Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 49

abusivismo refers to the unusual use of a resource (land), its overexploitation,
and a practice benefitting private individuals to the detriment of the whole city
(Clementi and perego 1983). in practice, abusivismo generates entire portions of
the periferia, when production, exchange, and consumption of houses are not
guaranteed by public institutions. in the 1960s, abusivismo became the ordinary
means of house construction, responding—in an illegal way—to the need for
accommodation of lower social strata excluded from the market. Retrospective
building amnesties ( condoni edilizi ) then ensured the transition of a building's
status from illegal to legal. Three such amnesties have been introduced in recent
decades: in 1985, 1994, and 2003. speculation increased the need for housing and
generated a completely distorted market where people moved from rent to pur-
chase, and a real “reserve army” of rentable dwellings was kept out of the market.
in 1951, 20 percent of Rome's population lived in an apartment they owned; in
2001, the percentage was 65 percent.
in 1951, there were approximately ten thousand vacant dwellings, accounting
for 3 percent of all households. after 20 years, their number tripled, and by 1981,
vacant dwellings represented 11 percent of the available stock (corresponding to
113,000 apartments). This percentage has since remained stable.
he Periferia Clandestina of immigrants in Rome
in 1953, seventy areas close to Rome's consular roads were slums that hosted im-
migrants from the center and south of italy. according to the 1951 census, more
than 100,000 people (8.7 percent of the whole population) in Rome were living
in “improper housing,” such as shacks, caves, basements, warehouses, and gar-
rets. This number decreased in the following years, and in 1961, approximately
seventy thousand were considered to be living in improper housing; by 1971, this
number had fallen to 20,000. in 1981, the census category of “improper housing”
was replaced by “other types of accommodation,” and the official statistics thus
produced underestimated figures of the most critical housing situations (545 in
1981; 184 in 1991; 1,471 in 2001). processes of segregation, similar to urbanization
patterns in latin america, asia, or africa, are emerging in contemporary Rome
(mudu 2006a, 2006b). The problem of improper housing has not disappeared,
as the ghettoization, expulsion, and deportation that the Roma population has
suffered demonstrates (Clough marinaro 2003; see also chapters 3 and 7). hous-
ing settlements defined as improper can be divided into five subcategories: (1)
improper accommodation within a house; (2) shantytowns; (3) night shelters; (4)
squatting; and (5) homelessness. in addition to these categories, there are the two
extreme spaces: prisons and Centers for identification and expulsion of illegal
immigrants. fifty years on, albeit with many differences and varying propor-
tions, shantytowns are still being reproduced to house some immigrants. how-
ever, unlike in the 1950s, the question of housing for immigrants is entirely absent