Prato Città Fabbrica
The Architecture of the Industrial District.

Introduction to the Prato Città Fabbrica symposium on architecture, territory, and production, held in Prato on October 8, 2016. Organized by Behemoth Press and convened by Francesco Marullo as an associated project to the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016After Belonging. (Video here by Igreg Studio)

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Prato is one of the most important Industrial districts in Italy.
After WWII, it became specialized in producing wool textiles. In the last decades, the district expanded its activities to many other sectors of the garment industry, such as tailoring, finishing, and fast retail.

Yet, textile production in Prato emerged already in the XII when the Arte Della Lana — one of the most powerful guilds among the seven commercial corporations of Florence— established several warehouses and workshops in town. Thanks to the trading abilities of Francesco di Marco Datini, who managed to establish commercial relations with France and the Flanders, the city flourished through the XIV and XV until the Spanish devastation in 1512.

But the real expansion of the garment industry in Prato began during the Granducato di Toscana in the XVIII century, which further promoted and extended trade with Europe and the Middle East. The expansion culminated in the XIX century when Giovan Battista Mazzoni imported back to Prato the secrets of textile looms from France, establishing new machines propelled by hydraulic power.

At that time, it was already evident how industrialization, knowledge, and mechanical innovation were intimately bound together and how the destiny of the production could not only rely on the entrepreneur's ability but also on the scientific research and the efforts of an entire collectivity.

It is not by chance that the first automatic loom — the spinning jenny of 1764 — was considered the very beginning of the first Industrial Revolution. Shortly afterward, a new kind of raw material was also introduced to minimize the costs of production: rags, namely wool recovered from shredding old clothes and industrial scraps, which would then be recycled into a new fabric —the so-called shoddy. This technique was, in fact, invented in 1813 by Benjamin Law to fulfill the demands of new uniforms and coats for British soldiers.

In Prato, rags became the main source of textile manufacturing. Coming from all over the world, as beautifully described in a passage by Curzio Malaparte, rags were accurately selected and mechanically transformed into a new fabric made of regenerated wool or synthetic fibers.

This gradually evolved into the Prato we knew 40 years ago: the industrial district that led the Italian and European textile markets during the 1960s and 1970s, with its clusters of family enterprises intimately connected into a sort of territorial network. And it was precisely this very particular integration of architecture and production, labor and innovation so typical of the industrial district, which suggested we organize this symposium today.

The industrial district is, in fact, a very particular exception to the present neoliberal economy: a sort of enclave where acceleration, innovation, and particular working conditions are combined together. Yet in Prato, this followed a very unusual path: rather than gathering together into a unique large-scale industrial monopoly, the district preserved its genuine horizontal and domestic character, clustering a series of enterprises into a network of firms tied by personal relations and cooperation which made it unique.

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But what is an industrial district?
A district is a geographically defined productive system characterized by many firms involved at different stages and in various ways in producing a particular product.

Wandering around the textile factories in up-north England — Lancashire, Yorkshire, etc. — Alfred Marshall noted a very particular distribution of factories, locally concentrated around infrastructural networks. These conglomerations were not isolated but part of a unique production process. Fragmented into distinctive but complementary activities, these firms constituted a sort of territorial assembly-line production, which on the one side, preserved a horizontal organization of separated units in spite of vertical integration or a hierarchical structure, while on the other side, allowed them to take advantage of the natural resources, the skilled local work-force, and knowledge present in the region.

Being both focused on a particular phase of the productive process and, at the same time, intimately connected to all the others, the district created a very singular combination of cooperation and mutual competition. In this way, rather than being an obstacle —a negative externality— territory was considered the primary condition — the platform of integration — for these companies to collaborate and work together as a unique chain. This particular agglomeration was not only capable of better exploiting the different potentials of a territory and their intrinsic differences, being entirely embedded with particular social realities, personal ties, and mutual trust. But also, they could better converge the innovation and evolution of production towards a common good, being all the companies interdependent and part of the same business: each acceleration and technological progress would have benefitted the whole chain.

In this sense, the district presented an alternative to the corporate model, dominated by small firms competing against each other, not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale but in terms of product design and innovation. Whereas globalization and neoliberal production seemed to homogenize territories and destroy local realities, within the protected compound of the industrial district, companies can produce differences, innovative approaches and specialization, creative experimentation, and mutual support.

