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Rebuilding community: participation and engagement in a post-quake networked movement
Last modified: 2011-05-31
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the practices of the actors of “The People of the Wheelbarrows”, a movement which emerged in the city of L’Aquila (Italy) after the 2009 earthquake. This tragic event led to
a prompt increase in the use of the internet by local citizens who adopted Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs in order to rebuild online the offline public
spaces of communication which had been damaged or destroyed by the quake. A year after the tragedy, to protest against the Italian state due to the problem of the debris that
continued to be unremoved from the historical city centre, some citizens decided to fled into
the streets with their wheelbarrows and autonomously remove the rubble: this event marked the emergence of “the people of the wheelbarrows” movement. Its aim was to involve the citizenship in the decisional processes regarding L’Aquila reconstruction, to promote transparency in
the management of the disaster funds and to re-open the militarized “red zone” created in the city
centre. With the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, a content analysis of the movement’s Facebook group and a combination of online and offline ethnography, in this paper we investigate how the movement interacted with the internet to organize collective action and we explore the ways in which the movement participation was articulated between online spaces and offline squares, meetings and events. Our findings highlight on one side the continuous interplay between the online and the offline dimensions (Bennett, 2003, 2005; Loader 2008) and on the other side they show the pivotal role played by a wide array of social media platforms in the life of the movement.
a prompt increase in the use of the internet by local citizens who adopted Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs in order to rebuild online the offline public
spaces of communication which had been damaged or destroyed by the quake. A year after the tragedy, to protest against the Italian state due to the problem of the debris that
continued to be unremoved from the historical city centre, some citizens decided to fled into
the streets with their wheelbarrows and autonomously remove the rubble: this event marked the emergence of “the people of the wheelbarrows” movement. Its aim was to involve the citizenship in the decisional processes regarding L’Aquila reconstruction, to promote transparency in
the management of the disaster funds and to re-open the militarized “red zone” created in the city
centre. With the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, a content analysis of the movement’s Facebook group and a combination of online and offline ethnography, in this paper we investigate how the movement interacted with the internet to organize collective action and we explore the ways in which the movement participation was articulated between online spaces and offline squares, meetings and events. Our findings highlight on one side the continuous interplay between the online and the offline dimensions (Bennett, 2003, 2005; Loader 2008) and on the other side they show the pivotal role played by a wide array of social media platforms in the life of the movement.