Is twenty-first-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe's core or periphery? This volume examines the "real city" beyond Rome's historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements.
The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies—the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.
Is twenty-first-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe's core or periphery? This volume examines the "real city" beyond Rome's historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements.
The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies—the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.
Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City
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Overview
Is twenty-first-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe's core or periphery? This volume examines the "real city" beyond Rome's historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements.
The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies—the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253013019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 311 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Isabella Clough Marinaro is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at John Cabot University, Rome.
Bjørn Thomassen is Associate Professor in the Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Read an Excerpt
Global Rome
Changing Faces of the Eternal City
By Isabella Clough Marinaro, Bjørn Thomassen
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01301-9
CHAPTER 1
Diversely Global Rome
Bjørn Thomassen and Piero Vereni
Urban Global Theory and the "Roman Question"
In Rome today, native-born Italians rub shoulders in daily life with immigrants from wildly different origins: Romanians and eastern Europeans who work in construction; Chinese men (and some women) running garment shops at the market of Piazza Vittorio; Bangladeshis working in restaurants and phone centers. In a new twist on the history of European colonialism, nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded in India by Mother Teresa, now come to the heart of Catholic Christendom, where they pray in English for the salvation of those living in the Roman peripheries.
An ethnographic approach to Rome forces us to develop a new understanding of globalization and the global city. Global city theory has relied too much on selected cities, such as London, Los Angeles, or New York, which have come to be seen as prototypical examples of the global. In the study of third-world cities, urban scholars have then tried to show how cities in the global "periphery" fit in—or not—with the prevailing models. It is time that we start to go deeper.
The emergence of theories linking the "new city" to an emerging economic global framework goes back to the early 1980s. The nation-state was increasingly challenged as the monopolist of economic and political power. The constructivist approach to the nation held by theorists such as Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1983) had produced among social scientists a widespread awareness of the recent dominion of the nation-state and made it possible to envision a future in which the state might not be central to political economy and cultural organization. The debates led to a serious, and much-needed, questioning of "methodological nationalism" (Chernilo 2006), that is, the tendency to posit the nation-state as the given unit of analysis. The emerging megalopolises around the world came to represent a new analytical tool and seemed to provide a sense of orientation for capturing the complexity of global flows. In John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff's "world cities" (1992), the theoretical frame of Wallerstein's worldsystem theory was applied to urban post-Fordist society. New forms of capitalism, held up by a new international division of labor and the fast-developing financing of the global economy, were seen as shaping the very social, physical, and political contours of the city, and the city itself was the motor of this emerging system.
In the 1980s, urban studies returned to the forefront of the academic and political agenda, attempting to reposition the city as a main actor, to be studied in its own right. However, the excessive reliance on economic and functionalist frameworks easily ended up obliterating the city even as it was bespoken. This was perhaps most clearly the case in the work of Manuel Castells, considered one of the most important (neo-Marxist) theorists of globalization. Despite Castell's focus on network societies, his (early) works were representative of sociological traditions that, inspired by Durkheim and various strands of Marxism, consistently denied any specificity to the urban question, reducing the city to a passive scenery of struggles around capitalism (Castells 1977). Cities were considered as inert players in the game, passive subjects of external forces that they could resist as little as the similarly battered nation-states. This is arguably not the case with what we today recognize as "global city theory." Especially through Saskia Sassen's conceptualization (1991), during the 1990s, we became acquainted with the global city: novel spaces where new forms of economy integrate with streams of immigration in a global network of hierarchical nodes and layers.
There are different versions of this global city theory, but they do share a set of common features. The global city is considered a new type of city because:
1. It transcends the national city system, going beyond the state that geographically encompasses it.
2. It articulates its economy, demography, and society to a global form of capitalism. That is, it is an economy-driven city.