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A very particular aspect of the textile industrial district is the domestic character of production, which could have been, in fact, outsourced to families and dispersed points of production and wherever there was enough space for a loom to work. At this scale, the textile factory literally blurred the traditional distinctions between living and working, production and reproduction, since all the activities took place in a big room (the stanzone) and everybody — men, women, kids — was in charge of taking control of the looms sewing.

The very terms “sweatshop” and “sweat system” were created to describe the process of subcontracting piecework within the textile production to masses of rural people migrating from the countryside to cities at the end of the XIX century… from London East and West End to New York. This condition today became generalized everywhere and often in much more violent forms— from the maquiladoras along the US-Mexico border to Bangladesh to Iran and to the Chinese district in Prato, where wooden floors and partitions have been added to the working space for the lodging of illegal workers.

What is crucial for us is that these almost inhuman conditions of life and work have been paradoxically replicated, sometimes in a more perverse way, in those so-called immaterial or “cognitive” forms of production that are far away from the physical efforts of the garment industry: in the silicon valley as well as in renown architectural office and even in universities, where overtime has become “standard.”

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The industrial district in Prato developed during a moment of rapid economic growth: basically, what happened in the United States with Fordism and mass-production in the 1930s, occurred in Italy in the 1960s. It was a sudden economic revolution that, in the span of a few decades, changed the whole of Italian society from being based mainly on agriculture to increasingly relying on industry, mass consumption, and services.

After the uncontrolled and speculative WWII reconstruction, the strong wave of industrialization and consumption forced the leading Christian Democratic government to a temporary coalition with the left-wing party to strategically elaborate new urban instruments to cope with the claims and the emerging needs of the working class.

Drastic interventions were planned across the national territory, with the construction of highways, railways, new public facilities, and housing to welcome the large masses of people moving from the rural areas towards urban centers looking for employment and better living conditions.

These were the premises from which the themes of the “grande dimensione” — the great dimension — or the “città-territorio” arose as attempts to revise the disciplinary role of urban planning as an instrument for controlling and balancing the new factors of production: basins of labor-force, territorial resources, the circulation of commodities, localized epicenters of information and knowledge.

The whole complex of natural and human resources was conceived as an integrated system of discreet interventions: a surface punctuated by directional centers, industrial nodes, commercial hubs, housing developments, cultural facilities, and infrastructural networks.

Elaborating the theme of the “great dimension” and drawing from Friedrich Engels’ writings — for whom the problem was not to conceive a better architecture or a better city but instead to understand the political forces that produced the city in the first place— the limits of architecture as a discipline were critically contested and Florence was one of the epicenters of debate.

Archizoom and Superstudio banished the very necessity of architecture within a world conceived as a continuous factory or an endless supermarket. And, it is clear how the horizontal network of textile enterprises of Prato resonated in the visionary assumptions of Greppi’s endless textile factory, the No-Stop City or the Continuous Monument, which by accelerating architecture to its utmost limits, attempted to make visible the power relations at stake in a large territorial compound.

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Thus, today we will try to look at this from different perspectives as we tried today to gather very different approaches. We will have Paola Vigano giving insights about her long experience in Prato with Bernardo Secchi; Christina Moon presents the labor conditions within textile production; Silvia Pieraccini, focusing on the juridical and legal characteristics of the Chinese pronto-moda; Matilde Cassani telling us about her recent project for a new Gonfalone for the city produced here at the Associazione china; Chiara Birattari and Zoe Romano from SerpicaNaro unveiling the “other-side” of contemporary textile production with the precarity of fashion design; Massimo Bressan, focusing on the relationship between the Chinese and Italian communities here in Prato; Claudio Greppi, who will delve into the political and economic conditions in Florence in these incredible years between 1964 and 1967; Filip Geerts, who will elaborate on the experiments and conjectures of the Centro Direzionale planned between Prato and Florence; and finally with Giorgio Piccinato, who will explain to us the genesis of the famous article “La Città Territorio. Verso Una Nuova Dimensione” he wrote with Manfredo Tafuri and Vieri Quilici in 1962.