Isabella Clough Marinaro | John Cabot University (original) (raw)

Books by Isabella Clough Marinaro

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces. Informalities in Governance, Housing, and Economic Activity in Contemporary Italy, 2022

This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, ... more This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, to analyze how dynamics of rule-bending take shape in Rome today. Adopting a multiscalar and transdisciplinary approach, it unpacks how gaps and contradictions in institutional rulemaking and application force many residents into protracted liminal states marked by intense vulnerability. By merging a political economy lens with ethnographic research in informal housing, illegal moneylending, unauthorized street-vending and waste collection, the author shows that informalities are not marginal or anomalous conditions, but an integral element of the city’s governance logics. Multiple actors together construct the local cultural norms, conventions and moral economies through which rule-negotiation occurs. However, these practices are ultimately unable to reconfigure historically rooted power dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, they often aggravate weak urbanites’ difficulties in accessing rights and services. A study that challenges assumptions that informalities are predominantly features of developing economies or limited to specific groups and sectors, this volume’s critical approach and innovative methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology interested in social theory, urban studies and liminality.

CONTENTS:

Introduction. Rome: The Informal City

Chapter 1. Tracing Informalities Across Scales and Fields

Chapter 2. Residing in Liminality: Housing Informalities and the Public Sector

Chapter 3. Liminality on the Street: The Shifting Rules of (In)formal Vending

Chapter 4. Informal Lending: The Challenges of Financial Liminality

Chapter 5. Garbage: Managing Liminal Matter through Multi-layered Informalities

Chapter 6. When in Rome: Mapping Romans’ Attitudes and Understandings of Informal Practices
Paola Castelli and Isabella Clough Marinaro

Conclusion

Papers by Isabella Clough Marinaro

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces, 2021

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces, 2021

Progress in Planning, 2020

Abstract The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contempor... more Abstract The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples. From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied institutional framework, a selective tolerance driven mainly by politically-mediated interests emerges as the distinctive feature of the public approach to housing informality in Italy. The paper aims to develop an innovative research approach to informal housing in Italy by overcoming traditional boundaries between research ‘objects’ and by looking at political uses and forms of institutionalisation that are deployed across housing informalities. By doing so, it also contributes to the literature which analyses informality through the lenses of state theory. Simultaneously, it represents a call for international research to investigate the similarities in the patterns of housing informality – and their multifaceted politics – in Mediterranean welfare states.

International Sociology, 2017

This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punis... more This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punish racialized poor groups, arguing that a central modality for managing urban marginality occurs through institutional generation of and participation in spheres of informality. Focusing on Italy’s segregation of Roma in ‘neo-ghettos’, this study explores how Roma’s confinement has been produced and modulated through contradictory policies, their ambiguous implementation by meso-level actors, and Roma’s micro-level navigation of ensuing arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, it traces how ambivalent formalization drives have bifurcated the city’s very diverse Roma populations into two main sociospatial configurations, surveillance-intensive ‘villages’ and unauthorized micro-encampments, producing intertwined informalities in housing and employment that reinforce power inequalities despite Roma’s attempts to exert some agency and autonomy through building social...

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2014

ABSTRACT

Ethnicities, 2014

This article examines novel spaces for Roma political participation that opened up under a right-... more This article examines novel spaces for Roma political participation that opened up under a right-wing municipal government in Rome between 2008 and 2013. Three channels were created through which Roma could engage with policy-makers and, in theory, make their voices heard: a ‘Mayor’s Delegate for Roma Issues’; a forum for debate among Roma groups and elected representatives in two official camps. Based on in-depth interviews with protagonists of this key period of mobilisation, we evaluate the successes achieved and obstacles faced. In particular, we highlight the differentiations which emerged among Roma actors, concluding that, following an initial period of enthusiasm and cohesion, most participants withdrew, achieving few of their initial goals. While the analysis demonstrates the heterogeneity of Roma groups and interests in this process, it also underlines the constraints created by the external political opportunity structure which ultimately worked to co-opt activists in ord...

