Interview with GHI Visiting Fellow Daniele Valisena

Daniele Valisena (Ph.D.) is Visiting Fellow at the GHI Washington Pacific Office at UC Berkeley. His current research project, “The Wild Around the Corner: Immigrants’ Feral Ecologies in New York, San Francisco, and Naples during the Age of Mass Migration, 1870–1924,” examines migrants’ practices of contestation in response to urban modernization during the Progressive Era. Daniele earned his Ph.D. in history of science, technology, and the environment from KTH – Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, conducting research on the environmental history of Italian miners employed in the Belgian coalfields. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium, researching the links between animal husbandry, genetics, and modernization during fascism in Italy.

Tell us about your project for the GHI. 

My project is at the intersection of environmental history and migration studies. My research encompasses issues surrounding the urban modernization of San Francisco during the Progressive Era, primarily, but l also study similar events in New York and Naples. 

My idea is that the modernization of cities is not a progressive process but has been contested by various actors for various reasons. One of these reasons was the ecological understanding of how a city works. Studying migrants are an interesting way to interrogate that. They’ve been marginalized and often considered ignorant, less modern, or less civilized. But migrants to the US—and elsewhere—also had stakes, they also had culture, they also had knowledge, they saw and understood the urban environment in their own ways. By looking at documents about migrants that were produced in these years, the presence of horses, goats, cows, chickens, and all sorts of farm animals in all parts of the city becomes very apparent. The project of removing animals from urban life often went hand-in-hand with attempts to remove migrants from city centers. The crux of my research is examining how and why migrants contested this process of modernization, and what alternative urban ecologies they imagined and performed, sometimes in alliance with other non-human urbanites. 

How did you become interested in this topic? 

This project is basically the evolution of an idea that I had with my former supervisor, Marco Armiero, while doing my PhD. We discovered by chance while studying Italians living in New York that one of the main reasons they were discriminated against and marginalized was because they were considered “backwards,” a belief that cut across racial, social, cultural, and ecologic categories. 

One of the main signifiers of their “backwardness” was that they lived with animals. While I'm not suggesting that everybody should have a goat, a pig, or a cow in their backyard, by looking at documents, oral histories, diaries, and stories about the villages and cities in Europe where these migrants were coming from, it is clear that they weren’t ignorant or backward. Most migrants had lived in buildings which were part of dense village settlements but also included yards for animals and it made perfect sense for them, economically and ecologically, to continue having animals and to have this urban-rural way of living. But this discourse about “backwardness” was not only appearing in New York; in Naples, where I lived before moving to Berkeley, similar things were going on and similar discourses were used to modernize the city. Authorities cited hygiene and anti-cholera reasons to justify measures which effectively got rid of the poor people from the central part of the city to make way for more upscale neighborhoods, so there was also this real estate valorization behind that. I also found similar documents in Paris during the Haussmann transformation. So basically, this project is an expansion of that idea. I think San Francisco is a pretty unique case in the study of Italian migration to the US, because Italians had a different position in the racial and social hierarchy compared with New York or Paris, for instance. They are definitely considered white here, alongside other European immigrants such as the Irish and the Germans who came at the very beginning of the city’s densification, right after the Gold Rush.

The fact that many immigrants and subaltern people shared similar practices of the city but were valued differently is quite telling on how also these discourses were instrumental in the development and modernization of the city. In examining urban modernization through this lens, you can see a more sinister agenda come into play, one that has to do with race, a certain idea of who can live in a city and what people should live in the city. It became clear that the motivations behind including or excluding certain groups was not always about nationality or color of your skin, but also in the kinds of economic and social processes certain groups were permitted to partake. 

In your research you found many connections between anti-immigrant views, sanitation and hygiene laws, the loss of biodiversity in urban settings, and the resultant increase in pollution. Are there any interesting legacies of this in the modern day that you've noticed? 

When I was developing this project during COVID-19 a few connections became clear. In the case of San Francisco, the 1906 earthquake was a pivotal moment in the history of the modernization of the city. This is not because of the earthquake itself, but rather the extensive damage it caused to city infrastructure and the resulting outbreak of plague in the years which followed. This tremendously accelerated processes of modernization, by way of prompting major reforms in building and hygiene regulations. This did much to change perceptions of animals in the immediate aftermath; they were primarily understood as being carriers of disease. The new regulations and these attitudes went hand-in-hand. The outcome of these changes in both areas of regulations was that cities became more zoned according to function; that is, cities were divided into areas where you work, areas where you spend your leisure time, certain parts designated to keep and butcher animals. It’s safer if you divide the city in this way in terms of control of disease and gave rise to areas like Butchertown in San Francisco.

While this made sense for public health reasons, what happened to the animals after the introduction of these sanitation measures is often left out of discourse about the process of urban modernization. The animals did not disappear, they just disappeared from the city. They were not moved into nice open pastures reminiscent of more traditional forms of farming. The removal of animals from the cities is linked to the development of mass and industrial farming, which is actually the reason why we have zoonoses like Covid-19. If you concentrate a lot of animals with the same genomic structure in very restricted areas, feed them with antibiotics, and breed them to reproduce the same identical animal, it’s a recipe for disaster. This means that when one of these animals gets sick, they all get sick. Combined with the need to concentrate large numbers of animals in a small area to efficiently feed large cities, it is easy to see the vulnerability of this system and the dangers it poses to human health. This is part of the same process, this separation between animals and urban life, that happened 100 years ago in most of the Global North.

You also get to the root of a big problem we have right now – industrial farming and zoonosis.  My research invites everybody to reflect on the fact that maybe this is not the right model that we want to continue to develop, and we should maybe rethink the way we inhabit not only cities, but the whole planet because they are connected. 

In pursuing this research, you developed something called the walking ethnographic method in order to “retrace multi-species stories and knowledge.” Could you tell us about this method that you're working on?

This method has to do with how I connect analysis of society and environment. The starting point is the idea that the way humans perceive space is mediated by the way we move through space, always considering accessibility and the fact that we are not walking and moving the same way in space depending on our bodies, race, gender, culture, etc... The way we move through space defines and mediates the way we perceive the natural environment, the built environment, and the social environment. Sometimes historical impact on the natural environment is still observable in the modern day. For instance, acidity levels in urban soils are heavily influenced by the presence of heavy metals. All the waste produced by slaughterhouses and other industries that were active in the past 150 years still impacts the environment today. In San Francisco, it’s because of the location of Butchertown that the Navy Yard was established there, and the radiation left in the soil by the shipyard business still affects the residents of Bayview and Hunter’s Point today. The past is never really past, it’s still there, and you don't really notice this if you don't move through and take into account the geography, the geology, and the history of the neighborhood.

How do you find life in Berkeley? What's your favorite thing about it?

I feel very lucky to be in Berkeley. The University is a very open place, and I do most of my research here, but we are also able to participate in activities throughout the campus. As a visiting fellow, I really benefit from that. It's easy to establish connections with different departments, people working on similar things but from very different perspectives and through different disciplinary lenses, and so that's great, and I really value that. It's hard to complain about the Bay Area in terms of climate, it’s a very beautiful place. I think I'm very lucky to be here.