Cosa vuol dire «metropolitano» a Roma? Ambiguità spaziali, economiche e politiche

The article explores the spatial, economic and governance patterns of urban development in Rome and their various determinants with the aim of verifying whether the existing/emerging patterns or strategies of development have metropolitan characteristics and what are the main factors that influence these patterns of development. These questions are framed by theories on urban neoliberalism and neo-liberalization, political rescaling , nsation states and public-private partnership in urban spaces and urban regimes, social and political construction of scale, metropolization processes. The pattern of economic development is characterised by a weak trans-scalarity, the pattern of urban development is characterised by an ambiguous polycentrism and as concerns the pattern of governance, rescaling is definitely contradictory. Said differently, material (economic; policy actions with physical impacts), immaterial (representations, discourses) and spatial factors explain the ambiguity and contradictions of metropolitan development patterns in Rome. Paths of development in Rome do not show “linear” metropolitan features. This depends on the specific accumulation strategy of Rome, which defines a development model that is not led by big firms, even less by trans-national capital or by the policy goal to attract it. In this model, the role of land rent and real estate is pivotal not only in economic terms but also in terms of political influence. At the same time, in this strategy the State (both at the national and local level) plays a central role in assuring and reproducing the firms’ dependence on national and local investments. This system of relationships stabilizes a sort of trans-scalar urban regime in which political actors exchange financial resources aimed at remunerating the interests of local economic actors with consensus and legitimacy. The extra- economic condition represented by the huge extension of the Municipality of Rome provides the spatial condition for this kind of exchange between the different actors (economic and political) of the urban regime.