Places 'out-of-place'

Abstract

In the frantic drive where the city extends into the world, and the world takes shape within the cities through migratory processes, we witness a multiplication of hybridisations, co-existences and conflicts. This gives way to kaleidoscopic landscapes in which, however, two polarities can be recognised: exclusivity and exclusion. It is the city of the rich and the city of the poor (Secchi 2013) that becomes more complex with ‘certain bodies [and] out of place’ multiplying the topographies of the other. This article, part of a PhD dissertation in progress, describes the case of Roma communities, and investigates ‘out-of-place’s’, emblems of urban exclusion generically called ‘Roma camps’, that corrode the idea of order and decorum. It describes, from an urban point of view, the phenomenon of encampment in its specification into a control device or an informal practice. Both such different urban configurations are investigated through a case study: a precise urban transect in the northern area of Naples in which both coexist, the informal settlement of Cupa Perillo and the Village of Solidarity in Secondigliano. This reveals latent conditions finding, in the informal configurations, alternative systems of rules that may suggest new spaces of utility to a project eschewing the narratives of a single history, the one that has produced control devices and urban expulsions.