Self-managed social centers appeared all over Italy during the mid-1980s, as a result of the recession and resignation of 1970s left-wing militant students and youth that were dissatisfied with authority.
Young adults with no money, place to meet, or fondness of authority squatted abandoned buildings, renovated them, and turned them into social youth centers. These self-organized groups began to find new purpose in the centers, as if they were operational factories, schools, prisons, gas stations, or stores that they once were before abandonment. These refurbished buildings became semi-legal, unconventional, independently run activity centers.
The social centers were often located in the outer suburbs of larger cities and were run cooperatively by several groups that used the facilities as underground drop-in centers, youth clubs, drug rehabilitation sites, recording studios, cinemas, art galleries, and eventually even computer venues that specialized in computer hacking. As a retreat for disgruntled youth, the social center became a breeding ground for Italian political music. Today, they are considered the heart of Italian hip hop.
Famous quotes containing the words social, centers and/or italy:
“In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery—back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)