Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
from the political agenda. Class and ethnic hierarchies as well as social networks
produce diverse housing outcomes for migrants. for example, Chinese immi-
grants never live in shacks, but they are found in overcrowded housing, whereas
immigrants from Romania who work in the construction sector are more likely
to be homeless or living in a shack.
intense housing segregation is often linked to a lack of legal residence docu-
ments. approximately eight thousand to fifteen thousand immigrants survive
in improper housing or are homeless (mudu 2006a). tracking and identifying
the most extreme forms of poverty suffered by these groups provides a useful
starting point for understanding how segregation processes have spatially and
socially expanded, while other patterns have become cyclical. unlike the 1950s,
marginal housing conditions are now scattered across the whole metropolitan
area and Rome has record numbers of homeless (mastrandrea 2004).
The housing market in Contemporary Rome
in the last twenty years, neoliberal policies in Rome have been implemented in
ways similar to many other cities: (1) the administration of the city is increas-
ingly and openly class-oriented, and upper classes dominate decisions and flows
of public money; (2) distribution and circulation of resources (housing is the best
example) are not priorities for policies that are aimed at private profit and land
valorization; (3) security policies are instrumentally used not to contrast illegal
activities but to enforce social control. There are a number of additional features
that are instead different from most other cities: the presence of a religious ap-
paratus that is largely allied to neoliberal forces and, as we will examine later, the
existence of widespread disjointed forms of resistance that challenge the social
order.
The dominance of neoliberal policies has relied on conflicts of interest and
corruption as important factors in giving away public housing stock, the heritage
of decades of collective investments. in fact, some politicians and their support-
ers have obtained apartments in the center of the city for the price of a car (lillo
2007). The last twenty years of local government have seen massive withdrawal
of the public sector from the housing market. in 1981, popular housing for rent
directly managed by the city authorities and the iaCp represented around 17
percent of total housing (abate and picciotto 1983). after a decade, the stock of
housing owned by the iaCp and other public institutions was below 10 percent
(Cresme 1995). in the 1990s, public intervention for housing was drastically re-
duced, so that the percentage of homes owned by the iaCp and other public
institutions was about 8.2 percent in 2001. The city of Rome, led by center-left
coalitions from 1993 to 2008, sold apartments and shops in the city center to
buy housing in the suburbs and in other municipalities of the province of Rome,
for example, in lunghezzina, Cinquina, Cerveteri, anzio, and pomezia (mudu
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