Torpignattara/Banglatown - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 78

district: will they reinforce the diaspora's frontiers in more rigid and politically
organized forms? or will the practices of hybridization reduce the ethnic element
in their social life? i have always found it remarkable and very allegoric, almost a
“historical nemesis,” that the banglatown settlement should establish itself right
around that abandoned monument called Cinema impero, a large fascist-style
building that with its still legible insignia dominates the streetscape like a ruin
from the colonial past. still more remarkable is the fact that this settlement is be-
ing presented as having benefited and improved an area with such a bad reputa-
tion: The “empire” decays but its “impure” fruits are being born and are growing
up around it, reclaiming the surrounding territory. as Clifford (1993, 29) once put
it, “the victims of progress and of the empire are weak, but rarely passive.”
Notes
1. on gentrification from the social and town planning perspective, see piccolomini
(1993), semi (2004), and annunziata (2007, 2008, 2011)
2. officially, the number of bangladeshis in italy is 65,556, 11,500 of them in lazio, mostly
concentrated in Rome. in the migration chain, the bangladeshis (usually young men) start
off as street traders in the black market; next, they go to work in restaurant kitchens as dish-
washers, sales assistants in markets, barmen, or workmen, and then as cooks; then, if they are
successful, they become entrepreneurs or self-employed small shopkeepers. These migrants
dream of reuniting their families, being self-employed in a business, and returning to bangla-
desh toward the end of their lives for their old age.
3. statistics office of Rome city council; see Vi aVai , february 2007, p. 2.
4. in 2006, the sixth municipality lost 5,000 more inhabitants (falling from 129,000 to
124,000), but the number of migrants rose from 9,600 in 2002 to 12,000 in 2006. in 2008, the
area lost a further 1,000 “old” inhabitants (falling to 123,000), but the number of migrants rose
to 14,000.
5. statistics office of Rome city council—written in the register on 31 December 2009.
6. There are no specific writings later than the mid-1990s about bangladeshi migration to
Rome. This was when the geographer melanie Knight, at the time of the first bangladeshi ar-
rivals, studied their economic activities in Rome. she identified in the particular structure of
the migratory chain one of the factors (people-trafficking organized by various regional deal-
ers) that drove immigrants toward Rome. however, Knight focused on the economic aspect of
the “network economy”; she did not take into account the political dynamics of the diaspora
and its repercussions on the construction of a “locality” in a specific territory (Knight 1997). a
topic about bangladeshi migration to Rome, speciically in the area of the sixth municipality,
has been published very recently (pompeo 2011); see also Riccio (2007) on bologna.
7. Various areas of Rome's outer suburbs, also “as spotted as a leopard,” contain conglom-
erations that are characterized by marked social stratification and rapid change. You can wan-
der from one street to the next, from one block of flats to the next, and sense a marked change
in horizons, inhabitants, and landscapes.
8. Concerning torpignattara, there are some studies from oral sources that relate to the
world war ii period (ficacci 2007) and some authentically local writings (sirleto, 2002; Di-
onisi and Della pietra 1994). see the classic study by ferrarotti (1970) for more information
about suburbs and urban villages in postwar Rome.