It is not easy to try to interpret violence in the city and violence of the city from the ethnographic gaze. It requires, I would say, an epistemological humility, the recognition of the different scales at play and of the distinct knowledge operations commensurate with them, the awareness of the incompleteness and partiality of the anthropological research gesture. This is Paolo Grassi's modus operandi. This book illustrates in an exemplary manner and for the first time, how the spatiality of the Milanese barrio San Siro in all its forms is by no means an innocent spatiality, and how visible degradation and selective abandonment attest, against the appearance of physical boundaries and stigmatizing media, that the city of the rich and the city of the poor are not independent variables.

Ferdinando Fava, Università degli Studi di Padova

Grassi has written a remarkable ethnography of everyday violence and hyper-segregated urban poverty in northern Italy. Dedicated to social justice and the memory of his precarious low-income working class interlocuters he documents how the precarious surviving poor survive and die prematurely. Between the lines of this rich ethnographic and theoretically playful book, one sees the inspiring history of independent radical leftism, and diversity of contemporary migration patterns in play in Europe. This ethnography takes on particular contemporary urgency as much of Europe teeters yet again, on the edge of a self-destructive descent into right-wing corporate fascism and kleptocratic quasi-feudal oligarchy—as does my own country and much of the rest of the world in the age of viral social media/AI predation. Grassi has also crafted a fascinating theoretical application of the ‘continuum of violence’ concept to a Lefebvrian critique of urban poverty on the front lines of precarious working-class solidarities in our polarized era of mass neoliberal lumpenization processes.

Philippe Philippe Bourgois, University of California Los Angeles