Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 40

organization of small unauthorized Roma encampments. This territorial mod-
el is centerless and stratified; it does not recognize any hierarchy of space (that
is, there is no inequality of value between center and periphery) or any of the
boundaries defined by gağé (non-Roma). what counts instead are issues of acces-
sibility/inaccessibility and the ways in which the Roma can escape control and
encirclement by making themselves invisible and continuously mobile. in this
field of strategic maneuvers and tactics, the spatial practices of immigrant groups
reveal—in dialogue with the history of transformation in the eternal City—the
new possibilities and tragic pathologies of contemporary Rome.
Notes
1. De Certeau (1980) also defines these as “arts” that constitute “walking rhetorics.”
2. The building of the esposizione universale di Roma (euR) district, which was intended
as the new center of Rome, positioned between the historic city and the sea, is a dramatic
exception to this model and demonstrates the change in the regime's approach and scale of
action following the conquest of ethiopia and the proclamation of the empire in 1936 (Gentile
2007). i would argue that it can be interpreted as the kernel of a future project of imperial cen-
trality whose area of reference was to be the entire mediterranean sea.
3. Capitolium was the monthly report, founded in 1925, of the activities of Rome's gover-
norate. see in particular the issues published between 1925 and 1930. i have thus far examined
about 1000 pages of statistical data and 3,300 pages of articles which constitute the foundations
of a larger research project.
4. These marginalities were not socially included, however, but simply surrounded spa-
tially. The old fascist borgate continue to be recognizable as places “apart” and their residents
socially stigmatized, although less so since the 1990s as immigration from abroad became a
consolidated phenomenon. in colloquial Roman speech, borgataro (resident of the borgate ) is
synonymous with being uncouth and ill-bred.
5. a part of these data is also presented in Cervelli (2009).
6. i have excluded filipino groups from the analysis because although they are one of the
most geographically concentrated collectivities in the city (over 90 percent live in the first
borough (municipio 1), this is strongly influenced by the fact that many of them are domestic
workers who live with their employers.
7. Residence data concerning the province are from 2007.
8. i use the term Roma here only as shorthand, since they speak different variants of the
Romani language and do not consider themselves to be a single entity.
9. Data are for 31 December 2007. The unpublished raw data were obtained from the sta-
tistics office of the Comune di Roma and reelaborated by the author.
10. Nine of the nineteen boroughs have extremely low levels of concentration (less than 2
percent of the bangladeshi population in each). This is also the case with Chinese groups in six
boroughs.
11. The ratio is exactly even among Chinese, whereas there is a larger proportion of young
men among the bangladeshis in both neighborhoods, which seems to reflect the current char-
acteristics of bangladeshi immigration patterns. one apparently anomalous phenomenon
should be noted, though: about 11 percent of bangladeshis officially reside in trastevere (zone
1b, first municipi ), a historical and very expensive neighborhood which attracts many tourists
and where gentrification occurred about three decades ago. it is now home to a large number