Scampia to remember, Scampia to forget. Tales of use and misuse of images from the northern area of Naples

The urgency to innovate promotional policies, which have got to the second or even the third generation without experimenting significant changes, encourages the passage from the marketing approach to sell the city as a product, towards more sophisticated cultural policy-led regeneration strategies. The objective of this paper is to emphasize the importance of this transition and the fruitful consequences it could have, introducing more specific models of planning and particular roles for planner. The methodology adopted consists of a case study on the contemporary Neapolitan production of external and local images, focused on the northern district of Scampia where we have been observing the use and misuse of images by local policy makers and social actors for several years. Conclusions argue that the difficulty by local actors to quit reiterating "places of power” and rather investing on the "power of places", mostly depends on the structural weakness of the promotional frames in use.