Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 37

graduates). The area included pigneto, which today is its most gentrified neigh-
borhood (and the nearest to the city center) but which originated as a partly il-
legally built borgata, separated from nearby urban areas by uncultivated land.
The settlement patterns of Romanian and albanian groups point to a dif-
ferent but equally distinctive dynamic:13 They tend to be located near the city's
administrative boundaries and especially beyond them, in various municipali-
ties within Rome's province (particularly fontenuova and ladispoli, but also
tivoli, Guidonia, fiumicino, pomezia, monterondo, mentana). Their concentra-
tion in the province of Rome, rather than the city, becomes clearer still when
we compare it not only to the bangladeshi and Chinese groups, but also to the
population more generally: 68.47 percent of the inhabitants of Rome's province
live within the capital's confines, with only 31.53 percent dispersed outside the
city. Romanian and albanian citizens are highly concentrated in the province,
with 49.43 percent and 57.83 percent, respectively, living in a municipality outside
Rome, whereas only 4.34 percent of banglandeshis and 9.58 percent of Chinese
reside there. if we compare these data with their presence in the towns where
they are most numerous, we note that this “dispersal” is actually a marginalized
concentration. They are distributed along the boundaries of the capital's metro-
politan area, which is much larger than the administrative limits of the Comune
di Roma. This settlement pattern is connected to the idea of centralized space
which has now, however, extended to a belt of land that is no longer circular but
has taken on a regional dimension and which is expanding progressively, absorb-
ing other towns as if they were new neighborhoods and adding them onto the
existing city.14 it is important to underline, though, that the scale of this research,
which covers the entire urban area, makes it impossible to explore the diversity of
personal motivations underlying migrants' choices of where to live, and therefore
only considers the relationship between a group's geographic concentration and
the city's structure.
finally, the spatial practices of Roma who live in unauthorized settlements
made up of tents and shacks appears to have a political dimension. Their use of
space is the means through which they resist the forced nomadism caused by
the bulldozing of their encampments and whose ultimate aim is to expel them
from the city altogether. an analysis of their settlement patterns is crucial to
this study because it entirely belies the spatial relations that underpin the radio-
centric model, but perhaps it enables us to make out the forms of urban territorial
control that are currently underway. before presenting the data, i reiterate that,
as with the other groups studied here, unfortunately we cannot delve here into
the individual choices and patterns of settlement and mobility of different fami-
lies involved. The Roma's migratory patterns alter significantly and often very
quickly; they are also often circular and thus potentially reversible. moreover,
the type of accommodation can frequently change—moving from a house to an