Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 214

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Residence Roma

Senegalese Immigrants in a Vertical Village

Cristina lombardi-Diop

t his chapter examines the dwelling practices that senegalese immigrants
devised—in one specific location in the city of Rome—as an attempt to respond
to the failure of the capital's integration policies. The site under consideration is
Residence Roma, a residential building in the neighborhood of forte bravetta,
located in the northern outskirts of Rome's XVi municipality, where over two
thousand immigrants lived between 2001 and 2006. among them were at least
eight hundred citizens of senegal (most of whom were wolof immigrants linked
to the sufi brotherhood of mouridiyya), who established themselves in rented
studio apartments. all of the senegalese residents were evacuated at the end of
2007, the site was demolished, and new and expensive villas are being built in
its place. Yet this story speaks to the city today. as a telling example of Rome's
transformation from national to global capital, it testifies to the existence of his-
torical events that are not lost, but only removed from the present. They can be
brought back to light by simply digging into them. The work of digging is exactly
what this essay does, as this work fits the history of the city of Rome perfectly.
when mussolini during the 1930s decided to remember the imperial past, all he
had to do was to “dig out” monumental places such as the Roman forum. Yet,
such an operation required the removal of other pasts, such as the medieval one.
in Rome, some pasts are more easily forgotten than others, and some are simply
too disturbing to deserve monuments to their memory. against the grain of such
forgetfulness, the work of this essay envisions Rome as a city that “has [ . . . ]
learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts” (de Certeau 1994, 91).
The events that occurred in Residence Roma exemplify how contemporary
Rome has been, and continues to be, highly affected by the major spatial trans-
formations brought about by global migrations. The focus of the chapter is on the
dwelling practices among senegalese immigrants, for this transnational commu-

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