Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin - 'Introduction: Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape' (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013) (original) (raw)
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Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape
Until the mid-twentieth century the Western imagination seemed intent on viewing Rome purely in terms of its classical past or as a stop on the Grand Tour. This collection of essays looks at Rome from a postmodern perspective, including analysis of the city's 'unmappability', its fragmented narratives and its iconic status in literature and film.
Transformations of the "urban" in Rome's post-metropolitan cityscape
Cellamare Carlo (2017). Transformations of the "urban" in Rome's post-metropolitan cityscape. In: edited by Alessandro Balducci Valeria Fedeli and Francesco Curci. Post-Metropolitan Territories. Looking for a New Urbanity. p. 117-137, New York:Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN: 9781138650480, 2017
This regional portrait provides a first interpretive reading of the transformations of the “urban” in the context of Rome’s territory. By using the term “urban” the intention is to interpret not only the physical-spatial or socio-economic transformations according to the best known studies, but the evolution of the complexity of the relationships between such different aspects. It means to look at the complexity of socio-spatial relations, such as the organization of daily life, the ways of living different territories, transportation modes, the relationship with the place where people live, the organization of time, the use of resources, and so on. Included in this are immaterial relations that refer to different lifestyles, to the cultural and social models, and to residents’ relationship with daily life.
The paper questions the urban narrative of the divided and underdeveloped city that is usually applied to Rome. Rome has always been considered a backward metropolis, a divided and dependent city, suspended between the modern and industrial North and the (comparatively) rural and traditional South. Since it became the capital of Italy in 1870, the small population that used to live around the Pope’s court has been replaced by those attending to the needs of the civil servants in government jobs, since Rome has in fact a comparatively weak industrial base. However, the administration pushed for the growth of the city, creating the need for a very large inflow of poor immigrants from the Southern countryside. Besides being limited and empirically inadequate, this raises a crucial theoretical question: how can we describe and understand the change of cities in an age of global rescaling For instance, the two main narratives of globalization and competition, and the critique of the resulting social and spatial division, though opposed, share the same epistemological concern with generalization and explication. But the process of globalization confuses geographical scales, weaves together local and global dimensions, and erases physical and social boundaries. At the turn of modernity, the city is as solid as ever, though neoliberal developments tend to jeopardize all certainties. The same cannot be said of its representations, that are increasingly less coherent and productive, though encroaching on the imagery of the city and of cities’ policies. Thus, walking on water is somehow required in order to match new social forms and their narratives. Marc Augé calls ville-monde such new urban environments, as opposed to the global city, based upon heterogeneity and juxtaposition. Urban space is socially fragmented, and a strict social zoning articulates society and opportunities. Cities change in diverging directions. This calls for a theoretical repositioning, and a paradigmatic turn in urban studies, as claimed recently by a number of scholars from the Global South. A turn that seems able to capture also some of the distinctive features of cities from a more local, European South. The Changing Italian Cities: Emerging Imbalances and Conflicts GSSI Urban Studies - Working Papers 6 | 2014 edited by Antonio G. Calafati
Spanning the entire history of the city of Rome from Iron Age village to modern metropolis, this is the first book to take the long view of the Eternal City as an urban organism. Three thousand years old and counting, Rome has thrived almost from the start on self-reference, supplementing the everyday concerns of urban management and planning by projecting its own past onto the city of the moment. This is a study of the urban processes by which Rome's people and leaders, both as custodians of its illustrious past and as agents of its expansive power, have shaped and conditioned its urban fabric by manipulating geography and organizing space; planning infrastructure; designing and presiding over mythmaking, ritual, and stagecraft; controlling resident and transient populations; and exploiting Rome's standing as a seat of global power and a religious capital.
2019
Ancient cities were sites of social mobility, the coexistence of different ethnic groups, and many cultural activities. Their politics directly involved citizens. This does not seem to be the case for contemporary cities, especially those in southern Italy. There many small and medium-sized towns are no longer attractive to young people, social life is inert, and cultural activities are almost entirely absent. The Ancient Cities project stems from reflections on the contrast between ancient and contemporary cities and aims to suggest new models for social, cultural, and civic development. N. Andrade, C. Marcaccini, G. Marconi, D. Violante (eds).
Urbanity beyond nostalgia: Discovering public life at the edge of the city of Rome
Research in Urban Sociology, 2010
The contemporary city of Rome is being built differently from the expanding post-war peripheries. New, mainly private residential developments are changing our perception of the cityscape. According to the General Plan, these projects are designed to encourage a polycentric metropolitanization, with mixed uses and facilities. But they have been critiqued for producing urbanscapes that ‘discourage urbanity’ because the relevant organizational and functional dimensions of public life have been almost totally neglected: foremost among these are the provision of public goods, services to citizens, high-quality standards of construction and an infrastructure allowing for spatial mobility. The main argument for urbanity emphasizes ‘the way of using the space of the city’ in combination with spontaneous forms of interaction within that urban space. This argument contests the production of the contemporary suburban areas of the city and is based upon a sort of nostalgia for the urbanism inherited in the romantic conceptualization of the modern European city, made visible in the celebrations of historical city places. It gives rise to dissatisfaction with the recently built environment which has been critiqued for its ‘absence of urbanity’. Despite – or perhaps because of – this criticism, little attention has been given to deepen the quality of life in those places from an agents-based perspective.In-depth interviews with local residents suggest that these communities represent ‘reserves of urbanity’ in which new forms of interaction may be interpreted as the ‘learning process of living together’, a precondition of both tolerance and civil respect that works as preliminary step in the achievement of public life in the urban periphery.
URBAN INVESTIGATIONS IN THE HEART OF ROME: THE ROME TRANSFORMED PROJECT
14th International Conference of Archaeological Prospection, 2021
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