Cities, 2019

This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in t... more This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in the city's street markets during the last two decades and how Roma traders have negotiated rising bureaucratic and legal obstacles to their everyday business strategies. The study draws on a variety of data-collection methods including oral history interviews with past street vendors and market organizers, participant observation in today's (in) formal markets, and primary media and municipal documentation. The analysis focuses on three interconnected elements: firstly it traces the relationship between the formalization of some flea-markets and the elimination of others as part of a broader drive to position the city as a globalized and efficient commercial environment for tourism and real-estate development. It demonstrates, however, that this process has been highly racializedtargeting Roma traders in particular through discourses of crime and dirt/disorderand implemented through partial, contradictory and erratic methods. Secondly, it examines the new and power-inflected informalities that have been produced as the authorities have sought to distance Roma traders from public view while failing to address the inequalities underlying those economic practices. Thirdly, it explores the costs and vulnerabilities that these informalities produce in traders' daily lives as they seek to maintain entrepreneurial autonomy. The analysis connects these dynamics to debates on urban management techniques internationally, while dissecting the unique modalities through which informalities are produced and negotiated in Rome.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 2021

International Journal of Housing Policy , 2021

This article presents ethnographic research carried out in Rome's Corviale public housing project... more This article presents ethnographic research carried out in Rome's Corviale public housing project: a 1-km-long building where squatting and unauthorised construction are widespread, most notably along the entire fourth floor. It first outlines the institutional background to these informalities, demonstrating that they have not emerged outside or in opposition to the state, but are the outcome of regulatory ambiguities determined by bureaucratic (in)actions over three decades and are tightly connected to the management of Rome's housing sector more broadly. It then explores how informalities are organised and experienced by residents; identifying social relations, power dynamics, and how squatters position their practices normatively in relation to institutional neglect and the local activities of semi-organised criminals. Beyond adding to debates on housing informalities in the global North, the analysis makes a wider theoretical contribution, focusing on the centrality of time as a defining feature of informal housing practices. It highlights how institutionally imposed temporalities generate conditions of protracted liminality, constraining residents' means and methods of survival but also producing the foundations for claims-making and negotiations to modify regulatory practices from 'below'. Lastly, it analyses a recent policy initiative to formalise the fourth floor, exploring its ability to uproot the multidimensional informalities that have crystallised over time.

Progress in Planning, 2020

The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy... more The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples. From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied

Italian Mafias Today, 2019

Still today Italian mafias are widely dismissed as 'an Italian problem' despite vast evidence tha... more Still today Italian mafias are widely dismissed as 'an Italian problem' despite vast evidence that these criminal groups have expanded well beyond Italy as their base for business. All of Italy's mafia groups have become-in fact many have long been-transnational in their economic and political activities and in their social effects. While the very real damage that these groups wreak on democratic processes, on fair market competition, on the environment and on the livelihoods and wellbeing of communities in Italy and abroad is often ignored, popular culture has ensured that they have become part of our global collective imagination. Recent films and TV series such as Gomorrah, the US 'reality' TV show Mob Wives and the novel The Piranhas (Roberto Saviano, 2018) continue to fuel our images of mafiosi's exciting and fearless lifestyles, their appetite for violence, their endless exuberance and kitsch glamour, appearing to embody the dark side of contemporary capitalist society. While no doubt enjoyable, these fictional representations cloud a reality that is far less exotic and yet much more complex. This book aims to provide an accurate, extensive and updated picture of how Italian mafias operate today: 1 how they organise, how they behave and how they adapt to changing economic opportunities and intensified attention from law enforcement and civil society. There is a long tradition of books in English that trace the development of Italian mafias especially in the run-up to the great moment of crisis of 1992-94, when the Sicilian Cosa Nostra embarked on a terror campaign against the Italian state, when the political system collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals, when a new set of actors and strategies for dealing with mafias began to emerge. Very few books, however, have tried to unravel the dramatic changes that have occurred in the quarter-century since then, and when they have, they have been partial-with a focus on a single criminal phenomenon-or primarily descriptive. This book breaks with the tradition of historical narratives on the mafias and proposes

Italian Mafias Today, 2019

This chapter analyses the trajectories of three Camorra clans as they have sought to expand into ... more This chapter analyses the trajectories of three Camorra clans as they have sought to expand into the Italian capital. Contrary to the long-standing belief that Rome was of little interest or penetrability for Southern mafias, the case-studies show the very diversified strategies and variable levels of success that have been achieved. In comparing the resources activated by each clan and their economic and geographical sectors of interest, the study seeks to offer some preliminary conclusions about Rome’s vulnerabilities as a “new” destination of mafia expansion.

