The Naturalisation of the City after the End of the World

Cellamare Carlo (2017). Transformations of the "urban" in Rome's post-metropolitan cityscape. In: edited by Alessandro Balducci Valeria Fedeli and Francesco Curci. Post-Metropolitan Territories. Looking for a New Urbanity. p. 117-137, New York:Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN: 9781138650480, 2017

This regional portrait provides a first interpretive reading of the transformations of the “urban” in the context of Rome’s territory. By using the term “urban” the intention is to interpret not only the physical-spatial or socio-economic transformations according to the best known studies, but the evolution of the complexity of the relationships between such different aspects. It means to look at the complexity of socio-spatial relations, such as the organization of daily life, the ways of living different territories, transportation modes, the relationship with the place where people live, the organization of time, the use of resources, and so on. Included in this are immaterial relations that refer to different lifestyles, to the cultural and social models, and to residents’ relationship with daily life.

RES. Anthropology and aesthetics, 2022

In the seventeenth century, the landscapes, waterscapes, and cityscapes of Rome were undergoing dramatic transformations. While the city’s architects, engineers, and planners faced the task of rebuilding the city’s deteriorating infrastructure, taming the Tiber’s corrosive waters, and designing grand new villas for Rome’s new landed elites, foreigners developed ways of taking account on the move of these three interlocking ecological systems by recording their impressions in words and images. Although walking was an integral aspect of everybody’s experience of early modern Rome, French sources express a particularly self-conscious reflection on urban perambulation - already evident in the 16th century writings of Montaigne - that would develop into a sustained theoretical discourse central to the identity and practice of the artist. This movement became a technique of analyzing the intersecting built and natural environments of Rome and of developing representational languages to describe the city’s urban and suburban metamorphosis as a series of aesthetic itineraries and ecological conundrums. The results were written and visual accounts of how the city’s rebuilding strategies and policies would participate in the construction of a seemingly coherent image of early modern Rome. This image, originating from a series of overlapping and often competing attempts to reconceptualize and ultimately redefine the city’s historical and material legacies, resulted from a dialogue between the producers and the consumers of Rome’s ecological contradictions: those who were working to rebuild it and those who were struggling to make sense of it.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2014

While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization.

2017

This collection of essays establishes multiple new perspectives for the possible interpretation of Rome and its landscape. Common to all its contributions is an effort to surpass the traditional image of the city as an open-air museum, a symbol of a lost grandeur confined in a nostalgic admiration of past achievement. Rome is investigated here from a postmodern vantage point, which sparks a stimulating debate and affirms Rome's status as a modern and even postmodern city.

2018

The 21 Century is the urban century with humans the dominant force shaping the planet's future. This paper outlines why the era's pressing imperatives need transformations in our production and habitation systems. These transformations require ecological design and technical and social innovations for adaptation. These adaptations need new visions of the city as nature and redefining the nature of the city. The paper begins by articulating the concept that all modern cities are forming a single global megacity – named Anthropocencia - linked together by gargantuan flows of information, goods and people. This megacity satisfies its rapacious appetites by drawing resources from a vast global hinterland. But the city is also a place of cultural production where the ferment of new ideas engenders the social and technological innovations needed for adapting to changing circumstances. Thousands of climate responsive and biophilic communities are in active exploration, ushering in ...

