Ways of Living in the Market City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 132

another consequence is the magnetic attraction of the shopping center:
Young people, in particular, are drawn away from the traditional shopping
streets to spend their spare time in the mall. whereas in the past people who
lived in Rome, especially the young, made for the historic center of Rome (when
they could, given the distance from their homes) or toward other intermediate
destinations, they now make a beeline for porta di Roma (and only in certain
cases for the city center, in search of alternatives and skilled employment). The
shopping center, furthermore, serves as a “filter” for the crowds that come from
outside the city and inverts the direction of the traffic flows outward from more
central districts (which is entirely new for Rome).
in short, the most obvious consequence of the shopping center is that it is
completely changing the organization of the city and ways of living in it. its pow-
erful attraction, its strategic location next to the ring road, its easy accessibility
(except for local residents!), and its projection toward the huge catchment area
in the northern zone of Rome mean that there is a predominance of nonlocal
visits and traffic. porta di Roma is a structure that has scant regard for the local-
ity and the neighboring areas: it is a structure that “thinks” and functions on an
urban and territorial scale and imposes a different way of experiencing the city.
The scale of housing is metropolitan, no longer local. The ring road is no longer
just an infrastructure for speedy connections and a barrier that holds back the
spread of the city into the countryside; it is an axis of gravitation (almost like a
metropolitan boulevard) around which ordinary city life revolves (in addition
to the twenty-eight big shopping centers that have arisen in the past few years),
ever more orientated toward life in the car, a place of concentration of the city's
activities that is now seen with a reversed perspective (ilardi 2005). its effects on
infrastructural organization and mobility are substantial, exacerbated by the in-
adequacy of public transport and entailing an increase in local traffic.
social behavior is also changing from other points of view. i will point out
just two aspects. first, there has been an enormous increase in private car use
that is becoming the normal (though not the only) form of transport, with a clear
add-on effect on both congestion and unsustainable environmental pollution.
second, as noted in my field research and indications from managers of the shop-
ping center, it has become normal for whole families to spend the weekend at the
mall, arriving early in the morning, staying for lunch, and finishing with a visit to
the cinema in the afternoon. The shopping center thus fulfils all of life's require-
ments in the space of a single day.
living in bufalotta
it is interesting to analyze and evaluate the experience of living in the district
next to the shopping center,10 an experience that reveals a clear evolution in a
concept of living that is even more important in a cultural context like that of
Rome. This context is partly linked to the mediterranean culture, where hous-