Where Is Culture in Rome? - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 242

act to restrict and confine the possibility of being autonomous and not in com-
petition with others.
in all these years of history of social Centers in Rome the paths have been
many and the directions taken have inevitably been varied. . . . There are many
which have now become fashionable clubs even with multinational corporate
sponsors:-([ sic ] others that have lost self-management and self-production
along the road and cooperate with and are funded by the municipality, others
have become places of/for political parties, others that have become interna-
tionally famous, others that have stuck to the neighborhood, those that keep
their original spirit, etc. time will tell which of these paths is/will be the best
way to proceed. in short, as usual, use your head and get an idea of your own.8
(translation by author.)
social centers arose under the pressure of a social crisis sparked of by the
transition to a postmodern age during the 1970s. in the 1980s, the social centers
highlighted a practicable approach to the use of space thoroughly different from
that advocated by the hegemonic majority. a social center is a self-managed non-
profit organization which operates in a squatted place mostly on the periphery
of a city. They conduct and support a mix of social, political, and cultural ac-
tivities devised as alternatives to and in stark contrast with neoliberal practices.
over three hundred social centers have been active throughout italy over the
past twenty-five years. similar organizations have also developed, although on a
decidedly smaller scale, in other countries such as Germany, switzerland, spain,
holland, and more recently in the united Kingdom (Common place 2008). Rome
is the city with the greatest number of social centers in italy. more than sixty cen-
ters were operating in the capital between 1986 and 2012; we must thus recognize
that the city is rich in social movements. in a social environment characterized
by discriminatory hegemonic neoliberal policies and an increasing shortage of
public spaces, social centers have represented an important experience charac-
terized by a particular approach to a number of major issues: first, the restora-
tion of disused public sites and uninhabited private properties and their reappro-
priation as new public spaces, and the concomitant effort to contrast speculation
and mastermind collective actions designed to eradicate social marginalization
and exclusion in italian cities. bearing in mind that most social centers are lo-
cated in peripheral areas, this issue is closely associated with the unequal spa-
tial distribution of resources. second, social centers promote the growth of the
“public sphere” by securing public spaces to be used as forums for discussion
and experimenting with cooperative work modes not governed by legislation on
wage labor (Vecchi 1994). Third, the social centers try out organizational modes
alternative to the bureaucratic organization of many aspects of political and so-
cial life and highlight areas which may provide scope for direct democracy and
nonhierarchical structuring.