The ambiguous renaissance of Rome

Over the last decade, many Italian cities witnessed how the introduction of direct election for the Mayor (enacted by national law n° 81/1993) contributed to a radical switch in the municipal management. The new “leadership-sensitive” management of towns often tended to amplify the risks of joining an international model of “Urban Renaissance” centred on the neoliberal competition struggle among world cities. This mainstream, in many Italian historical centres, was led by the increase in real estate values and the incredible pressure of commercial/tourist activities which determined a widespread tendency to make the city into a living museum, allow unruly, mass commercialization and expel the ‘mixité sociale’, in this way threatening the identity of those characteristics which guarantee the survival of some attractive activities themselves. The city of Rome offers a brilliant example of this double-effect mechanism. It is also an interesting place where another ambiguity of this new institutional framework becomes clear: being that the ‘decisionism’ suggested by the one-man-centred electoral system matched with a gradual opening of social dialogue. Under this perspective, the so-called “Modello Roma” (Rome Model) is not more than a self-description which the present ruling group created to resume (and doing marketing on) their goals: those of giving shape to a paradoxical/ambitious horizon of a “competitive city of solidarity”. The recent book “The Rome Model. The ambiguous modernity” (AA.VV., 2007), whilst honestly recognising many positive aspects of several Renaissance policies implemented in the Italian Capital along the last 6 years, introduces some doubts on their long term effects. While wondering why the “Rome model” is gaining the status of national reference to be emulated by local authorities all over the country, the book prefers to redefine it as a successful “managing style” going towards a cementified city warmly welcoming the international mass-tourism and participating in the neoliberal competition struggle among world cities, rather then accepting its self-definition as a “progressive model” for coping with the urban problems. If regarded from the city historic heart, the definition which better fits for the “Rome Model” is probably that of an “urban oxymoron made out of a joint venture between a strong enrooted history of labour and grassroots’ bottom-up battles for conquering the right-to-the-city and a sort of terrain vague open to developers’ pillage strategies” (Allegretti, 2007). Within a similar context, the interests of the Rome local government in the gradual increase of spaces of social dialogue and participation practices, may denote ongoing cultural change or simply a ‘nodal tactic’ for answering to the growth of urban conflicts, avoiding heavy clashes and diluting them into thousands of tiny deliberative arenas. But it indeed reveals an approach in transition from a policy attentive above all to transformation in the urbs (i.e. the physical city) to policies which pay attention to changes in the civitas (the established community), with its effects linked to inhabitants’ heightened sense of belonging and civil commitment. Taken as a whole, all these reasons explain the perspective from which the present essay intends to throw a glance on the ambiguous urban Renaissance of Rome over the last 6 years. It will mainly “tell a story”, that of the dynamic asset of an urban movement which took shape in the very core of historical centre, leading to some practical results which affected urban public policies. The latter could be considered “symbolic” of the future possibilities that urban movements could open – with their struggle - to gain a more ‘incisive’ position in addressing or re-shaping urban policies. The chosen narrative style aims at simplifying comprehension to those readers who are not in deep familiarity with the peculiar roman complexity.