The Self-Made City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 189

latin america, the middle east, india, southeast asia, africa, and elsewhere. in
these places, the phenomenon has assumed massive proportions and is regarded
as a very serious urban and social issue because of the proliferation of shanty-
towns. The situation in Rome is very different. here we are talking about a large
modern western european capital that is affluent and endowed with a strong
heritage of historical and cultural strata and a major system of infrastructure.
Conditions in the southern hemisphere stem from serious problems of hous-
ing and poverty. in Rome, the problem has its origins in unauthorized building,
but it has become intrinsic, indeed functional, to the evolution of the city. This
can call into question the very idea that Rome can be considered a “modern and
advanced” western capital,4 yet the incidence of unauthorized building can be
considered a variant, if only a “low-profile” one, of advanced “predatory capital-
ism.” it also suggests that Rome's “modernity” cannot easily be subsumed under
any existing model or category (see also Thomassen and Vereni, chapter 1). some
more recent studies have considered the situation in european or western coun-
tries (uN-habitat 2010), but the phenomenon is more in evidence in eastern and
southern european countries such as albania, macedonia, Greece, and mon-
tenegro. in the recent past, the problem was invariably seen as an emergency,
linked to urban migration of large numbers of people following the changes in
the economies of those countries. by contrast, the phenomenon in Rome had
very different features: although it originated out of “necessity,” especially for
housing, today it has assumed the character of a standard modality of town plan-
ning; it affects the middle class, it has become speculative and no longer affects
only residential building.
Characteristics of the informal City in Rome
in Rome, informal housing assumes a range of characteristics, reflecting a pro-
cess which is variegated, massive, and spread over a wide area. in many ways, it
assumes the characteristics of deep-rooted social behavior, a way of responding
to the inadequacy of public administration, a basic way of building a city.
first, we have “classic” unauthorized building, that is to say unauthorized
building originating from a need for housing and motivated by “necessity”; this
led, and leads, to the construction of residential buildings for one or at the most
two families (which could have one, two, or three stories). we are dealing here
with unauthorized self-building, where the builder also lives there with his whole
(maybe extended) family. he does not own the land, but the operation is carried
out with the agreement of the landowner, indeed often requested and granted,
or at least offered by the landowner who sees to the unauthorized dividing-up
and illegal sale of the sites even though they are unsuitable for building. This
type of “classic” unauthorized building has come to be used not only for housing
but also for shops, workshops, and farms; is often for speculative purposes; and
is carried out directly by the individuals who own the land. This “unauthorized