Prior to the Second World War Europe’s ruling classes had no perception of the destiny of the modern city. This despite the fact that almost a century earlier Baudelaire had intoned the decadence of their most beautiful city. Proud of their ordered, authoritative, and often authoritarian capitals, Europeans saw history as a course predestined to create that miracle of civilisation exemplified by the metropolis of the old continent: wealthy, with a rigid social hierarchy, symbolically, physically and culturally rooted in history, firmly established at the summit of a providential, though still highly dramatic process. The metropolises of Europe were perceived, in the end, as organisms at the pinnacle of their conscious maturity and the height of their industrial and financial might. They appeared to posses an ability to self-regulate internal and external conflicts, imposing models of assimilation and reciprocal adaptation upon sources of imbalances, conceived by imagining the possible effects of disturbances and anticipating their transformations – thus adopting planning in the form of a series of direct systematic operations. Two years later, in 1939, Claude Lévi Strauss went much further; his direct experience with São Paulo, Brazil (and New York) convinced him that the modern metropolis, which he observed and which observed him with a thousand hidden eyes as he, a foreigner, crossed it, cannot be judged according to the parameters of architecture (thus also excluding those of planning), but with those of the landscape; and to the same degree that everything in the natural landscape is in transformation, simultaneously luxuriance and putrefaction, he claimed that «the cities of the New World […] pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage». With no intermediate stage: this is the most important clue, the tag that for the great anthropologist implicitly, though peremptorily, invalidated the idea that the cities of the New World are truly part of history. Lévi Strauss, who certainly learned to be a narrator of cultures and ethnographic contexts as Walter Benjamin learned to be a narrator of cities, froze – despite being captivated – in front of the metropolises of the New World, home to a coexistence between past and present, and between proximity and distance. Perhaps the time has come to truly study the world’s metropolises as individuals in the midst – or at the beginning – of their evolutionary age seeking to establish their stage of development and that of their parts, in the concreteness of reality. The term stage is used here to refer to a recognisable and well-characterised structure that is organised and relatively balanced – equivalent to one of the stages of Jean Piaget’s theory of development. This would make it possible in the most appropriate terms to solicit different urban communities to autonomously imagine the effects of on-going disturbances, accompanying them as they realistically express their fears and desires and anticipate the form and objectives of tangible operations to be implemented within the limits of a community’s available resources and level of organisation and the pedagogic capacities of the city and its government.

The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject: An Interdisciplinary Conference, The University of Surrey, UK, July 2-3, 2010.

Research in Urban Sociology, 2010

The contemporary city of Rome is being built differently from the expanding post-war peripheries. New, mainly private residential developments are changing our perception of the cityscape. According to the General Plan, these projects are designed to encourage a polycentric metropolitanization, with mixed uses and facilities. But they have been critiqued for producing urbanscapes that ‘discourage urbanity’ because the relevant organizational and functional dimensions of public life have been almost totally neglected: foremost among these are the provision of public goods, services to citizens, high-quality standards of construction and an infrastructure allowing for spatial mobility. The main argument for urbanity emphasizes ‘the way of using the space of the city’ in combination with spontaneous forms of interaction within that urban space. This argument contests the production of the contemporary suburban areas of the city and is based upon a sort of nostalgia for the urbanism inherited in the romantic conceptualization of the modern European city, made visible in the celebrations of historical city places. It gives rise to dissatisfaction with the recently built environment which has been critiqued for its ‘absence of urbanity’. Despite – or perhaps because of – this criticism, little attention has been given to deepen the quality of life in those places from an agents-based perspective.In-depth interviews with local residents suggest that these communities represent ‘reserves of urbanity’ in which new forms of interaction may be interpreted as the ‘learning process of living together’, a precondition of both tolerance and civil respect that works as preliminary step in the achievement of public life in the urban periphery.

The paper questions the urban narrative of the divided and underdeveloped city that is usually applied to Rome. Rome has always been considered a backward metropolis, a divided and dependent city, suspended between the modern and industrial North and the (comparatively) rural and traditional South. Since it became the capital of Italy in 1870, the small population that used to live around the Pope’s court has been replaced by those attending to the needs of the civil servants in government jobs, since Rome has in fact a comparatively weak industrial base. However, the administration pushed for the growth of the city, creating the need for a very large inflow of poor immigrants from the Southern countryside. Besides being limited and empirically inadequate, this raises a crucial theoretical question: how can we describe and understand the change of cities in an age of global rescaling For instance, the two main narratives of globalization and competition, and the critique of the resulting social and spatial division, though opposed, share the same epistemological concern with generalization and explication. But the process of globalization confuses geographical scales, weaves together local and global dimensions, and erases physical and social boundaries. At the turn of modernity, the city is as solid as ever, though neoliberal developments tend to jeopardize all certainties. The same cannot be said of its representations, that are increasingly less coherent and productive, though encroaching on the imagery of the city and of cities’ policies. Thus, walking on water is somehow required in order to match new social forms and their narratives. Marc Augé calls ville-monde such new urban environments, as opposed to the global city, based upon heterogeneity and juxtaposition. Urban space is socially fragmented, and a strict social zoning articulates society and opportunities. Cities change in diverging directions. This calls for a theoretical repositioning, and a paradigmatic turn in urban studies, as claimed recently by a number of scholars from the Global South. A turn that seems able to capture also some of the distinctive features of cities from a more local, European South. The Changing Italian Cities: Emerging Imbalances and Conflicts GSSI Urban Studies - Working Papers 6 | 2014 edited by Antonio G. Calafati