Visibility as Justice: Immigrant Street Vendors and the Right to Difference in Rome

Francesca Piazzoni

doi:10.1177/0739456x20956387

Abstract

Dominant constructions of what looks “appropriate” enable the exclusion of poor immigrants from public spaces around the world. This paper analyzes how Bangladeshi vendors challenge exclusion by tactically appearing and disappearing in Rome’s iconic landscapes. While xenophobic, pro-decorum regulations seek to banish marginalized subjects from the tourist-friendly city center, immigrant vendors mobilize their own visibility by emplacing urbanisms of opportunity, refuge, and belonging. Learning from these urbanisms, planners can deploy a spatial lens of visibility to advance the right to difference. I propose In Plain Site, a policy and place-making approach that helps empower oppressed groups to see and be seen in the city.

Highlights

Social and spatial inequalities continue to marginalize poor immigrants in cities across the globe
Rifat and I approached vendors in public spaces relying on convenience sampling, which later led to chainreferral sampling
The theoretical premise here is that the right to visibility lies at the core of the right to difference

Summary

Introduction

Social and spatial inequalities continue to marginalize poor immigrants in cities across the globe. Michael Rios (2014) contends that newcomers enact an insurgent aesthetic of marginality by making their demands, tastes, and bodies visible in space This aesthetic emerges, for example, when immigrants transform their homes to satisfy needs (Irazábal 2012), when immigrant vendors acquire legitimacy in the eyes of others by means of their presence on the streets (Crisman and Kim 2019), when business owners use ethnic signs to both attract customers and construct a sense of home (Sezer and Maldonado 2017), when newcomers use and transform spaces into places of worship (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014; Sen 2013), and when immigrant groups appropriate spaces by playing or socializing in public space (Kamel 2014; Law 2002). With this question in mind, I analyzed the conflicts and opportunities that emerge when immigrant street vendors make themselves visible in the touristic center of Rome

Method

Findings

Conclusion