3. It is connected to other global cities in a network of nodes. And the nodes have their own hierarchy.
Global city theory was criticized during the 1990s, mostly in order to overcome its evident Western-based perspective. The original models drawn upon were New York, Los Angeles, and London, but the attempt to include non-Western cities made the theory itself somehow puzzling: What is the point of a theory that conflates New York and Cairo, Tokyo and Mumbai under the same label, world cities? And why would one rather than the other city be considered paradigmatic? Because it is more powerful? And if so, how should this be measured?
From the onset of the global city, debate analysts have tried to identify specific units and have systematically focused on economic and financial features. In one of the first references to global cities, Robert B. Cohen (1981) isolated a multinational sale index, measuring the relative strength of a city as a center of international business, and a multinational banking index, which measures the internationality of banking by comparing the share of foreign deposits to the share of domestic deposits held by each bank in each city. This approach gave way to more research on the role of transnational corporations as key indicators of a possible hierarchy of global cities (Friedmann and Wolff 1982). The subsequent attention on finance capitalism in the wake of Sassen's research brought about a new interest for the global location strategies of transnational firms (Taylor 2003). According to this approach, cities can be ranked on the number of offices owned by transnational firms, thus producing a hierarchical network. Measuring London's global reach, for instance, this method ranks Milan as an "important link" to London and Rome only as a "minor link" (Beaverstock et al. 2000). The fact that Milan seems more globalized than Rome does is on the one hand a truism (given the industrial history of Milan compared to Rome) and on the other a disappointing outcome of the analysis, since we are left with the annoying feeling that the whole analytical framework does nothing but confirm common sense, without a proper description of how globalization has affected minor links, which may be both theoretically and ethnographically more relevant in explaining globalization than prime, major, or important links.
Writers such as Friedmann, Sassen, Castells, and Taylor are right that some cities established themselves as dominant players within the global market economy, as power centers controlling the transnational service economy: what Sassen calls "nodes" of networks, capital flows, and human movement. But it is quite another step to posit these cities as "models."
This "hierarchical epistemology" dominating urban theory is in fact nothing new. All the merits of the Chicago school notwithstanding, members of the school such as Wirth, Park, or Burgess took certain characteristics of American city development as a blueprint for the city in general, generating universal models on the basis of a very limited number of cases. On the other hand, within the city proper, and falling into another kind of extreme, the Chicago school put an exaggerated, almost exclusive emphasis on certain marginal figures, or marginal forms of existence (crime, deviance), thus failing perhaps to address what really generates each city: its own "soul" and identities of belonging. There is something inherently deceptive about dominant trends in urban theory: They simply fail to capture the essence of lived, urban experience.
At the more comparative-theoretical level, contemporary global city theory equally fails to accommodate anything that falls in between the dichotomy between "northern postindustrial hypercities" and "southern ever-growing megacities." Rome is just such an in-between city: Western, even emblematically so, and therefore not approachable within the frame of the emerging southern capital. Yet Rome does not comply with almost any of the features of the northern global city. Rome is clearly peripheral to the streams of capital, finance, and investment that made a city like London truly global. Rome does not seem directly "connected" to other centers in a wider hierarchy of global cities making up today's worldwide economic architecture. Rome is not a base for transnational corporations and financial industries, nor is it a major headquarter for accountants, lawyers, and other professionals offering their skills to transnational corporations. In fact, Rome is one of Europe's few capitals without a stock exchange. So can we place the city within any broader framework of understanding at all?
Multiple Modernities: Rome as Alternatively Modern
Rome has gone through its own peculiar modernization process since it became capital in 1871. Rome is not "unmodern" or "late modern," rather its modernity has to be positioned against the city's history and the role the city came to play with respect to the formation of Italy as nation-state and, today, as a fast-developing global political/cultural economy. We argue that the globality of Rome can best be approached within a perspective of alternative or multiple modernities. From within this paradigm, modernity is considered an inherently ambivalent and open-ended process that implodes and develops differently within different cultural and geographical contexts (Eisenstadt 2000; Thomassen 2012). The development of the notion of multiple modernities was an important way for social theorists to move beyond Eurocentrism while still allowing for an analysis of modernity, now in the plural. Western modernity was/is but one particular trajectory of historical development; modernization and Westernization need to be disentangled as analytical categories and historical processes. This pluralizing must be continued within that Western context, as different cities, regions, and states modernized along wildly different routes even within Europe and its single states. Of huge relevance for positioning Rome, the multiple modernities paradigm, as developed by Eisenstadt in his elaboration of Weber, also put much more stress on modernity as a cultural force: Modernization processes, even within the economic and political spheres, are built upon values, worldviews, and types of life-conduct that cannot simply be deduced from an economic substructure.
