Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
kilometers of the aurelian walls and gradually extending outward (insolera
1970). This disciplinary organization of space was aimed at the biopolitical con-
trol of the poor population, which potentially threatened the regime. indeed, the
process was carried out by continually mapping spatial practices and urban life
though the collection of highly detailed statistical data (concerning, for example,
demographics and population movements, dietary trends, places of death and
medical conditions of children), which focused on the relationship between pop-
ulation and space and were published in the magazine Capitolium. 3 he urban
model this governmentality initiated, based on a fundamental binary opposition
between interior and exterior, and which we could describe as “radio-centrically
disciplinary,” appears to have influenced the geographical location of the popula-
tion and the city's development for a long period thereafter. The position of the
unauthorized settlements, which were partly built by italian migrants who ar-
rived in the 1950s and 1960s and were partly developed by real-estate speculators
in the same period on state-owned land (see mudu, chapter 4), appears to have
been based on a recognition of the city boundary traced by the no-man's land,
which in fascist times separated the city from the borgate, and beyond which
these new agglomerations were set up.
The location of the new and squalid peripheries, which were developed in the
1980s, represent a continuation of that model. These are high-density neighbor-
hoods of public housing built at a great distance from the city center, surrounded
by urban voids, lacking in public spaces, and with few transport connections. it
is important, however, to note one change which did occur in the interim period:
The boundary of the city shifted from being fixed and uncrossable to a “mobile
border” (which was also functional to real-estate speculation), forming a belt into
which the city progressively expanded, incorporating the forms of marginality
which were once on the outside.4 The spatial practices of the immigrant groups
discussed in this chapter seem to be dismantling this spatial radio-centric disci-
plinary model, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by its deterioration
and thus accentuating its decay. at the same time, they make the contemporary
confines of global Rome visible. These are boundaries that are political, linked
to strategies for controlling the population as in the case of Romani men and
women; socioresidential, connected to the large size of the current metropoli-
tan area underlined by the location of Romanian, albanian, and, to a lesser ex-
tent, polish, groups; and cultural, related to the appearance of specifically global
neighborhoods which cannot be reduced to a single nationality and within which
local forms of cultural cohabitation emerge that are typical of international bor-
ders but which do not simply reflect existing frontiers between states. This is the
case in urban areas where, for the first time, groups who had no relations prior
to their immigration (such as Chinese and bangladeshi communities) live side
by side. This radically new situation is forming a new set of internal boundaries
which are both local and transnational and which make Rome a truly global city,
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