What sort of metropolitan restructuring took place in Italy during the crisis? Rome and its suburbs (Fiumicino)

Abstract

The case of the Italian capital and its peripheries makes it possible to analyze metropolitan restructuring in connection with the global economic, social and financial crisis caused by the subprime crisis, and with a public action marked by the ‘città metropolitane’ institution in 2014, but also with a crisis of legitimacy of local power. The article mobilizes both existing literature and classic statistical indicators at national and European level, and a field investigation in Fiumicino, the airport suburb of the capital. The crisis of the peripheries is multi-scale, in the sense that it refers to articulations of scales that go from the local level to the national and supranational levels. At national and European level, Rome -although it is still a rich city- appears as one of the more sensitive points of the crisis arc that has been generated in the south facade of Europe since 2007; and the crisis has affected the recovery process with respect to Milan which had began in previous decades, even if taking into account that the economic and social indicators of the capital are ambiguous. In addition, on the suburban scale, the crisis of the peripheries affects morphologically complex urban developments, from the ‘borgate’ formed by individual or small collective housing, to large private housing complexes built around immense shopping centers, or social housing neighborhoods. The construction of a metropolitan power -slow and uncertain- takes place partly in these peripheries, and in the Roman case, particularly from these ‘borgate’ of downtown and from other parts of its suburban area, including Fiumicino.