From Silicon Valley to Vesuvius Valley: Dismantled industrial farms to a knowledge-and-creativity hub in Naples, Italy

Abstract

San Giovanni a Teduccio, a downtrodden suburb of Naples, Italy, is a far cry from Silicon Valley, USA. The crumbling apartment buildings, the walls covered in both graffiti and death notices and the ubiquitous clothes lines hung outside people’s windows do not leave the impression that this neighbourhood is a centre for high technology. And yet it is this spot — a corner of the sprawling city that never quite recovered after a major food-packing factory shut its doors in the 1980s — where the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, hoped the best and brightest young minds in the world would come to train to be leaders in the new app economy. This hope has been met; in fact, the iOS academy is now in its second year and over 50 per cent of its students are foreign. This paper analyses the new creative climate in Naples, from the city’s recent Fordist past to the present day. Specifically, the analysis will support the theme of creativity, which is nowadays recognised as a fundamental factor for innovative cities, and this theme’s relationship with the concept of resilience in an urban context. This study includes survey-based research from the eastern part of Naples to support the arguments in this article.