Cities, 2020

Global neoliberal drives towards a state of deregulation, combined with top-down attempts to conf... more Global neoliberal drives towards a state of deregulation, combined with top-down attempts to confine certain spheres of social life outside the formal/legal domain, are forcing many urban actors into new spaces of informality and vulnerability. This Special Section engages actively with current debates on urban governance and the rising precarization of city-dwellers by focusing on Rome, a diversely global city characterized by pervasive informality. Particularly, we concentrate on a highly heterogeneous but stigmatized social group, the Roma, as a lens to analyze the complexities of (in)formal negotiations over resources and rights to the city. We thus highlight how informalities that are produced in multiple grey spaces are used to exert power over subaltern groups, while being simultaneously harnessed by those actors to express autonomy and agency. The empirical complexities that emerge at the intersection of heterogeneous macro-and meso-level institutional policies and practices, and micro-level dynamics of urban power and resistance, become nodal points through which to reflect on the diffuse character of policing and on how cartographies of power, social divisions, cultural belonging, and citizenship are produced and transformed in the contemporary city.

Cities, 2019

This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in t... more This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in the city's street markets during the last two decades and how Roma traders have negotiated rising bureaucratic and legal obstacles to their everyday business strategies. The study draws on a variety of data-collection methods including oral history interviews with past street vendors and market organizers, participant observation in today's (in) formal markets, and primary media and municipal documentation. The analysis focuses on three interconnected elements: firstly it traces the relationship between the formalization of some flea-markets and the elimination of others as part of a broader drive to position the city as a globalized and efficient commercial environment for tourism and real-estate development. It demonstrates, however, that this process has been highly racializedtargeting Roma traders in particular through discourses of crime and dirt/disorderand implemented through partial, contradictory and erratic methods. Secondly, it examines the new and power-inflected informalities that have been produced as the authorities have sought to distance Roma traders from public view while failing to address the inequalities underlying those economic practices. Thirdly, it explores the costs and vulnerabilities that these informalities produce in traders' daily lives as they seek to maintain entrepreneurial autonomy. The analysis connects these dynamics to debates on urban management techniques internationally, while dissecting the unique modalities through which informalities are produced and negotiated in Rome.

Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis, 2019

This chapter analyses the processes whereby thousands of Romani people have been segregated and c... more This chapter analyses the processes whereby thousands of Romani people have been segregated and confined to territorially stigmatized camps in Italy’s capital over the last 40 years. It locates these camps and their daily management within Wacquant’s analytic cartography of the production of spatialized marginality, the racialization of poverty and the means through which the bodies and economies of dishonoured groups are governed in the neoliberal era. It argues that these camps produce a neo-ghetto system in which residents are managed through diffuse policing and merging of assistential and disciplinary technologies in ways that extend their control across urban space. A core feature of this management involves constant tension between increasingly expansive regulations and their frequent inapplicability or selective enforcement, forcing Roma to reconcile shifting and unpredictable expressions of power. Multidimensional spaces of informality have thus emerged, not as a condition ...

Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, 2018

This article examines the activities and challenges faced by Roma waste traders in Rome, contextu... more This article examines the activities and challenges faced by Roma waste traders in Rome, contextualized within critiques concerning the sustainability of the city's refuse collection services and disposal systems. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Roma camps in the city but focusing particularly on one community and street market, the study explores traders' strategies in collecting, recycling and reselling metals and second hand consumer goods. These activities involve constant negotiation of legal barriers and financial obstacles that force many into conditions of informality or illegality. The analysis investigates how traders respond to these external pressures in their salvage and resale practices. It considers the logistical and spatial tactics employed and traders' continuous creation and reinforcement of business networks as well as their symbolic responses to political discourses that construct them as sources of urban blight. It thus draws on theoretical discussions around the centrality of waste ideologies in the negotiation of urban social inequalities.

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces. Informalities in Governance, Housing, and Economic Activity in Contemporary Italy, 2022

This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, ... more This book draws together debates from two burgeoning fields, liminality and informality studies, to analyze how dynamics of rule-bending take shape in Rome today. Adopting a multiscalar and transdisciplinary approach, it unpacks how gaps and contradictions in institutional rulemaking and application force many residents into protracted liminal states marked by intense vulnerability. By merging a political economy lens with ethnographic research in informal housing, illegal moneylending, unauthorized street-vending and waste collection, the author shows that informalities are not marginal or anomalous conditions, but an integral element of the city’s governance logics. Multiple actors together construct the local cultural norms, conventions and moral economies through which rule-negotiation occurs. However, these practices are ultimately unable to reconfigure historically rooted power dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, they often aggravate weak urbanites’ difficulties in accessing rights and services. A study that challenges assumptions that informalities are predominantly features of developing economies or limited to specific groups and sectors, this volume’s critical approach and innovative methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology interested in social theory, urban studies and liminality.

