The Self-Made City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 192

on the other hand they were victims of deceit and widespread acts of injustice.
Their attempts to regularize the situation, paying what was due and in addition
acknowledging the damage to the community that they were willing to pay com-
pensation for, often ended badly or took many years to sort out. They felt that
they were living in an insecure condition, an insecurity that was not formally ac-
knowledged and entailed a long wait for all those things that are part of city life:
services, infrastructure, facilities, urbanization, public spaces, parks. They lived
in an incomplete city, forever waiting and uncertain of their future.
The matter of unauthorized building may have been closely linked, at any
rate in its initial stages, to a struggle for housing, but many aspects of it evolved
with the passage of time: its relationship with the housing model, the typology
of buildings and the construction process, the changing social requirements and
objectives of the developers, and the areas that were affected. in the end, a system
was created around unauthorized building that was at the same time a housing
regime and an economic regime.
The problem was also affected by speculative building, as well as by three
successive building amnesties (in 1985, 1994, and 2003) that triggered a mecha-
nism of implicit and silent acceptance of an unauthorized process of building
development, in the expectation of more amnesties and related legislation. more
recently, the housing laws at national and regional levels have tended to reinforce
this trend, favoring deregulation and supporting small-scale and scattered build-
ing development and furthermore putting a premium on cubic capacity, seeing
this incentive to building activity as a response to the global economic crisis.
indeed these low-profile policies can be seen as a local consequence of the global
economic situation.
so unauthorized building moved on from being based on “necessity” to be-
ing based on “affordability” that aims at affordable good-quality dwellings that
often have a garden (or even a swimming pool). These aspired to a higher stan-
dard of living, meeting the future requirements of children and foreseeing an
increase in nuclear families (mostly houses of various sizes and other one-family
units, often built by small construction firms, but also small blocks of flats, typi-
cal of Rome's building style, or other two-family or multifamily buildings). The
next stage was a type of economic and speculative construction where the builder
was not necessarily the occupier and user of the building and where the end use
was not only residential (unauthorized building has also spread to industrial,
commercial, and artisans' areas). The final stage was the organized and “indus-
trialized” forms of speculative building (creating entire residential complexes),
where the enterprise was supported by specialized technicians and lawyers.
what also changed from the 1980s was the typology of the residents: one
could observe the simultaneous presence of “original” residents, the “pioneers” of
these areas, and of strangers to the neighborhood who were renting their homes,