While the theoretical framework tied to the idea of multiple modernities is by now well recognized and figures prominently in social theory (Thomassen 2010), it still has not informed urban theory to the extent one might have expected (but see de Frantz 2008). Yet there is hardly any area of research where the notion of multiple modernities becomes more directly applicable, and the city of Rome is but one case in point. Negotiations of urbanity in and across various contexts constitute urban politics as plural and open-ended (de Frantz 2008, 480).
Multiple modernities further translate into an understanding of "multiple globalizations," to multiple ways of dealing with globality (see also Smith 2001). The global city centers of the West may not necessarily be seen as the only producers of either modernity or globality. The decentering of Western modernity implied in the multiple modernities paradigm has several aspects to it, but one of them is certainly spatial and should invite us to think differently about position, territory, and power. Quite evidently, each major city in today's world is global, but from an anthropological point of view, this globality needs to be established from within, not by applying parameters of measurement that simply mimic those hierarchies of economic power that nobody should deny. The notion of multiple globalizations (Vereni 2012) does imply various layers of connectedness across the globe, but it also presupposes that various cities will find their own role and identity within wider, shifting national and global configurations. The diversity which unfolds, it must be noted, is also internal, as cities are composed of heterogeneous spaces and a multitude of actors, single and collective, who live the local and the global differently.
The ways in which a city like Rome becomes global is furthermore rooted in the particular historical trajectory of the city and is tied to the ways in which modernization has unfolded in contradictory and ambivalent ways. Without being rooted in the complexities of local reality, "global theory" comes to mean very little (McNeill 1999). Rome is shaped by economic, political, and cultural modernization, but in ways that defy any classificatory logic. Concretely, these historical complexities can be very briefly sketched as follows.
Rome in Recent History: Frictions of Modernity
Rome was not chosen as capital of Italy in 1871 because it was perceived as modern or avant-garde, quite the contrary. Already in the fourth century ad, Rome had seen street lighting; by 1870, there was none of the kind. By European but also North Italian standards, Rome was both an economically and politically "backward" area ruled by the papacy. The choice of Rome was based on symbolic more than political and economic reasons. Within Italy, Rome was the only potential capital that could boast a truly national reach. Italian nationalists from across the political spectrum agreed that without the twofold legacy of classical and papal Rome, the unification of Italy would remain incomplete. However, Rome was also useful for more mundane reasons: In order to win the souls of the emergent and still weak bourgeoisie in Italy, the political expansion of the Kingdom of Piedmont needed to permanently defeat localisms and parochialisms that had hindered the development of a united Italian political entity. A "neutral" point of balance had to be detected between the then most powerful and populated cities in Italy (Turin, Genoa, Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples); a steady pivot around which the whole unitarian project could be developed, minimizing the risks of jealousy and rivalry among the preexisting local and regional powers. Rome perfectly suited this role, being neutral geographically, politically (devoid of a modern ruling class), and even economically (Caracciolo 1956, 17). Similar to Brussels and Strasbourg, which became the administrative and political centers of the European Union due to their marginality and lack of power in European politics, Rome became capital of the modern Italian state to compensate for this extraordinary political fragmentation, and mostly due to the city's weakness.