CONTENTS:

Introduction. Rome: The Informal City

Chapter 1. Tracing Informalities Across Scales and Fields

Chapter 2. Residing in Liminality: Housing Informalities and the Public Sector

Chapter 3. Liminality on the Street: The Shifting Rules of (In)formal Vending

Chapter 4. Informal Lending: The Challenges of Financial Liminality

Chapter 5. Garbage: Managing Liminal Matter through Multi-layered Informalities

Chapter 6. When in Rome: Mapping Romans’ Attitudes and Understandings of Informal Practices
Paola Castelli and Isabella Clough Marinaro

Conclusion

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces, 2021

Inhabiting Liminal Spaces, 2021

Progress in Planning, 2020

Abstract The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contempor... more Abstract The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples. From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied institutional framework, a selective tolerance driven mainly by politically-mediated interests emerges as the distinctive feature of the public approach to housing informality in Italy. The paper aims to develop an innovative research approach to informal housing in Italy by overcoming traditional boundaries between research ‘objects’ and by looking at political uses and forms of institutionalisation that are deployed across housing informalities. By doing so, it also contributes to the literature which analyses informality through the lenses of state theory. Simultaneously, it represents a call for international research to investigate the similarities in the patterns of housing informality – and their multifaceted politics – in Mediterranean welfare states.

International Sociology, 2017

This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punis... more This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punish racialized poor groups, arguing that a central modality for managing urban marginality occurs through institutional generation of and participation in spheres of informality. Focusing on Italy’s segregation of Roma in ‘neo-ghettos’, this study explores how Roma’s confinement has been produced and modulated through contradictory policies, their ambiguous implementation by meso-level actors, and Roma’s micro-level navigation of ensuing arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, it traces how ambivalent formalization drives have bifurcated the city’s very diverse Roma populations into two main sociospatial configurations, surveillance-intensive ‘villages’ and unauthorized micro-encampments, producing intertwined informalities in housing and employment that reinforce power inequalities despite Roma’s attempts to exert some agency and autonomy through building social...

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2014

ABSTRACT

Ethnicities, 2014

This article examines novel spaces for Roma political participation that opened up under a right-... more This article examines novel spaces for Roma political participation that opened up under a right-wing municipal government in Rome between 2008 and 2013. Three channels were created through which Roma could engage with policy-makers and, in theory, make their voices heard: a ‘Mayor’s Delegate for Roma Issues’; a forum for debate among Roma groups and elected representatives in two official camps. Based on in-depth interviews with protagonists of this key period of mobilisation, we evaluate the successes achieved and obstacles faced. In particular, we highlight the differentiations which emerged among Roma actors, concluding that, following an initial period of enthusiasm and cohesion, most participants withdrew, achieving few of their initial goals. While the analysis demonstrates the heterogeneity of Roma groups and interests in this process, it also underlines the constraints created by the external political opportunity structure which ultimately worked to co-opt activists in ord...

Cities, 2019

This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in t... more This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in the city's street markets during the last two decades and how Roma traders have negotiated rising bureaucratic and legal obstacles to their everyday business strategies. The study draws on a variety of data-collection methods including oral history interviews with past street vendors and market organizers, participant observation in today's (in) formal markets, and primary media and municipal documentation. The analysis focuses on three interconnected elements: firstly it traces the relationship between the formalization of some flea-markets and the elimination of others as part of a broader drive to position the city as a globalized and efficient commercial environment for tourism and real-estate development. It demonstrates, however, that this process has been highly racializedtargeting Roma traders in particular through discourses of crime and dirt/disorderand implemented through partial, contradictory and erratic methods. Secondly, it examines the new and power-inflected informalities that have been produced as the authorities have sought to distance Roma traders from public view while failing to address the inequalities underlying those economic practices. Thirdly, it explores the costs and vulnerabilities that these informalities produce in traders' daily lives as they seek to maintain entrepreneurial autonomy. The analysis connects these dynamics to debates on urban management techniques internationally, while dissecting the unique modalities through which informalities are produced and negotiated in Rome.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 2021

