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This book investigates the success story of the fast fashion industry-mainly owned by Chinese migrants-in Prato, Italy. It outlines how Prato has become the center of a value chain stretching from suppliers in China and Turkey all the way to buyers in Europe. Despite this, a policy attacking Chinese entrepreneurship has been devised and implemented in Prato. This volume analyzes said policy against the crisis of Prato's textile industry. Based on the author's 15 years of fieldwork in Prato, the book sheds light on the entangled processes of city making and the restructuring processes linked to capital accumulation by tackling issues of governance, territory, migration, division of labor, labor mobility, housing, and human rights.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Globalization and its Impact on the Italian Fashion Industry.- 3. The Migrant Pathway of Emplacement in Prato.- 4. The Global Low-End Fashion Center.- 5. The Mobile Regime.- 6. The Foundations of the Mobile Regime: Global Restructuring of Social Reproduction and Ethnicization of the Workplace.- 7. "My City Brought to its Knees": The Downscaling of Prato and the Criminalization of Chinese Entrepreneurship.- 8. Conclusions.
About the author
Antonella Ceccagno is Professor of Chinese Linguistics and East Asian Sociology at the University of Bologna, Italy. For more than ten years she worked as Managing and Research Director of the Center for Immigration Research and Services in Prato, Italy.
Summary
Unveils the criminalization of Chinese entrepreneurship in Prato, ItalyTackles issues of labor and outsourcing of social reproduction
Offers a new conceptualization on the drastic reconfiguration of production in the Chinese network of suppliers in the fast fashion industry