From the early Risorgimento in the nineteenth century, Republicans, Monarchists, and Unitarians all embraced Rome as the center of their political programs. Catholics close to papal power were among the few to resist the idea of Rome as the Italian capital. It was rejected exactly by those politicians and sectors of civil society which were actually living and operating in Rome. So, while "l'Italia ha bisogno di Roma" ("Italy needs Rome!") was a common slogan between 1861 and 1870 during the Unification of Italy, the inverse statement (e.g., that Rome needed Italy) was far less heard.
Rome's peculiar political history also relates to its economy. The fight against localism and regionalism was a necessity for the emerging Northern Italian bourgeoisie, striving to impose a fully fledged capitalistic mode of production. A national market had to be guaranteed beyond regional entrepreneurial and industrial traditions. Due to its economic weakness, only Rome could act as a neutral guarantor for the implementation of Italian capitalism. Capitalist farming and modern industries in Italy grew up predominantly in the northwest of the country, concentrated within the "industrial triangle" of Milan, Turin, and Genoa. As Rome became capital in 1870, this did not really change. The businesses that developed in the growing capital were all connected to transport, consumer sales, and administration.
In a very real sense, Rome was a "service sector" city long before terms like information economy and postindustrialization had been invented. Rome today is not "postindustrial," for it was never industrial in the first place. Indeed, after 1871, the new Italian political leadership purposefully avoided the development of industrial sectors in the Eternal City because they were afraid that a politicized proletariat in Rome would cause too much trouble (Caracciolo 1956, 61–62). Rome had to serve as a docile body of political centralization. Working-class neighborhoods, like those just barely visible today in Testaccio or Garbatella, grew up around trade and distribution of foodstuffs. Mussolini's plan for a self-sufficient national economy certainly did not make Rome independent in terms of consumer goods, except perhaps in the vegetables that were grown in the agro romano (the Roman countryside) and the various "garden cities" (see Trabalzi, chapter 17), especially as the economic crisis before and during World War II worsened. Italy's first "economic miracle," booming from 1957, radically altered Rome and its physical shape, with new palazzine (apartment buildings) mushrooming around and outside the historic center. But Italy's economic miracle still did not turn Rome into a center of production.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Changing Faces of Rome ISABELLA CLOUGH MARINARO AND BJØRN THOMASSEN
Part I. Rome: The Local and the Global City
1. Diversely Global Rome BJØRN THOMASSEN AND PIERO VERENI
2. The Liberal, the Neoliberal and the Illiberal: Dynamics of Diversity and Politics of Identity in Contemporary Rome MICHAEL HERZFELD
3: Rome as a Global City: Mapping New Cultural and Political Boundaries
PIERLUIGI CERVELLI
4. Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome PIERPAOLO MUDU
Part II. Changing Faces, Changing Places
5. Torpignattara/Banglatown: Processes of Re-urbanization and Rhetorics of Locality in an Outer Suburb of Rome ALESSANDRA BROCCOLINI
6. Foreign Pupils, Bad Citizens. The Public Construction of Difference in a Roman School PIERO VERENI
7. Evicting Rome's Undesirables: Two Short Tales ISABELLA CLOUGH MARINARO AND ULDERICO DANIELE
8. The Rootedness of a Community of Xoraxané Roma in Rome MARCO SOLIMENE
9. Ways of Living in the Market City. Bufalotta and the Porta di Roma Shopping Center CARLO CELLAMARE
Part III. Rome and its Fractured Modernities
10. Roma, Città Sportiva SIMON MARTIN
11. Football, Romanità and the Search for Stasis MARK DYAL
12. Rome's Contemporary Past VALERIE HIGGINS
Part IV. The Informal City
13. The Self-Made City CARLO CELLAMARE
14. Marginal Centers: Learning from Rome's Periphery FERRUCCIO TRABALZI
15. Residence Roma: Senegalese Immigrants in a Vertical Village CRISTINA LOMBARDI DIOP
16. Where is Culture in Rome? Self-Managed Social Centers and the Right to Urban Space PIERPAOLO MUDU
17. Greening Rome: Rediscovering Urban Agriculture FERRUCCIO TRABALZI
Contributors
Index