Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 39

cidence that these settlements are often located “under” or “inside” the city: in
abandoned underpasses, along riverbanks, next to isolated bicycle tracks, under
bridges, and along bypasses, in empty buildings or in the least accessible areas of
public parks. it should be stressed that this residential mobility is certainly not a
form of nomadism; rather, it makes it easier to return quickly to the places from
which they have been evicted.19 we can hypothesize that this use of space in real-
ity aims to avoid the forced nomadism that the current strategies for politically
controlling Roma in Rome produce, both through the destruction of unautho-
rized camps and through the Roma's relocation in so-called solidarity villages
made up of prefabricated containers (about 28 m2 each, housing between eight
and ten people) introduced in 2005 and whose regulations are all based on the
notion that the Roma's presence is transitory (some of them are converted former
tourist campsites). The regulations limit the Roma's right to live there to six years,
divided into three two-year periods at the end of each of which the authorities
evaluate whether to permit them to stay on (see Cervelli and pota 2011).20 it is
important to add that long-term residence in these “villages,” in addition to being
against the rules, is strongly discouraged by living conditions within them; they
are all located far from the city center and are overcrowded, lacking in spaces for
recreation, and precarious in terms of services and hygiene (for example, in one
of the camps the author tasted the drinking water; it was salty). how do the new
forms of control of urban territory that are thus being tested on Roma function?
This is a strange form of power which instead of expelling the subjects it is try-
ing to control, or immobilizing them as occurs in the radio-centric disciplinary
model, seems to continuously chase them, moving the boundary that excludes
them into every place in which they stop: a marginalizing power which controls
people by keeping them on the move rather than obstructing their circulation.
Changing faces, Changing places
This study of the spatial practices of different immigrant groups allows us to
identify three distinct ways in which they reinterpret the radio-centric disciplin-
ary model of urban space as it was defined during the fascist period. The first of
these, underlying the settlement patterns of Chinese and bangladeshi groups,
considers the urban area as a whole in which the value of its neighborhoods de-
creases as one moves away from the center (as in the fascist model) but which
offers some gaps into which the two collectivities have inserted themselves in a
very compact way. The second approach, used by Romanians and albanians, re-
produces some features of the patterns of italian migrants in the 1950s and 1960s,
treating Rome as a whole made up of a set of boundaries along whose margins
they position themselves, thereby pushing those boundaries substantially out-
ward. They thus identify the current area of influence of the metropolitan region
whose radio-centric model is no longer fixed but is now inserted in an expanding
belt of territory of varying widths. The third model is instead inferable from the