Residence Roma - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 219

ously decentered native communities, today's immigrants are often the target of
evacuation and demolition practices that decentralize and disperse immigrant
communities away from the city's historic and central districts. These practices
determine clear boundaries of settlement that define categories of exclusion from
privileged areas of Rome's walled center.
Vertical urban Villages
senegalese transnational migrants in france, italy, and the united states tend to
privilege physical proximity by settling in large numbers in single units or build-
ings. These dwelling places in the urban context have been defined as vertical
villages (N'Diaye and N'Diaye 2006). These are
an outward expressive form of a complex network of long-standing practices,
structured relationships, and values growing out of the experience of interde-
pendence in long-distance trade, craft apprenticeship, and teamwork in farm-
ing that bridged rural and urban—a mechanism of survival and community
building rooted in and relating to these overlapping and intertwined occupa-
tional traditions (N'Diaye and N'Diaye 2006, 97-98).
The vertical villages can be conceived as counterpart of the compound or
family residence in africa where extended family members live (Carter 1997),
sharing close-knit ties with neighbors and friends. in the early 1980s, in the bor-
go Dora area of turin, ibrahim wade, a former peasant turned trader in italy,
established the first house inhabited exclusively by senegalese. by the early 1990s,
more than 120 people lived there by sharing six rooms (Carter 1997). in Rome,
decayed old buildings near the termini station, which are no longer attractive for
the local population, usually provide temporary shelter for those newly arrived
in italy or lacking a stable job and a permit to stay. as they gradually insert them-
selves in the labor market, most immigrants improve their housing conditions
by seeking more stable types of housing, usually rented private houses occupied
by one person or the whole family (Natale 2006). many senegalese immigrants
settled in the same residential complex, thus forming an extremely large com-
munity. in the late early 2000s, Residence Roma soon became one of the largest
sites of settlement for senegalese in italy. it was composed of five buildings, each
of which was seven stories high, and divided into studio apartments ( monolocali )
averaging 30-40 m2 in size.4 The entrance to each building opened onto a large
courtyard, the only communal space of the complex, where residents gathered—
usually divided by ethnic community—for socializing and trading goods.
on each floor, at least forty units were distributed along a labyrinth of cor-
ridors and halls. The buildings were named in alphabetical order, with each unit
labeled in progressive numerical order. in 2005, over two thousand people, in-
cluding one hundred italian families lived there in the rented monolocali. he