Ways of Living in the Market City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 135

ated whole segments of a market city. operations of this kind, which imply a
commonplace and standardized city aimed mainly at the middle classes, have
not been opposed, but instead supported, by the public administration; the latter
have played an important role and therefore have considerable responsibility in
this type of urban development. as i have said, it is an operation that benefits
only the private sector (yet proclaimed as being in the public interest) and cre-
ates a synergy between the city government and entrepreneurs. The boundary
between public and private interest is thus made uncertain and ambiguous and
has become a typical feature of urban development in Rome in recent years. such
completely inadequate urban public policies seem questionable, as does the easy
standardized concept of a city that has lost its riches and the entirety of commu-
nal living and forms of coexistence: a concept of a city that is dominated by other
interests reflecting a trivialization of housing, where the sense of ownership and
the significance of places is thwarted and where the collective dimension of the
city disappears from residents' lives.
This massive style of development of the market city in Rome confirms the
limitations of the “Rome model” and the creation of a modernization without
modernity. That is to say, it lacks that quality that truly characterizes a modern
capital city and could certainly characterize a city like Rome, endowed as it is with
a magnificent historical and cultural heritage and extensive social resources. The
policies, both private and public, that continue to typify the Rome model seem
to be pursuing a modernization made up of buildings and infrastructure that is
“abreast with the times,” supposedly an instrument of fitting competitiveness at
the international and global level, without aiming at an overall development of
the city—on the contrary, bringing about an impoverishment of it. indeed, the
economies that derive from it, such as those relating to the market city, are in fact
short-term: They aim obviously at the exploitation of existing resources (land
use, trade, salaries, financial activities, etc.) without creating new resources and
without playing a driving role for the entire city, in a course whose consequences
have already been seen in the recent economic crisis.
Notes
1. Rome's urban master plan; the main instrument of urban planning, adopted in 2003
and approved in 2008.
2. There exists a huge amount of research and a wide-ranging debate on shopping centers,
slanted almost exclusively toward a radical (if not ideological) critique of the shopping center
as such and the consumerist model that it embodies.
3. see scarso (2005) for a vast and complete survey of the bibliography.
4. for example, Daniele lucchetti's italian-french film La nostra vita ( Our Life, 2010),
which won an award at the Cannes festival, was a great success in italy; it was set in an outer
suburb of this type that was under construction.