Fighting for the City at the Neighbourhood Scale: The Comitati di Quartiere in 1970s Rome

The comitati di quartiere (neighbourhood associations, or literally committees) exemplify the new forms of grassroots activism of the 1970s and played a key role in the urban social conflicts in Italian cities – especially in its speculation-ridden capital, Rome. A comparison of two particularly influential Roman neighbourhood associations – Comitato di quartiere Magliana and Comitato di quartiere delle Valli – sheds light on similarities and differences regarding actors, approaches, watchwords and repertoires of action. While the former implemented self-organized rent strikes and supported squatters in the working- and lower middle-class neighbourhood to occupy hundreds of flats in what they interpreted as an urban front of a more general class struggle, the latter mainly aimed at the defence of a 20-hectare meadow at the southern fringe of the middle-class neighbourhood from development plans, but also fought for the improvement of the local social infrastructure and organized a variety of social and cultural activities. In both Magliana and Quartiere delle Valli – albeit in different forms and with different outcomes – autonomous collective actors mobilized for what Castells describes as ‘the city as a use value’, focusing on collective consumption demands, and for ‘the city as a political entity of free self-management’.