Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 44

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housing and homelessness in
Contemporary Rome

pierpaolo mudu

t he history of contemporary Rome is one of urban development led predomi-
nantly by private interests which have caused an enormous burden of social con-
flict (insolera 1993; berdini 2008). in order to understand this development it is
necessary to be familiar with a range of recurrent terms such as borgate, borghet-
ti, palazzinari, abusivismo, and condono that describe important features in the
evolution of the city's housing market. since 1870, Rome's demographic growth
has gone through four main phases. The first period followed Rome's appoint-
ment as capital in 1870, when there were approximately 200,000 inhabitants. in
the second period, in the 1930s, during fascism, its inhabitants passed the one
million mark (Rossi 1959). The third period was between world war ii and the
end of the 1960s. The fourth period concerns the last forty years, in which there
has been a population decrease in the city of Rome and a growth in the rest of
the province, generating sprawl and the creation of an extended environmentally
unsustainable metropolitan area.
Rome as capital has always been a city of immigrants, formed initially by
a century of migration flows from other italian regions (mostly southern and
central) and then, in the last three decades, from abroad (mudu 2007). housing
thousands of new inhabitants has historically constituted a device of power that
has kept large strata of the population outside the “free market.” Rome is italy's
capital of evictions, sfratti (6,626 eviction orders issued in 2011), and the number
of people homeless or in precarious housing conditions is estimated on the order
of 5,000-15,000 individuals (mastrandrea 2004; Cortellesi et al. 2007). in this
chapter, i investigate under what conditions and with what effects the right to
housing is exercised, focusing particularly on poverty and homelessness, hous-
ing policies in the three main periods of urban growth, and the formation of the
periferia, as well as forms of resistance practiced against the structural housing
conditions and speculation-driven policies.

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