Kaleidoscopic shades of grey: The shifting (in)formalities of Rome's street markets

Abstract

This article explores how Rome's municipal authorities have managed Roma's vending practices in the city's street markets during the last two decades and how Roma traders have negotiated rising bureaucratic and legal obstacles to their everyday business strategies. The study draws on a variety of data-collection methods including oral history interviews with past street vendors and market organizers, participant observation in today's (in)formal markets, and primary media and municipal documentation. The analysis focuses on three interconnected elements: firstly it traces the relationship between the formalization of some flea-markets and the elimination of others as part of a broader drive to position the city as a globalized and efficient commercial environment for tourism and real-estate development. It demonstrates, however, that this process has been highly racialized – targeting Roma traders in particular through discourses of crime and dirt/disorder – and implemented through partial, contradictory and erratic methods. Secondly, it examines the new and power-inflected informalities that have been produced as the authorities have sought to distance Roma traders from public view while failing to address the inequalities underlying those economic practices. Thirdly, it explores the costs and vulnerabilities that these informalities produce in traders' daily lives as they seek to maintain entrepreneurial autonomy. The analysis connects these dynamics to debates on urban management techniques internationally, while dissecting the unique modalities through which informalities are produced and negotiated in Rome.