Where Is Culture in Rome? - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 232

social center originating from a squat is termed Centro sociale occupato auto-
gestito, Csoa (self-managed squatted social Center), while a social center that
has some kind of legal recognition uses the acronym Csa (self-managed social
Center). Recently, new denominations have emerged such as laboratorio occu-
pato autogestito (self-managed squatted laboratory), spazio occupato liberato
(squatted liberated space), or spazio pubblico autogestito (self-managed public
space). squatting is an essential event in the life of a social center, not only be-
cause this action entails breaking the law, but also because it is a way of appropri-
ating what has been withheld and denied by urban policies (solaro 1992; adinolfi
et al. 1994; maggio 1998). most social centers have taken as their symbol a “flash
of lightning piercing a circle” (tiddi 1997).
self-management is at the core of any social center activity (mudu 2012).
self-managed social, political, and cultural activities are carried out based on
a complex decision-making process and usually decisions are reached at open
meetings, held on a weekly basis.
activities are funded with money collected during events, such as concerts
or movie projections, and by selling food and drinks. The members of social cen-
ters are mostly unpaid volunteer workers. as activities are self-managed, the gen-
eral rule is that there cannot be any regular paid jobs (lombardi and mazzonis
1998), although, in the last fifteen years, various social centers have decided to
pay people who can keep their activities going within a logic of social enterprise
(membretti 2007). it must be recognized that social centers make an efficient use
of the funds they collect, especially considering the difficulty of restoring large
buildings or organizing big events unless one has significant funds and the work
is done for profit.
social centers tend to network based on their political affiliations, mainly
Communist or anarchist (mudu 2012). The groups linked to the Communist ex-
perience either adopt collective, anticapitalist, or antifascist approaches linked
to autonomist, situationist, poststructuralist and neo-marxist theories (e.g.,
Debord, foucault, and Negri) or, in a few cases, leninist strategies. Conversely,
anarchist groups prioritize the creation of small decentralized communities over
the strategies traditionally advocated by theorists such as bakunin or Kropotkin
or the creation of “temporary autonomous Zones” (bey 1993).
who participates in social Center activities?
in some social centers, people have their homes within the complex and keep it
open seven days a week, while in other cases, they are run by one or more collec-
tives that keep the space open three or four days a week. investigations carried
out in the 1990s provide a clear picture of the fact that although visitors differ in
terms of age, gender, and education, they reflect the structure of the labor market,
especially as far as the younger generations are concerned (Consorzio aaster et
al. 1996, senzamedia 1996). for many years, most of the members of social cen-