The Self-Made City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 195

public spaces and green areas with recreational facilities) are used by residents
of the much wider area since Valle borghesiana itself has no such services. Valle
borghesiana has a population of just over ten thousand, which, added to borgata
finocchio and the neighboring toponimi, amounts to over forty thousand people:
an entire town that is completely unauthorized and deprived of essential services.
The city council envisaged the possibility of setting up consortia for the to-
ponimi (though, in many cases, existing consortia would be enlarged) that would
target not only the execution of the works, but also the planning and drawing
up of detailed plans that here—unlike in o Zones—were lacking and therefore
could be dealt with by private as well as public initiatives. Clearly they had in
mind a sort of “urban planning contract” or a “collaboration with the unautho-
rized landowners.” The city government, through a number of public notices,
set out the criteria for drawing up plans and subsequently evaluated them and
approved them. The planning process is proving extremely time-consuming and
is still ongoing.
The true Dynamic of a Consortium
The experiment with consortia for self-regeneration seems interesting and, in
some ways, effective, but if the concrete dynamics are studied in depth, the facts
prove to be more complex, diversified, and at the same time problematic and
ambiguous.
The consortia came into being originally in response to pressure from people
who were motivated and committed to regeneration, often gathering around an
original nucleus of people with a concrete interest in carrying out such regenera-
tion in their own residential area. in this sense, the consortia appeared to be (and
in part were) an opportunity to finally make changes that had always been dif-
ficult to achieve, owing largely to the shortcomings of the administration. at the
same time, the consortia were founded on a relationship of trust, on delegation to
people at the core of the organization and in particular to the chairman, and on
participation relating to small concrete issues and not to big policies.
with the passage of time, the consortia, especially through their small man-
agement teams, evolved, combining diverse characteristics. in some cases, they
stayed tied to a sort of community dimension mixed with friendly relationships
that were linked to the joint character and mutual assistance of the pioneering
enterprise of colonizing wild territory. in others, they gradually grew into small
centers of management, local interest networks, and local micropowers, where
there was an uncertain and blurred boundary between the leader who was seri-
ously committed to the local community and the “village despot” whose interest
tended toward the local and municipal levels.
as i have already pointed out, a new development has brought about the
creation of a number of organizations, generally resembling consortia, that have