Ways of Living in the Market City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 134

and these are their words. in the absence of an alternative during one's spare
time, and in order simply to buy some bread,12 the shopping center becomes an
unavoidable landmark with important effects on the perception of space, and
public space in particular: people leave their own homes (where they spend the
whole of their private life); they go to the garages; they get in their cars; they go
to the underground car park in the shopping center; and they take the lift or the
escalator up to the mall. sometimes they spend the entire day there. The inter-
mediate space, even in its physicality, disappears from the horizon of residents'
lives and from their imagination; all that exists is one's own home and the shop-
ping center, which is certainly not a “public space” in the traditional sense of the
word (these areas are private property, placed under surveillance). This so-called
public space in turn loses its whole character of a place of intersection of routes
and stories in residents' lives, both because of the dispersal and alienation caused
by the physical character of the spaces and because the shopping center with its
nonlocal character witnesses a large number of visitors who do not live nearby.
The physical public space (the square, the street) that still exists and is well looked
after in these districts thus completely loses its meaning and for the time being
has no visitors. The only areas to be visited are the playgrounds for children, who
are always accompanied by parents or grandparents.13 by the same token, mental
and social public space, the collective dimension of living, disappears from the
residents' horizon of life.
The ways of delineating spaces that are characteristic of most of the city of
Rome and that mark a city's vitality do not exist in this district; sometimes a
couple of market stalls are stationed outside the private perimeter of the shop-
ping center, on the route to the bus stop. Community spirit is out of the question;
people's behavior is determined by the organization of the space; the sense of
ownership of the places is thwarted. even the district's management committee,
which still exists, meets via the internet and not in real places. Thus, the district
committee's pronouncements address the failure to create the areas intended for
the office complex (which, according to the committee, would prevent bufalot-
ta-porta di Roma being reduced to a solely residential district, that is to say a
“dormitory quarter”)14 without perhaps being aware that the quality of housing
would not change.
modernization without “modernity”
This chapter has attempted to illustrate and appraise one example of the hous-
ing developments that have become typical in Rome in recent years, especially
the last decade, based on a multiplication of centralities, which are complexes
of shopping centers and residential quarters. These private initiative projects,
incorporated into the new urban master plan with the ostensible purpose of re-
generating the outer suburbs, have completely failed to meet this objective and
have turned out to be in essence financial and housing operations that have cre-