Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 14

count comparable numbers of international bureaucrats, and this takes Rome
even further away from the stereotype of the global cities attracting foreigners
primarily as an essential component of their post-fordist economic system based
on transnational corporations and finance capitalism.
Going further back in time, people have come to Rome from all over the
world since antiquity (sanfilippo 2011). here the city's role as the heart of Catho-
lic Christendom has guaranteed a steady presence of foreigners even when, after
the seventeenth century, it was entirely marginal in international politics. Rome
attracted the attention of the world even when it was little more than a provincial
town. This international dimension has never been characterized to a decisive ex-
tent by the size or nature of its production system. There have always been more
priests and nuns than executives in Rome, but this did not prevent Rome from
becoming a city with a truly global reach.
Global-local Rome
Rome is a globalized city. its shape, its urban policies, and its everyday life are
constantly affected by flows and streams of people and images making up its
own peculiar global-local, or glocal, cityscape. Global Rome today exists at the
margins of an international division of labor and the new finance economy. at
the same time, the city keeps developing with its many layers of political admin-
istration. it also keeps developing as a part of lesser networks caused by demo-
graphic trends (which explain the presence of caretakers for the growing number
of elderly people), historical trends (that made the city “the refuge of all nations”
since the middle ages), and cultural trends such as its image as a center of reli-
gious heritage. such images perhaps make Rome more similar to other religious
centers which are undergoing their own peculiar form of globalization, such as
santiago de Compostela, Jerusalem, or mecca. so we need a model for represent-
ing globalization within the city which takes into account culture and history in
all its facets, from the outskirts of the still sprawling city to its historical center,
and on the buses that connect its nodes, traffic permitting.
Rome is not a model city, nor can it be modeled after other cities. Rome
today is undergoing urban transformations whose structure cannot be easily
deciphered or apprehended through prevailing theoretical frames. Changes are
brought about by interacting forces from below and above and by the cultural
and political, as well as strictly economic dimensions, of globalization. at the
theoretical level, such an opening is represented by a paradigm of multiple and
alternative modernities and globalizations. The rest pertains to the study of con-
crete settings and concrete human beings; the rest pertains to ethnography.