Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 215

nity evidences salient features connected to larger spatial practices that charac-
terize the reterritorialization of urban spaces in globalization. in particular, the
chapter discusses the creation, near Rome's centro storico, of “vertical villages”
that are an alternative to the ghettoization of many immigrants and specific to
the senegalese communities in diaspora. moreover, the chapter explores the
gendered dimension of housing discrimination practices by looking at the way
in which senegalese women creatively transformed the private, mono-familial
apartments of Residence Roma into hybrid spaces, a practice that responded
more closely to their cultural and gendered dimension and ultimately critiqued
the very concept of integration from within.
The premise of my approach rests upon michel de Certeau's important the-
ory of everyday consumption (of space, food, goods, and texts) as a form of alter-
native production. according to de Certeau, daily practices of consumption of
dominant economic systems do not necessarily imply passivity on the part of the
consumers. on the contrary, daily operations (such as walking, dwelling, cook-
ing food, watching tV, and reading) very often constitute forms of consumption
that appropriate and utilize the products of a dominant economic system in ways
that are foreign to that system but functional to other specific ends (de Certeau
1994, xii-xiii). The vertical villages are thus a form of alternative production of
space in the face of urban dispersal, segregation, and housing discrimination.
The existence of vertical villages counterbalances the ambiguous de facto/de
jure logic of discrimination that privileges italian nationals over non-european
union foreigners in housing and rental policies. housing constitutes one of the
major problems immigrants experience in italy and shortage of housing is a lin-
gering issue in the history of the country (see also mudu, chapter 4). although,
in 2005, 14.4 percent of houses sold on the real-estate market in italy were bought
by foreign residents, 36.5 percent of them lived in precarious housing conditions.
in 2006, shortage of housing figured as the number one problem for migrants in
italy, listed before the issue of finding a job and the nostalgia of home (Caritas/
migrantes 2006, 159).The difficulty immigrants experience in finding a home in
italy is an emblematic sign not only of the breaking of the social “pact of hospital-
ity” on the part of state institutions, but also of the breaking of the “absolute hos-
pitality” given to nameless migrants in a just society.1 two theoretical paradigms
contribute to my discussion: the concepts of linguistic and cultural hybridity,
and transnationalism. more specifically, i draw part of my argument from the
model provided by the type of urban wolof that has developed during the last de-
cades among transnational senegalese traders as a new linguistic hybrid (swigart
1992) that mixes wolof, french, and any of the other languages dominant in the
host country of the senegalese diaspora. The code switching between different
languages is a normative practice (swigart 1992) that does not disrupt the linguis-
tic and social integrity of the speaker. in the paradigm i assume as the one that