Bottom-up Community Development Through Creative Practices in Rome. Insurgent and Pro-social Narratives at the Neighborhood Scale

Narratives are powerful tools in social lives, that affect policy process and also citizens’ attitudes and belief. Storytelling could represent a powerful instrument for community building and citizens’ public (dis)engagement. In this paper we explore how subjective narratives were built, at the neighbourhood scale. We deteched two main narratives, pro-social and insurgent, bridging the neighbourhood inhabitants both to the city as a whole and to the global scenario. Based on a qualitative set of interviews combined with social observation in two neighbourhoods of Rome, one of the largest southern european capital, we analyze how subjective narratives are disseminated at the local scale. Local meetings, street art venues, public encounters that animated the neighbourhoods’ life, shed light on the multiple identities and the different systems of belief held by the citizens. Moreover, both for the insurgent and the pro-social narratives, we identified their social function, using the classic Putnam’s categories of bonding and bridging. Bonding is not always a local process, as well as bridging is not always related to a global scale. Our paper investigates these non-linear identities building, in order to un-box the attitudes and the conflicts of the ‘hyper’ citizens.