Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 45

poverty and homelessness
urban marginality can be defined as the inability of the market economy, or of
state policies, to provide adequate shelter and urban services to an increasing
proportion of city dwellers, including the majority of the regularly employed
salaried workers, as well as practically all people making their earnings in the
so-called “informal” sector of the economy (Castells 1983, 185).
The array of terms through which poverty can be discussed is reminiscent
of the high variety of words available to stigmatize homosexuality. similar to the
sphere of sexuality, poverty is an important issue in power-related discourses
and practices. poverty does not exist in itself; rather it represents a large range of
deprivation processes that include lack of housing and food as the most visible
indicators and other factors such as an individual's accentuated marginality in
social networks. in recent decades, the debate on poverty has shifted toward fo-
cusing on “social exclusion,” mainly in europe, on an “underclass” in the united
states, and on marginalidad (marginality) in latin america (fassin 1996). This
shift is justified by the need to rely on multidimensional and relational concep-
tualizations rather than limiting the analysis to a “simple” lack of resources.1
These concepts assume three different symbolic topologies of poverty: inside/
outside, high/low, center/periphery (fassin 1996). however, there is little consen-
sus about these concepts, and it has been argued that debates about exclusion and
underclass lack a theoretical basis (fassin 1996; martinelli 1999). furthermore,
the three concepts suggest a binary social vision that does not take into account
social transformations; instead, they contribute to stigmatizing victims of pov-
erty (fassin 1996). another relevant definition has been proposed by wacquant
(2008), who identifies “advanced marginality” as the novel regime of sociospatial
relegation and exclusionary closure that result from the uneven development of
the capitalist economies and the recoiling of welfare states. poverty cannot be
separated from the social processes that produce sociospatial segregation. Thus,
in addition to statistics concerning people who sleep in the streets, in parks, or
emergency shelters, it is equally important to examine data on the dynamics that
transform independent individuals into homeless and vice versa (tosi 2009). for
example, contemporary studies include divorced people earning 2,000 euro a
month but who are expected to devote 70 percent of their money to child support
and a mortgage. in Rome, there are an estimated 90,000 potential newly poor
individuals (Caritas di Roma 2011).
poverty is a constitutive dimension of homelessness (Rauty 1995); however,
homelessness can affect large sections of the population, not only the poor. Rome
city government statistics show that of 5,182 homeless assisted by municipal so-
cial services in 2002, 64.9 percent were foreigners and 79.2 percent were male.
in 2009, 17.0 percent of families claimed they had great difficulty making ends