Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 6

nected” to other centers in a wider hierarchy of global cities making up today's
worldwide economic architecture. Rome is not a base for transnational corpora-
tions and financial industries, nor is it a major headquarter for accountants, law-
yers, and other professionals offering their skills to transnational corporations.
in fact, Rome is one of europe's few capitals without a stock exchange. so can we
place the city within any broader framework of understanding at all?
multiple modernities: Rome as alternatively modern
Rome has gone through its own peculiar modernization process since it became
capital in 1871. Rome is not “unmodern” or “late modern,” rather its modernity
has to be positioned against the city's history and the role the city came to play
with respect to the formation of italy as nation-state and, today, as a fast-devel-
oping global political/cultural economy. we argue that the globality of Rome can
best be approached within a perspective of alternative or multiple modernities.
from within this paradigm, modernity is considered an inherently ambivalent
and open-ended process that implodes and develops differently within differ-
ent cultural and geographical contexts (eisenstadt 2000; Thomassen 2012). The
development of the notion of multiple modernities was an important way for
social theorists to move beyond eurocentrism while still allowing for an analysis
of modernity, now in the plural. western modernity was/is but one particular
trajectory of historical development; modernization and westernization need to
be disentangled as analytical categories and historical processes. This pluraliz-
ing must be continued within that western context, as different cities, regions,
and states modernized along wildly different routes even within europe and its
single states. of huge relevance for positioning Rome, the multiple modernities
paradigm, as developed by eisenstadt in his elaboration of weber, also put much
more stress on modernity as a cultural force: modernization processes, even
within the economic and political spheres, are built upon values, worldviews,
and types of life-conduct that cannot simply be deduced from an economic
substructure.
while the theoretical framework tied to the idea of multiple modernities
is by now well recognized and figures prominently in social theory (Thomas-
sen 2010), it still has not informed urban theory to the extent one might have
expected (but see de frantz 2008). Yet there is hardly any area of research where
the notion of multiple modernities becomes more directly applicable, and the
city of Rome is but one case in point. Negotiations of urbanity in and across
various contexts constitute urban politics as plural and open-ended (de frantz
2008, 480).
multiple modernities further translate into an understanding of “multiple
globalizations,” to multiple ways of dealing with globality (see also smith 2001).
The global city centers of the west may not necessarily be seen as the only pro-
ducers of either modernity or globality. The decentering of western modernity