Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 38

unauthorized camp, a prefabricated container to a shack—without this being a
linear process that can be conceptualized as a trend toward greater or lesser sta-
bility. Chapters 7 and 8 explore these processes in greater depth.
according to the available data—which is very fragmented and constantly
changing due to the Roma's frequent evictions and relocations—at the end of au-
gust 2008, there were 133 unauthorized shanties, inhabited by 4,179 people (some
of whom were not Roma), and about 50 percent of which were children.15 The
camps are spread throughout almost the whole city, in eighteen of its nineteen
boroughs, with the exception of the third municipi The encampments usually
lack running water, electricity, and plumbing, and their contact with welfare ser-
vices is scarce or nonexistent. They are very small, often home to between five and
thirty inhabitants belonging to one or two families. only 8 of the 133 camps were
home to one hundred people and only 1 contained more than three hundred.
Thus, 2,818 people were living in 125 camps. This has not always been the case in
Rome, though; the number of unauthorized encampments tripled from less than
70 to approximately 220 between 2006 and 2011 as the policy of forced evictions
and camp demolitions intensified (see Clough marinaro 2009),16 producing ever
smaller and more hidden microshanties generally inhabited by a few families,
most of which are eastern european and of recent migration to italy (motta 2011).
This rise in the number of camps did not happen because of a growth in the pop-
ulation but rather because the size of the encampments shrank radically. in 1995,
a census found that there were 5,467 Roma distributed in 51 unauthorized camps
(motta and Geraci 2007). in 2002, the municipal authorities provided minimal
services to some of the settlements, such as chemical toilets, electricity, and a
few public drinking fountains. There were thirty-two such official camps, located
in sixteen of the boroughs, in addition to just under sixty unauthorized ones
where about six thousand Romanian Roma lived (motta et al. 2006).17 by august
2008, twenty-six of the original fifty-one camps were still inhabited and had been
transformed into legal camps, but the roughly sixty unauthorized camps of 2006
had doubled in number, even though the population counted in the studies di-
minished from 6,000 to 4,179 (probably in part due to the option of “voluntary
repatriation”—for which they received a small amount of money—following the
forced evictions, although many of them then returned).
The fact that the number of unauthorized camps more than doubled without
there having been a growth in the population is extremely important.18 These
camps seem to be structured like “dust particles,” as one of italy's most eminent
scholars in the field, leonardo piasere (1999), eloquently defined this phenom-
enon when discussing his ethnographic experience and his view that Roma make
themselves invisible at times when repression against them is at its most intense,
to then reappear when the situation calms down again. The rise in unauthorized
microcamps is thus tied to a tactic for creating invisibility, which is only possible
with small agglomerations that can be hidden and moved quickly. it is no coin-