Marginal Centers - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 205

offices that were dotting the eastern part of the agro (bortolotti 1988). several
suburbs also emerged on former ecclesiastical properties rented to bourgeois en-
trepreneurs or on properties owned by the aristocracy who sold or rented it to
land speculators. The most important characteristic of such a tumultuous devel-
opment is that it happened without an urban master plan (the first such plan is
dated 1873) but followed the private interests of landowners, insurance compa-
nies, banks, and developers. These groups, taking advantage of the increasing
demand for new housing, took over the responsibility for deciding which areas
were to be developed by means of ad hoc agreements with the government or
simply without permission.
The second period of urbanization corresponds to the interwar period, par-
ticularly the twenty-two years of fascist government (1922-1944), when rural to
urban migration continued relentlessly, piling the issue of unemployed in search
of new accommodation on top of an already difficult housing situation. This is
when private speculators and cooperatives, aided by permissive state legislation,
began or completed the construction of Garbatella and montesacro, “garden cit-
ies” located at a significant distance from the city center and which were then
expanded by the regime to house masses of workers.1 The suburbanization of
Rome also responded to ideological requirements of the fascist regime. The ex-
altation and reconstruction of the myth of “Roman-ness” led to dramatic urban
renewal projects that radically changed the fabric of vast areas in the city center,
the life of thousands of its residents, and the direction of urban development,
which shifted its axis from the east to the west, toward the sea. The realization
of a neo-augustan Rome with the blessing of the Vatican required the reloca-
tion of thousands of working-class families from the center to twelve periph-
eral borgate: suburban low-income enclaves built according to state-of-the-art
rationalist principles (trabalzi 1989). This official suburbanization was mirrored,
during the same years, by an informal, self-made urbanism developed by rural
immigrants along major roads leading to the city, around and inside aqueducts
and along railways. lacking basic infrastructures such as electricity and sewers,
and with improvised connections to the water system, the Roman press named
these workers' agglomerations “abyssinian Villages” to emphasize both their
precarious state and improbable aesthetic, as well as the subordinate status of
their residents.
Through the years, some of these nuclei were transformed into more solid
and coherent agglomerations. mud, carton, tin, and wood were substituted with
more solid materials such as brick, so that the original “abyssian Villages” be-
came veritable borghetti, slumlike agglomerations often equipped with roads,
water, and sewage systems. some of the borghetti became precursors to the wild
urbanism of “necessity” which accompanied the economic boom of the post-
war period. prior to the 1950s, self-made urbanism was represented by two ideal