Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 33

a frontier city which reproduces within itself the borders that once only delimited
states. The data presented in the next section provide a mapping of these new
boundaries.5
Theoretical Debate and methodology:
Cultural boundaries and technologies of power
The specificity of my approach lies in its aim of returning to and updating the
analytical themes concerning urban space identified by michel foucault and
michel de Certeau, on the one hand distinguishing the strategies of power and
governmentality within urban space, and on the other hand mapping spatial
practices and their relationship with those strategies. The work intersects with
the study of urban planning (see Cervelli 2009 for a critique of the definition of
“periphery” presented in the latest urban master plan for Rome), with geography
(in terms of “rethinking peripherality,” Davis 2006), anthropology (piasere 1999),
and sociology (sassen 2008).
The methodology is semiotic, based mainly on the theories of lotman (1994)
and de Certeau (1980), in dialogue with foucault's research. The data were col-
lected through direct anthropological observation as well as the analysis of urban
configurations, demographic statistics, political discourses and historical sourc-
es. in lotman's (1985, 1994) theory of culture as “semiosphere,” a culture's identity
is built through two processes: the production of “self-definitions,” which involve
varyingly complex sets of models of identity (from the most basic binary ones to
more multiform webs of broader categories), and the demarcation of “semiotic
boundaries,” understood as all the points of contact between the cultural system
and what lies outside it (other cultures). These boundaries are not barriers but
filters, places in which elements of one cultural system are translated and pass
into another. The specificity of one cultural system is thus constructed through
the “invention” of differences with other cultures (or through radically simplify-
ing other cultures) while simultaneously inserting external elements within one's
own system. without this latter process, no culture could mutate and survive.
in this way, culture is conceived as a dynamic system which is not sealed but
rather is in constant osmosis with other cultures, incorporating elements which
are filtered through its own models of identity, thus achieving stability as well
as transformation. These processes of stabilization (the production of models of
identity) and transformation (translation) are carried out through all the “lan-
guages” the culture has at its disposal. according to lotman, though, the most
important communicative devices are language and space. Through these pro-
cesses, boundaries are constructed that are both external to the culture and in-
ternal (i.e., that reproduce the mechanism of relationships with the other within
itself). These boundaries are pictured as a hierarchy, at the center of which are the
areas of stability (or “semiotic centers”) that are more codified and thus simpler—
where contact with what is considered “other” is forbidden—and more dynamic