The SELF MADE URBANITY project observes the city of Rome as a cross point where urban phenomena of the Northern and Southern hemisphere are very near together.
Researching along a spatial axis of the Roman consular streets Casilina – Prenestina, in the territory of the municipality of Rome our aim is to focus on different cases of informality, such as informal economies, informal housing, informal settlements, self organization and (self)recovery of the territory, connecting at the same time the different “cases” to related phenomena within the City of Rome or other European and extra European cities.
SELF MADE URBANITY looks at the different phenomena of alternative city building from the point of view of those, who have constructed their homes by themselves, learning from and including the protagonists of self organisation and self organized urbanism in knowledge production. Researching and reflecting on the complex historical, sociological, anthropological and political situation from their point of view will provide, in our opinion, a new consciousness and understanding of contemporary European urban space.
February 2009
During the 1st international Workshop “SELF MADE CITY” /informal Rome in the framework of a guided tour we visited different settlements born from 1890 until the 1970is in order to illustrate different periods of informal settlements. During our visit we met several representative of self organization in Valle Borghesiana. During the discussions and presentations at Istituto Svizzero di Roma our guests exchanged different experiences and observation methods in multidisciplinary research projects.
July 2009
In the framework of the 2nd international workshop: Imparare da Borghesiana / workshop on field in Public History, with the local inhabitants of Borghesiana and its surroundings, in collaboration with Consorzi di Autorecupero and local neighbourhoods assemblies, we started collecting personal stories and collective experiences of political struggles in order to reconstruct the history of these informal settlements, still in the urban recovery process, without forgetting the migrants as new inhabitants of these settlements and the large urban transformations in the new built settlements called “Centralità” in even farther outskirts of the city.
August 2009
In Pula at the Post Capitalist City Conference we described different aspects of our work made during the 2nd workshop “Imparare da Borghesiana,”speaking about personal stories and collective experiences of political struggles of the inhabitants of these informal settlements and migrants as new inhabitants. An other point we mentioned is the notion of self management and self organisation, that gets very problematic, especially if inhabitants only have political competences but not the power and the mandate to execute.
November 2009
The Dossier SMU- research.net report n° 01/09 describes the first steps of our research.
ROMA/ REPORT; International Research on the Informal City, Novembre 2009
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