Navigating the (in)formal city: Roma, urban life and governance in Rome

Abstract

Global neoliberal drives towards a state of deregulation, combined with top-down attempts to confine certain spheres of social life outside the formal/legal domain, are forcing many urban actors into new spaces of informality and vulnerability. This Special Section engages actively with current debates on urban governance and the rising precarization of city-dwellers by focusing on Rome, a diversely global city characterized by pervasive informality. Particularly, we concentrate on a highly heterogeneous but stigmatized social group, the Roma, as a lens to analyze the complexities of (in)formal negotiations over resources and rights to the city. We thus highlight how informalities that are produced in multiple grey spaces are used to exert power over subaltern groups, while being simultaneously harnessed by those actors to express autonomy and agency. The empirical complexities that emerge at the intersection of heterogeneous macro-and meso-level institutional policies and practices, and micro-level dynamics of urban power and resistance, become nodal points through which to reflect on the diffuse character of policing and on how cartographies of power, social divisions, cultural belonging, and citizenship are produced and transformed in the contemporary city.