Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Front matter

AGEING WITH SMARTPHONES IN

URBAN ITALY p; EE) nN CAN AR

oa AT, N!

Contents

List of figures

Series Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction to Milan

Milan is a city in the northern region of Lombardy (see Fig. 1.1) that has long been an important industrial hub within Italy and Europe. The city currently has a population of around 1.3 million in the municipality, while the surrounding metropolitan administrative area has a population of around 3.2 million.” It is the second-largest city in Italy after Rome (2.8 million). Milan underwent profound socio-economic and demographic changes in the post-war period of the economic boom years, including significant population movement within Italy"? as people came to the city from the surrounding countryside and other northern regions, and then from southern Italy, to work, before settling and begetting future generations in the city.’

Milan today is a very different city from the Milan that many older adults I met remember from their youth. The city is strewn with former factories, many of which have been converted into co-working hubs, art

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Figure 1.1 Map of Italy showing the location of Milan. Created by Georgiana Murariu.

galleries and educational establishments. Notably, the Milano-Bicocca university, which hosted me as a Visiting Researcher during my research in Milan, presents an impressive architectural structure, converted from the old Pirelli factory in the northeast of the city. Many older people today live by themselves or with their spouses, and many young people who left in the economic crash of 2008 are still living outside Italy and in other European cities. More than 45 per cent of households are single-person, while many families are dispersed across the country and the world, and are in the business of working out how to be present and participate in each other’s lives to varying degrees, in person or virtually.

The demography of Milan has undergone significant change with respect to ageing and migration patterns. Between 2003 and 2013 the total population grew by roughly 15 per cent, and although there has been a decrease in young Italian adults, this has been offset by an increase in older adults, children and citizens born abroad.’° Today, in the city, around 260,000 citizens come from different parts of the world, making up roughly 19 per cent of the total municipal population.’’ According to official census figures, citizens born abroad are mostly from the Philippines, Egypt, China, Peru, Sri Lanka, Romania, Ecuador, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and other countries in the Middle East and in other parts of East and South Asia.'®

Milan is known as one of the fashion capitals of the world and for its historical and contemporary reputations in the fields of design, architecture, food and glamour, from the iconic La Scala opera house, opened in 1778, the 1950s Pirelli Tower, which is a feature in post-war Italian neorealist cinema, and the Bosco Verticale (‘vertical forest’) building completed in 2014 (see Fig. 1.2), to the Milan Fashion and Design weeks and, since 2018, the annual Milan Digital Week, which reflects the city’s active shift towards becoming a leading centre of digital innovation in the country.”

Because of a concentration of high-income groups in the city and its role in the tertiary sector (e.g. fashion, design, finance and publishing), gas. A a ‘i

Figure 1.2 Photo of the Bosco Verticale in Milan, taken in 2019. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Bosco_Verticale_Milano. jpg. CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Milan is the metropolitan area with the highest average income in Italy. Despite the challenging economic climate in Italy, the city has in recent years undergone a kind of renaissance, typified by the 2015 World Expo that took place in and around the city, the second in its history.” The city has seen a lot of investment typified by new structures such as the Porta Nuova complex, an area of newly built skyscrapers, designer buildings, fashion houses, shopping malls, gyms and bespoke eateries in the midnorth of the city that brings capital, labour and tourism (domestic and international) to the city.

In addition to its reputation as a fashion and design capital, Milan has been widely recognised as an innovator of urban smartness and a leading ‘smart city’. Since around 2010 the notion of the smart city has developed, building on earlier ideas of the digital or networked city.” It broadly denotes the increasing embedding of technologies into the infrastructures of cities around the globe.”* Roberta Cocco, the Councillor for Digital Transformation and Civic Services of the municipality of Milan, proposed a specific agenda for digital development in the city comprised of four pillars: 1) digital infrastructure (including Wi-Fi, 5G and broadband), 2) digital services for citizens (regarding public administration and bureaucracy), 3) digital education (supporting digital literacy in order to access digital services and 4) digital skills (promoting these within the municipality and with cross-sector partners to boost employment and careers).** Cocco views Milan as a ‘model of experimentation’ with regard to technological urban innovation, and there is a consensus within the municipality and across the city that other Italian cities will follow suit. These developments in digital innovation in Milan will be referred to in chapters that specifically examine the presence of smartphones in daily life and digital health and care practices, in city, regional, national and transnational contexts.