Liminal Moves by Flavia Cangià

Author:Flavia Cangià [Cangià, Flavia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9781800730496
Google: PagDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2021-04-02T02:52:55+00:00

Urban, Cross-Border, and Semantic Movements

The city of Rome represents an “in-between city” falling “between the ‘northern postindustrial hypercities’ and the ‘southern ever-growing megacities’” (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 7). Rome has become the hub of international diplomacy, labor migration, and tourism, and it has long been the urban incarnation of the imaginaries of artists, writers, and religious pilgrims around the world. During the last thirty years, the city has experienced a vast demographic transformation, with an increasing influx of migrants and refugees, many of whom become permanent residents. While affecting the social fabric of the city in all its aspects, including its lifestyles, urban morphology, local economy, and artistic vibrancy, this sociocultural diversity has become a highly discussed problem in the local political debate. Rome is indeed the nucleus of many contradictions:

The city of Rome … is a living miracle, incorporating opposite extremes of almost everything human beings have ever produced. Its endless and timeless beauty persists side by side with urban degeneration, pollution, and crime proliferation in some of Europe’s most desolate city areas, often built illegally. The warmth and openness of its inhabitants can turn into closure and xenophobia. … Rome is a laboratory of intricate human relations and curious forms of sociability, of diffidence and civility, cynicism and humour, rudeness and kindness, a chaotic blend of distance and closeness, carelessness, apathy, and engagement. (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 1)

The urban configuration of this city is based on such contradictions. Practices of settlement in the city on the part of residents have had to confront forms of urban development entangled with real estate speculation. The presence of migrants in such social conditions has been exploited by speculators in the context of the housing market, to amplify the social conflicts between communities over access to public spaces and dwelling rights (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 114).

The school where this study was conducted is located in a suburb in the eastern part of the city, between the larger neighborhoods of Casilina and Prenestina, in an area known as Centocelle,5 which is characterized by a high rate of immigration and inhabited by a large number of low- and middle-working-class families, including artisans, workers, and clerical workers. In 2013, migrants in Rome amounted to 362,4936 and represented approximately 10 percent of the whole population, with this number increasing in recent years. At the time, the Romanian community represented the vastest migrant population in Rome (22.6 percent of the total population in the year 2012), with a significant concentration in Casilino and Prenestino/Centocelle areas (Caritas Roma, Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS 2012). More specifically, Centocelle and the nearby Pigneto-Torpignattara district have long been inhabited by a large community of immigrants of different origins (Conti and Strozza 2006; Lombardi-Diop 2014). Between 2009 and 2014, the number of migrant pupils enrolled in Italian schools increased considerably, by 19.2 percent. At the time of the research, the school already represented a place where youths could meet with migrants on a daily basis. The area of Centocelle, according to adolescents,

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