RECYCLING CITY

ciability, housing, entrepreneurship etc.) in places where natives are only ‘passing by’. In other words Piazza Candiani as well as the Padua and Mestre railway stations have been abandoned by natives while immigrants re-signifies places such as Giardini dell’Arena (Padua) being a centrality for caregivers or Piazzale Stazione (Padua) being a reference point for sub-Saharan Africans.

In any case consumption is a key issue in emplacing ‘the comfort’ both for natives and migrants. Migrants shape urban space in the railway station areas in Padua and Mestre to their own needs by opening shops supplying ethnic goods and offering services tailored to their culture and traditions not provided by the hosting society. This give rise to a specialization of space and consequently to the emergence of a certain ‘image of the city’ (Lynch 1960).

Differently Piazza Ferretto in Mestre hosts very classy boutiques, thus shaping specific accessibilities to the city centre. In any case the formal and the informal ethnic economy in the railway station as well as the formal economy in the city centres create shopping spaces that form ‘a continuum’ with footpaths, as well as traditional public spaces (Kärrholm 2012), thus questioning the very notion of ‘public’ space.

These re-signified places provide symbolic as well as material resources to the newcomers. They are hubs for the individual as well as for the communitarian dimension of the self. In this sense, space plays a fundamental role in the identity construction process. Through the construction of territories, newcomers enlarge their portfolio of places (Kesztenbaum 2008); in other words they strength their spatial capital (Cancellieri 2011). As an example, the railway station in Padua is a multidimensional urban spaces where to keep in touch with friends and other people speaking the same language and cultural codes as well as spaces where to find job and other key information.

On the other hand, if we agreed that backstage spaces are strongly shaped by the relationships created with some constitutive outsides (Deridda 1981), the research on spatial accessibilities must focus on the relation between centralities and the margins.

Concerning this, the research demonstrates how the ‘image of the city’ (Lynch 1960) plays a fundamental role in the demarcation of spatial accessibilities.

According to Oliver and Wong (2003), prejudice contributes to self-selection of accessibilities in urban space. In other words, the contemporary city tells us that differences in public space are synonymous with distrust, simply because these unfamiliar behaviours question the taken-for-granted sensory landscapes of everyday life. The presence of diversity (not only the ethnic one) involves uses of space that may be unfamiliar to the residents, thus perceived as a menace to the wellbeing of the local urban society. More specifically, the migration imaginary structures desires and anxieties able to shape the understanding of ‘other54