Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 30

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Rome as a Global City

Mapping New Cultural and Political
Boundaries

pierluigi Cervelli
(translated by isabella Clough marinaro)

spatial practices and urban transformation
The analysis presented in this chapter is the result of a research project concern-
ing the use of space in Rome by men and women belonging to various immigrant
groups: Chinese, bangladeshi, Romanian, albanian, and Roma. Their “spatial
practices”1 appear to be based on an ability to innovatively and strategically in-
terpret the relationships between areas which developed out of the sociopolitical
model of urban space defined by fascism—a model which outlived the regime
and endured well into the postwar period (in my view until the 1980s). studying
the spatial practices of these immigrant groups allows us to make out the incipi-
ent transformations, the new political conflicts, and the emerging religious and
linguistic cultural stratifications that make contemporary Rome a global city,
profoundly different from the city it was a few decades ago. in order to verify
this hypothesis on a macro level, i compare the urban model which developed
through Rome's transformations between 1871 and 1940 with the spatial practices
of these groups, investigated through an examination of their sociodemographic
data.
i situate the appearance of this model during fascism, between 1925 and
1940, because this was the period in which the enormous transformations in the
city's monumental, urban planning, and demographic organization occurred
(insolera 1970; Racheli 1979; sanfilippo 1994). it was in this phase that the rela-
tionship between city and countryside was radically altered, entire medieval and
renaissance sections of the historic center were demolished, and the system of

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