Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 218

leather purses, cheaply produced in China and in Naples and sold to italian cli-
ents. in the 2000s, there are bootlegged CDs and videos (lombardi-Diop 2005).
trade activities facilitate the organization of mobility from and to the country of
origin, in a constant flux of people, goods, and information. travel and technol-
ogy (tV, telephone, and internet) contribute to fast and constant contacts with
home (mboup 2000). The diasporic movement from africa to europe is no lon-
ger simply from place of origin to host country, but it is a movement into and out
of different types of spaces.
Rome and the New immigration
Residence Roma is a space at the threshold of the historic center of Rome. its
inhabitants, when asked, say that they live “ in centro. ” in fact, it is a few miles
away from centrally located sites such as Gianicolo, saint peter's, and trastevere,
where many of the mourid traders set up makeshift shops to sell their goods.
but Residence Roma also exists at the threshold of the late modernity of Rome.
its history is a layered one linked to the transformation of Rome from a city
of internal migrations to a city that now hosts over 440,000 foreign residents
(almost 10 percent of its total population) from such diverse countries as, Ro-
mania, albania, poland, the philippines, sri lanka, China, bangladesh, egypt,
and peru (Caritas/migrantes 2011, 474).3 when Rome became the capital of the
newly founded italian state, the city was still to be created in terms of modern
housing and infrastructures. its basic industry soon became the construction
industry, which created a “building proletariat” (Casacchia, Calvosa, and son-
nino 2006), subject to much exploitation. while it was used to build the official
city, the internal proletariat was housed in shacks and little houses built along
the main consular roads. Gradually, Rome's lower classes were expelled from the
city center and moved to the borgate in the outskirts, where the new labor immi-
grants from regions close to lazio also settled (Casacchia, Calvosa, and sonnino
2006). The process of remixing and decentering Rome's working-class and low-
income populations, which first targeted internal immigrants, is now affecting
non-european union foreigners. from the early 1990s onward, they established
themselves in historic working-class areas, where internal immigrants moved
from the 1920s onward, such as pigneto-torpignattara, Centocelle, alessandrino,
primavalle, and magliana (mudu 2006; see also mudu, chapter 4). The south-
ern axis of settlement along the Casilina road was marked by the occupation of
the pantanella complex, an ex-factory brutally evacuated by the police in 1990.
its inhabitants were arrested and the building set on fire. similar to what will
happen to Residence Roma, the pantanella complex was entirely restructured
and put on the real-estate market for high profit. These two cases show that con-
temporary urban immigrant settlements are subject to patterns of displacement
that seem constitutive of Rome's formation process as a global capital; like previ-