Until ten months ago he drank beers in the square and now he continues to do so but with the tricolor band on his chest. Giulia Casonato, 24, the youngest city councilor of Trento, was appointed mayor of the night. It will be she who will have to oil the gears of nightlife, avoiding the delicate mechanism that involves the desire for fun and the right to livability from jamming.
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by Enrico Ferro
Once again, the theme of nightlife returns to the center, from north to south, especially in this difficult phase of recovery and exit from the pandemic. So even Trento, a municipality of 117,000 inhabitants with 16,000 university students, has a problem with nightlife, just like Milan, Padua, Bologna, Rome and many other medium and large cities.
Mayor Franco Ianeselli, elected in September 2020 with a center-left coalition, decided to give his younger colleague the difficult task of dealing with nightlife and all its dynamics. “Sociality is a need but it must be managed, otherwise it clashes with other needs”, explains Giulia Casonato, a bachelor’s degree in economic and social sciences and a master’s degree currently underway. The reasoning that contains the possible solution cannot ignore the geographical map of the city. It is the fun that becomes a problem of public order, a theme that has entered forcefully at the top in many prefectures of Italy.
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In Bologna there are complaints in Piazza Verdi, in Padua in Piazza Duomo, in Milan in Corso Como, the list would be very long. In Trento the problem is in Piazza Santa Maria Maddalena. “A small square, where everything is concentrated”, explains the young councilor, hinting at what are the inconveniences reported by the residents, such as noises, disorders, drunkenness in the open. “I want to clear the field: I will not deal with public order but with interaction and sociability”, specifies Casonato. “The intent is to make the various souls that compete in this dynamic collaborate. We will create a permanent table, to understand what the parties are asking for. My role will be to try to make the various needs meet ”. All good in theory, but in practice? “We have areas where there are dealing problems. Trying to move the fun and the presence of people there, we could achieve the effect of removing the drug dealers and decentralizing the nightlife a little, with the result of making an area now degraded safer. Another task of mine, which perhaps my young age could positively affect, is to try to change the narrative about the fun of young people. I know what they need: I just have to try to transfer it to the other interlocutors ”. The idea of the mayor of the night, or in any case of a figure conceived to deal with everything that happens at night in a city, was born in Amsterdam in 2012. Since then the experience has spread to many other European cities and also to Italy every now and then the theme comes back. He talked about it in Turin a few years ago, now he talks about it in Bologna. Trento has decided to invest in it in a concrete way. “Among my interlocutors there will be the managers of the premises: they must be given the opportunity to organize events and create more moments in different ways. I think of small concerts, shows. However, attention is also needed for what is happening around. Take care of the spaces, pay attention to the residents. In short, the meaning of the table that will be created is precisely that of getting to know each other, confronting each other, talking to each other and above all getting rid of some annoying label “.
The youngest councilor of the municipality will therefore be the hub of this delicate mechanism of urban regeneration. “I am young and I am an administrator: I believe it is important to have generational legitimacy, to remind all my peers that they can be part of the institutional and administrative world“.
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