Marginal Centers - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 208

a few spots along the main road connecting idroscalo to the neighborhood of
ostia. as many residents note, the “dumping” that happens at idroscalo is only
in part due to the practices of locals. most of the garbage that lies abandoned
around the settlement (from old sofas to refrigerators) is brought there by out-
siders. The sensation of living in an abandoned place reinforces psychological
mechanisms such as cynicism, resignation, and mistrust that constitute the basis
of the social psychology of the community. mistrust is mostly directed at city
hall, as the most common comments during our interviews underlined: “we feel
abandoned”; “we have asked many times and received nothing”; “as far as they're
concerned, we do not exist”; “everything you see here we made ourselves”; “when
they come here they only do so to show off”; “nobody protects us.”
The feeling of being isolated and abandoned is further reinforced by events
concerning the construction and, more recently, the expansion, of the marina.
for about forty years, the community of idroscalo was the only built zone in an
otherwise rural area. in early 2000, a consortium of local entrepreneurs, backed
by local administrators, built a marina for three hundred boats on previously
unspoiled land, radically and permanently altering the area's ecosystem. to keep
idroscalo residents quiet and win their tacit approval of the project, the city gov-
ernment promised that the new port would employ locals. in reality, though,
no idroscalo residents have been given work there. indeed, if anything, the pe-
rimeter wall and the gates of the marina have further isolated the community
from the city. in 2008, the authorities granted the same consortium permission
to expand the marina, de facto severing idroscalo from what little access to the
sea they had left. moreover, municipal architects have now put forward plans
to bulldoze the community and build a “nature” park in its stead. The fact that
there is a living community on the site appears irrelevant to these planners whose
projects do not even indicate the presence of a settlement. in a purely imperial
fashion, the city of Rome considers idroscalo empty and devoid of life. its resi-
dents, like their twentieth-century predecessors in other parts of Rome, are now
plunged into urban planning processes much larger than themselves and, as in
the past, the city government continues to show its violent side when dealing with
poor citizens.
uprooting and Relocation
it is worth briefly returning to the fascist program of urban renewal mentioned
earlier in this chapter. The forced relocation of thousands of residents from the
centro storico to isolated suburbs with no job opportunities was a traumatic ex-
perience not least because it uprooted them from their social environment, jobs,
and friends, forcing them to reinvent their lives from scratch amid strangers. The
event left a strong mark on the collective memory of thousands of elderly Romans
and their children.2 from the 1970s onward, when the left-wing city government