International Journal of Housing Policy , 2021

This article presents ethnographic research carried out in Rome's Corviale public housing project... more This article presents ethnographic research carried out in Rome's Corviale public housing project: a 1-km-long building where squatting and unauthorised construction are widespread, most notably along the entire fourth floor. It first outlines the institutional background to these informalities, demonstrating that they have not emerged outside or in opposition to the state, but are the outcome of regulatory ambiguities determined by bureaucratic (in)actions over three decades and are tightly connected to the management of Rome's housing sector more broadly. It then explores how informalities are organised and experienced by residents; identifying social relations, power dynamics, and how squatters position their practices normatively in relation to institutional neglect and the local activities of semi-organised criminals. Beyond adding to debates on housing informalities in the global North, the analysis makes a wider theoretical contribution, focusing on the centrality of time as a defining feature of informal housing practices. It highlights how institutionally imposed temporalities generate conditions of protracted liminality, constraining residents' means and methods of survival but also producing the foundations for claims-making and negotiations to modify regulatory practices from 'below'. Lastly, it analyses a recent policy initiative to formalise the fourth floor, exploring its ability to uproot the multidimensional informalities that have crystallised over time.

Progress in Planning, 2020

The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy... more The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples. From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied

Italian Mafias Today, 2019

Still today Italian mafias are widely dismissed as 'an Italian problem' despite vast evidence tha... more Still today Italian mafias are widely dismissed as 'an Italian problem' despite vast evidence that these criminal groups have expanded well beyond Italy as their base for business. All of Italy's mafia groups have become-in fact many have long been-transnational in their economic and political activities and in their social effects. While the very real damage that these groups wreak on democratic processes, on fair market competition, on the environment and on the livelihoods and wellbeing of communities in Italy and abroad is often ignored, popular culture has ensured that they have become part of our global collective imagination. Recent films and TV series such as Gomorrah, the US 'reality' TV show Mob Wives and the novel The Piranhas (Roberto Saviano, 2018) continue to fuel our images of mafiosi's exciting and fearless lifestyles, their appetite for violence, their endless exuberance and kitsch glamour, appearing to embody the dark side of contemporary capitalist society. While no doubt enjoyable, these fictional representations cloud a reality that is far less exotic and yet much more complex. This book aims to provide an accurate, extensive and updated picture of how Italian mafias operate today: 1 how they organise, how they behave and how they adapt to changing economic opportunities and intensified attention from law enforcement and civil society. There is a long tradition of books in English that trace the development of Italian mafias especially in the run-up to the great moment of crisis of 1992-94, when the Sicilian Cosa Nostra embarked on a terror campaign against the Italian state, when the political system collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals, when a new set of actors and strategies for dealing with mafias began to emerge. Very few books, however, have tried to unravel the dramatic changes that have occurred in the quarter-century since then, and when they have, they have been partial-with a focus on a single criminal phenomenon-or primarily descriptive. This book breaks with the tradition of historical narratives on the mafias and proposes

Italian Mafias Today, 2019

This chapter analyses the trajectories of three Camorra clans as they have sought to expand into ... more This chapter analyses the trajectories of three Camorra clans as they have sought to expand into the Italian capital. Contrary to the long-standing belief that Rome was of little interest or penetrability for Southern mafias, the case-studies show the very diversified strategies and variable levels of success that have been achieved. In comparing the resources activated by each clan and their economic and geographical sectors of interest, the study seeks to offer some preliminary conclusions about Rome’s vulnerabilities as a “new” destination of mafia expansion.

Cities, 2020

Global neoliberal drives towards a state of deregulation, combined with top-down attempts to conf... more Global neoliberal drives towards a state of deregulation, combined with top-down attempts to confine certain spheres of social life outside the formal/legal domain, are forcing many urban actors into new spaces of informality and vulnerability. This Special Section engages actively with current debates on urban governance and the rising precarization of city-dwellers by focusing on Rome, a diversely global city characterized by pervasive informality. Particularly, we concentrate on a highly heterogeneous but stigmatized social group, the Roma, as a lens to analyze the complexities of (in)formal negotiations over resources and rights to the city. We thus highlight how informalities that are produced in multiple grey spaces are used to exert power over subaltern groups, while being simultaneously harnessed by those actors to express autonomy and agency. The empirical complexities that emerge at the intersection of heterogeneous macro-and meso-level institutional policies and practices, and micro-level dynamics of urban power and resistance, become nodal points through which to reflect on the diffuse character of policing and on how cartographies of power, social divisions, cultural belonging, and citizenship are produced and transformed in the contemporary city.

