Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 34

areas, which are more permeable to hybridization, are defined as peripheries and
made up of all the “borders” where various cultures come into contact.
in this chapter, i explore how Rome was used to define italian identity and
how, through the management of urban space, an image of cultural center and
margin was created in the process. i also examine how that relationship changed
with time. i am not only concerned with the “ideological” use of space but also
how it functions as a “technology of power” (foucault 2004), an issue that lot-
man does not address. in order to analyze the possible forms of resistance (or
simply avoidance), i consider the relationship between political use of urban
space and spatial practices in terms of the distinction made by de Certeau be-
tween strategies and tactics. for de Certeau, strategies are systems for organizing
time and spatial relationships in order to make a place immobile and unchange-
able, in which the subjects that are incorporated have no choice but to occupy
the positions that the dominant (technocratic or political) power establishes for
them. he tactics are instead the myriad ways in which those who are “domi-
nated” evade those strategies without openly overcoming them but by exploiting
the aporias they present. The way spatial practices function as tactics essentially
consists of “subjectifying” places, thereby transforming them from a collection
of immobile elements to “practiced” spaces. The relationships between places
are redefined by the people who cross them with varying speeds and in various
directions. i argue from this point of view that the spatial practices of immi-
grant groups restructure the relationship between urban areas in a way that is
equivalent to de Certeau's tactics, exploiting the contradictions and underlining
the enervations of the model of disciplinary political space and, in the case of
the Roma, the emergence of new practices of political control of urban space. it
should be emphasized that at times de Certeau's approach appears to consider the
relationship between dominators and the dominated in a rather static way. i ar-
gue that it is instead necessary to examine how those who on one level of analysis
appear to be homogeneously dominated can instead be divided by inequalities of
power and forms of exploitation. equally, i think that considering those groups'
spatial practices only as forms of resistance would be to idealize them. what i
consider instead most interesting is the way in which they can help us under-
stand how—with varying means and motivations—the model of political space
is being surpassed and how the city is being transformed.
spatial practices among Rome's immigrant Communities
my argument takes its inspiration from a number of direct observations: starting
from the visibility of various immigrant groups in certain areas of Rome, i began
to explore their residential practices across the whole city. i examined the official
data concerning residence status as of 31 December 2006, originally collected by
the national statistical agency (istat) and reworked by the Caritas observa-