City Branding, Merchandising
San Lorenzo was born in 1880 as a proletarian neighborhood, it was designed for workers and railway workers. The original anatomy of the neighborhood that based its economy on craftsmanship and on a strong belonging to the working class is distorted with the strong influx of students in the university city. The university city, which had been living with the neighborhood for some time now, underwent a downsizing also in relation to the boom in enrollment by off-site and not, which forced the neighborhood to adapt to the needs of young people, who no longer reflected the previous ones. We have therefore moved from a neighborhood that based its economy on local crafts to a neighborhood where we give way to the new demands of those who come to live there: students.
The first structures that host off-campus students and associations for the right to study are born.
The self-managed structures together with the unused spaces become an investment for private companies and companies, which transforming them into student houses as well as enriching themselves will upset the economy of the neighborhood. From public to private, from local to global.
The neighborhood, now distorted, sees and lives all these changes without being able to profit from them, but rather suffering the consequences. The scenario that follows creates a favorable environment for the aggregation of students but not for its inhabitants; the nocturnal physiognomy of the neighborhood is completely different from the daytime one, the streets at night are filled with young people, the shutters of the premises that are lowered during the day rise and give life to the nightlife of the neighborhood, the same of which the residents complain and that make the neighborhood not enjoyable.
To date, 50% of 20,000 inhabitants of San Lorenzo are students, this is due to the sudden increase in rental prices, which has become a real business for private individuals and therefore now inaccessible for aspiring residents. All these contradictions make San Lorenzo a neighborhood that has always experienced real social upheavals, often in antithesis to each other, to which it is always adequate in its own way, it is therefore difficult to imagine a future for the neighborhood with this perspective, the most skeptical imagine it as a great hostel for students, the most hopeful as the district of knowledge, which makes the university and students its strength.
