ABSTRACT
Urban space in contemporary Italy are currently contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are constructed and negotiated. While at a national level widespread xenophobic discourses classify migration as a security and public order problem, and define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italitan Cities, at a local level the leadership and cultural entrepreneurs of Turin based the city urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness with the aim to attract visitors and capital investments. As the intersection of such discourses shape the manifold ways through which (post)migrant bodies become represented perceived and addressed in contemporary Turin, this paper will address how such dynamics are negotiated by group of children of migration between 16 and 21 years old practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin public spaces. The focus on capoeira and parkour, two lifestyle sport which emplace the body in public space, enabled this study to highlight how group of (post)migrant youth used these practices to negotiate spaces and processes of inclusion, and exclusion, in Turin’s citycape. Capoeira and parkour represented meaningful sites of analysis, as practices wrought with contradictions indicative of current trends within Turin’s urban politics. Both disciplines are abundantly endorsed by public-private events celebrating Turin’s renewal, vibrancy and diversity. However, the participants’ engagement with capoeira and parkour in Turin’s regenerating citycape, enable to illuminate the shifting meaning of citizenship in the context of research, and articulate it to the reciprocal constitution of bodies space, and power relations in less-than-coherent assemblage of neoliberal urban regeneration.