Changing geographies of class and gender: Earthquake reconstruction in western Sicily after 1968

This study, based on anthropological research, examines key aspects of interaction between the state and the local community and between inhabitants and their built environment. After the powerful earthquake of 1968 in western Sicily new relationships were formed between the government and the population of the affected area, the Belice Valley. Previously these villages were poor and relatively isolated. Nucleated peasant settlements were marked by class heterogeneity, expressed in the haphazard mixing of house size and architectural style. Mediterranean ideologies of honor-shame influenced the conservative relations between the sexes and their differential use of public and private space.; In a matter of moments the role of the central government was transformed from a secondary, largely absent entity to an institutional force responsible for rebuilding the streets, the piazze, and homes of 100,000 people. The spontaneous emergence of a locally based, cross-class protest movement was organized to demand self-determination and comprehensive reconstruction of settlements supported by productive economic opportunity. The history of capitalist urban planning and Italian state policy regarding building and zoning reveals efforts to use the built environment to promote the interests of capital and facilitate political control over the citizenry. Consistent with these aims, the Belice reconstruction involved Modernist new towns, designed and financed exogeneously--settlements arranged to accentuate class differences and inhibit interaction, houses designed to increase consumption and market dependence.; While new town inhabitants largely accepted changing patterns of class formation and residential segregation, they had more complicated reactions to new arrangements of residential space as they influenced gender relations. Some accepted the highly privatized and standardized structures of domestic space provided by the state, while others risked penalty to modify this space to better accommodate traditional expectations associated with neighborhood work patterns and social networks of women. Still others rejected new towns altogether and moved to rural peripheries. Inhabitants' responses to the reconstruction of their settlements demonstrate the important interactions between power relations of class and gender and the continually changing built environment.