Cities, 2019

This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in t... more This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in the city's street markets during the last two decades and how Roma traders have negotiated rising bureaucratic and legal obstacles to their everyday business strategies. The study draws on a variety of data-collection methods including oral history interviews with past street vendors and market organizers, participant observation in today's (in) formal markets, and primary media and municipal documentation. The analysis focuses on three interconnected elements: firstly it traces the relationship between the formalization of some flea-markets and the elimination of others as part of a broader drive to position the city as a globalized and efficient commercial environment for tourism and real-estate development. It demonstrates, however, that this process has been highly racializedtargeting Roma traders in particular through discourses of crime and dirt/disorderand implemented through partial, contradictory and erratic methods. Secondly, it examines the new and power-inflected informalities that have been produced as the authorities have sought to distance Roma traders from public view while failing to address the inequalities underlying those economic practices. Thirdly, it explores the costs and vulnerabilities that these informalities produce in traders' daily lives as they seek to maintain entrepreneurial autonomy. The analysis connects these dynamics to debates on urban management techniques internationally, while dissecting the unique modalities through which informalities are produced and negotiated in Rome.

Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis, 2019

This chapter analyses the processes whereby thousands of Romani people have been segregated and c... more This chapter analyses the processes whereby thousands of Romani people have been segregated and confined to territorially stigmatized camps in Italy’s capital over the last 40 years. It locates these camps and their daily management within Wacquant’s analytic cartography of the production of spatialized marginality, the racialization of poverty and the means through which the bodies and economies of dishonoured groups are governed in the neoliberal era. It argues that these camps produce a neo-ghetto system in which residents are managed through diffuse policing and merging of assistential and disciplinary technologies in ways that extend their control across urban space. A core feature of this management involves constant tension between increasingly expansive regulations and their frequent inapplicability or selective enforcement, forcing Roma to reconcile shifting and unpredictable expressions of power. Multidimensional spaces of informality have thus emerged, not as a condition ...

Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, 2018

This article examines the activities and challenges faced by Roma waste traders in Rome, contextu... more This article examines the activities and challenges faced by Roma waste traders in Rome, contextualized within critiques concerning the sustainability of the city's refuse collection services and disposal systems. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Roma camps in the city but focusing particularly on one community and street market, the study explores traders' strategies in collecting, recycling and reselling metals and second hand consumer goods. These activities involve constant negotiation of legal barriers and financial obstacles that force many into conditions of informality or illegality. The analysis investigates how traders respond to these external pressures in their salvage and resale practices. It considers the logistical and spatial tactics employed and traders' continuous creation and reinforcement of business networks as well as their symbolic responses to political discourses that construct them as sources of urban blight. It thus draws on theoretical discussions around the centrality of waste ideologies in the negotiation of urban social inequalities.

International Sociology, 2017

This article extends Wacquant's theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punis... more This article extends Wacquant's theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punish racialized poor groups, arguing that a central modality for managing urban marginality occurs through institutional generation of and participation in spheres of informality. Focusing on Italy's segregation of Roma in 'neo-ghettos', this study explores how Roma's confinement has been produced and modulated through contradictory policies, their ambiguous implementation by meso-level actors, and Roma's micro-level navigation of ensuing arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, it traces how ambivalent formalization drives have bifurcated the city's very diverse Roma populations into two main sociospatial configurations, surveillance-intensive 'villages' and unauthorized micro-encampments, producing intertwined informalities in housing and employment that reinforce power inequalities despite Roma's attempts to exert some agency and autonomy through building social capital within and beyond their communities. Variable informalities thus emerge as a core dimension through which resources and constraints are selectively apportioned as techniques of governmentality implemented by different institutions and actors.

Progress in Planning, 2020

The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy... more The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regular-ization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples. From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing in-formalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied institutional framework, a selective tolerance driven mainly by politically-mediated interests emerges as the distinctive feature of the public approach to housing informality in Italy. The paper aims to develop an innovative research approach to informal housing in Italy by overcoming traditional boundaries between research 'objects' and by looking at political uses and forms of in-stitutionalisation that are deployed across housing informalities. By doing so, it also contributes to the literature which analyses informality through the lenses of state theory. Simultaneously, it represents a call for international research to investigate the similarities in the patterns of housing informality-and their multifaceted politics-in Mediterranean welfare states.