Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 3

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Diversely Global Rome

bjørn Thomassen and piero Vereni

urban Global Theory and the “Roman Question”
in Rome today, native-born italians rub shoulders in daily life with immigrants
from wildly different origins: Romanians and eastern europeans who work in
construction; Chinese men (and some women) running garment shops at the
market of piazza Vittorio; bangladeshis working in restaurants and phone cen-
ters. in a new twist on the history of european colonialism, nuns from the mis-
sionaries of Charity, the order founded in india by mother teresa, now come to
the heart of Catholic Christendom, where they pray in english for the salvation
of those living in the Roman peripheries.
an ethnographic approach to Rome forces us to develop a new understand-
ing of globalization and the global city. Global city theory has relied too much
on selected cities, such as london, los angeles, or New York, which have come
to be seen as prototypical examples of the global. in the study of third-world cit-
ies, urban scholars have then tried to show how cities in the global “periphery”
it in—or not—with the prevailing models. it is time that we start to go deeper.
The emergence of theories linking the “new city” to an emerging economic
global framework goes back to the early 1980s. The nation-state was increasingly
challenged as the monopolist of economic and political power. The constructivist
approach to the nation held by theorists such as ernest Gellner (1983) and bene-
dict anderson (1983) had produced among social scientists a widespread aware-
ness of the recent dominion of the nation-state and made it possible to envision
a future in which the state might not be central to political economy and cul-
tural organization. The debates led to a serious, and much-needed, questioning of
“methodological nationalism” (Chernilo 2006), that is, the tendency to posit the
nation-state as the given unit of analysis. The emerging megalopolises around the
world came to represent a new analytical tool and seemed to provide a sense of
orientation for capturing the complexity of global flows. in John friedmann and

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