(Un)happy degrowth in the Italian Northeast: Social Consequences after Thirty Years of The Second Industrial Divide

For nearly forty years, until the advent of the recent major world recession, the development model of the Italian Northeast was considered by worldwide scholars as a best practice of horizontal integration: an ideal type of flexible production, typical of the radical modernity. However, following the theoretical perspective that any discontinuity creates new opportunities, but also social consequences and unexpected effects, it can be seen that, in the face of economic success, some critical issues concerning daily life and social relations emerges in the Northeast. These are issues of some importance which, however, have not yet been adequately studied and, perhaps, even understood. As a partial compensation of this gap and as a way to fill the lack of specific knowledge about it, over the last ten to fifteen years has come to the attention a heterogeneous corpus of novels and films that have placed in the center of their narration the Northeast with the its people, their relationships and their vicissitudes and residential and industrial landscapes, both (people and places) deeply affected by the mode of production in recent years. In their diversity, these productions dig into the Northeast of recent decades and share many traits of social reality slipped into existential discomfort. Faced with these testimonies, one would have to say that, for the Northeast, one of the main perverse effects of the economic well-being achieved is represented by the inverse correlation between hard work, income and individual happiness. The argument that we are to support here is that this effect is perceptible by putting the daily lives of people at the center of attention, dissociating them, for once, by their identity as entrepreneurs. For writers and directors, the tangible manifestations of discomfort in the Northeast are traced to the loss of the sense of existential continuity with their own traditions, the spread of anxiety and the impoverishment of interpersonal relationships, the retirement into the private sphere, in the banality of the affections , in excesses and sexual commercialization, the spread of 'international tertiary' of organized crime, drawn from the El Dorado of easy enrichment, by the work off the books or by exploitation. All of these symptoms have been lived and represented within a scattered scene in the dispersal of social and spatial relationships: a vast existential self-aggregation sprawl dotted by ubiquitous surveillance devices. So much negativity needs to be understood. One way to do this is to try to understand how the Northwest recurring image has been generated and how the Northeast image has changed over time.