In transition

Borghesiana is an example of self organized and self urbanised settlements. The area between the consular roads Casilina and Prenestina was built in a completely informal way. You’ll find there every period of informal building activities and urban legislative as well as recovery procedures. Valle Borghesiana is currently concerned with the procedure of „Toponimi“, the urban recovery plan for illegal areas built in Rome from the 1980’s on. „Toponimi“ represents an innovative practice of self-recovery and planning of urban territory. With this instrument the municipality of Rome entrusts the planning and design of primary and secondary infrastructure directly to the citizens, a complex procedure that requires long, continuous participation of all involved stakeholders. In the next months (perhaps), Valle Borghesiana is supposed to complete the executive recovery plan that the inhabitants and their representatives have been working on for ten years. A communitarian process of self-organization provided the planning of primary urban infrastructure and, after a long bureaucratic process, should lead to the formal recognition of the district. Valle Borghesiana is a complex territory, paradigmatic and characteristic for many phenomena of Southern Italian and Mediterranean urban space: From the – often collective – self-made construction of houses, to forms of social self-organization and political struggles, which will lead to the legal recognition and legalization of the suburb. Exploring the history of this neighbourhood, means to retrace the history of a city and of a nation: The right to housing, which for years determined the national political debate, the issue of labour and that of migration – first nationally and now globally – up to the current request for the “right to the city”.