing to do. Petty crime flourished and prostitutes and drug dealers targeted the area. Italians who couldn't afford to move out became too scared to open their doors at night.

In a recent editorial, Corriere della Sera described the area as "the worst possible example of failed integration" and said it was an example of what can happen if ghettos are allowed to form. It pointed out that Italian immigrants themselves were in the same situation a century ago in Bayard Street in New York's Little Italy, where 1,324 immigrants huddled in 132 rooms, and their miserable existence was chronicled by anti-slums campaigner Jacob Riis.

Matters came to a head last month, when a pitched battle raged for several hours one night between gangs of Moroccans and Nigerians wielding clubs, machetes, knives and crowbars. Tear gas was used to break up the fight and the incident shook the citizens of Padua. The city known for its artworks by Giotto, Donatello and Mantegna, and which is home to Italy's second-oldest university, where Galileo was once a professor of mathematics, had the distinction of having the most dangerous housing development in northern Italy.

Now Padua has another dubious claim to fame. A large and ugly barrier has been erected to help protect local residents from the run-down apartment blocks, largely filled with immigrants. Stretching for 84 metres, three metres high and made of thick steel panels, there is a police checkpoint at the entrance as well as CCTV cameras. The project has been welcomed by local people but is highly controversial. The barricade has already been dubbed Padua's Berlin wall and has reignited a debate about how to treat foreign migrants.

"It's obscene and racist," said Aurora D'Agostin, head of the local Green party. Another local group COBAS denounced the barricade as "segregation, like the concentration camps or the Jewish ghettos." Gian Carlo Galan, the centre-right president of the Veneto region, said that Padua's centre-left council had simply "given in to criminality" and that it had failed to tackle the social problems rife in the area. The hard-right Northern League party took another tack. "Raze the casbah of foreign delinquency to the ground," it roared. Some of the immigrants themselves hit back after the construction of the wall by stoning the windows of a local bar.

Some 210,000 people live in Padua, of whom 20,000 are legally resident non-EU citizens. A further 30,000 non-EU residents live in the surrounding province, which has a total population of almost a million. There are also several thousand asylum seekers, all hoping to be given leave to stay.

The mayor of Padua, Flavio Zanonato, a member of the Democrats of the Left party, has agreed that the barricade is not ideal but said he had to respond to the concerns of local people living near the estate, who were concerned about the level of violence and drug dealing. He is looking at a plan to employ immigrant police officers to patrol what has been nicknamed the Padua Bronx, on the grounds that they might be able to bring calm to the area.

He has also sharply criticised Italian property owners who are making a mint out of the immigrants. "This is a phenomenon we must face and resolve," he said about the problems of integration. "That's why shorter waiting times for obtaining Italian nationality and the right to vote are necessary instruments. The multi-ethnic society is firmly entrenched in Italy. We have to encourage integration and non-EU immigrants themselves can lend a hand."

Three of the Serenissima's apartment blocks have already been emptied of tenants and sealed up so that they cannot be reoccupied, and there are plans to move everyone else out in the next year or two "We've had no problems with the families that were relocated," pointed out the mayor. The key to assimilation, he argued, is to distribute immigrants around various areas of Padua and not to put them up in one place.