Sicilia Fashion Village: features and potentialities of an out-of-town retailing format at the core of the Island

Consumption can be regarded as a typically urban specificity, at the point that the complex tangle of purchase dynamics, sale formats as well as space organisation patterns have been recently moulding a process of (re)urbanisation which dates back from the osmotic relationship between urban settlements and the marketplace. As a consequence, spatial dimension and consumption are so interwoven that even the apparently non-urban shopping centres reveal elements referable to urban “attitudes”, in terms of space patterns and social practices, owing to the urban values these new “consumption cathedrals” are representatives of. It is not a chance that shopping is considered as the main driving force shaping the so-called “cityscape” and “mindscape”: that is to say, both the tangible space organisation of urban fabric and what is generally perceived as the “spirit of the city”. The paper, part of a wider project still in progress, aims at highlighting the deep impact exerted by the recently opened Factory Outlet “Sicilia Fashion Village”, strategically located at the core of the island, in the province of Enna, within the territory of Agira municipality. This 25.000-square-metres aggregative non-lieu seems to be perfectly inserted in the wider retail Sicilian scenery, where the centre/periphery dialectics has been lately structuring around the dichotomy between “natural” shopping vocation of old town centres and, on the other hand, the newly abrupt proliferation of suburban shopping centres, which combine contemporary shopping practises with unprecedented socialisation dynamics. This new Factory Outlet Village stands on a traditionally depressed Sicilian area, where the tottering economy is still clinging to rural traditions, whilst the attempts at creating an industrial cluster, in the nearby Val Dittaino, have broken on infrastructural gaps as well as on the inadequacy of local players. Therefore, from the strategic standpoint, the apparently reckless location choice is justified by the wide accessibility provided by the motorway linking the main urban centres, Palermo and Catania, not to mention the perfect centrality at the core of the island, which lets prefigure a broader number of consumers coming from the whole Southern Italy. As a result, the main focus of this work deals with the geo-economic impact of such a consumption place, set in a chiefly half-rural landscape, punctuated by small or medium scale towns: in other words, it covers the new geographies of territories and flows, not to mention the effects on the local employment level as well as the potential process of re-imag(in)ing of such an area, rich in cultural and artistic heritage, which the new Outlet Village could promote indirectly. For this reason, the methodology implies an exhaustive study of the territorial and socio-economic layouts, in addition to a series of qualitative face-to-face semi-structured interviews to be distributed among both store managers and employees and, on the other hand, among visitors, in order to gather a patchwork of multifaceted “consumption narratives”. Compared to the retail Sicilian landscape, the wider Italian one reveals itself only slightly more rooted, since the first Outlet Villages have been rising for the last ten years, as the Italianised versions of the North American ones. These new shopping centres have been inserted into the constantly increasing evolution of urban patterns, branded by dispersion and fragmentation, apart from the consequent split between urbs and civitas. Strictly linked to this sprawl-oriented evolution, the growing mobility tendency has drawn a new map of space organisation, often structured around this consumption landscape, where shopping centres, factory outlets, malls (re)produce in an extra-urban dimension functions and narratives of space traditionally reserved to the urban one. It is against these (post)modern sceneries of anthropic contemporaneity, full of symbolic layers, that the Outlet Villages are outlined, demanding a specificity depending not only on the product array but also on the architectural patterns which hint more explicitly to the real urban layouts, in a kind of trick of reflections between real places and fictional non-lieux. It is not a chance that this study is inserted in a wider analyses of the whole retail Sicilian landscape which, later on but similarly to Northern Italy, has been recently facing a sudden multiplication of new consumption centres at the point that a new geography of shopping places and practices has upset atavistic relations, such as those centre/periphery, city/countryside, urban/rural.