ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Desiring a Gadjo City: Political Economy in Post-fascist and Postcolonial Rome

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 07 | INCLUSION

Speaker

Dr Giovanni Picker (University of Glasgow)

Description

In dialog with recent research on urban planning, race and ethnicity (e.g. Mele 2017; Beebeejaun 2022; Williams 2024), in this paper I examine the planning of camps for socially disadvantaged, Eastern European Roma by the municipality of Rome from 1993 to 2020. Drawing on extensive archival, policy and interview-based research, I trace the intersections of political economy and planning narratives during each of the six waves of camp planning -- 1993-1998 (i); 1998-2001 (ii); 2001-2006 (iii); 2006-2008 (iv); 2008-2013 (v); 2013-2020 (vi).

Here I detect the guiding figure of the future city that the municipal authorities have been striving for in each planning wave. This figure differs in the six planning waves, but since the mid-2000s - when political economy and urban security became the main planning principles - it crystallized as that of a “Gadjo city”. Since “Gadjo” means "non-Roma" in Romani language, I use the term “Gadjo city” to refer to a city in which there are no Romani cultural expressions. In partial disagreement with the scholarship on planning and race, I argue that the Gadjo city is not only exclusionary but also inclusionary. The municipal authorities strive for a racially purified city by both excluding Roma as self-sovereign subjects and including them as voiceless and passive subjects who are either housed in camps or assimilated into the white majority.

To explain the peculiarity of the ambivalence of inclusionand exclusion that characterizes the rationales of camps for civilians worldwide (Picker and Pasquetti 2015; Minca et al 2018), I show that camp planning in Rome is predicated on a twofold urban planning history. On the one hand, the planning of indigenous quarters in Italy-occupied Ethiopia (1936-1940) was driven by a desire for racial segregation and exclusion. On the other hand, the planning of Fascist new towns in central Italy (1932-1936), drew on the opposite desire for territorial reclamation (bonifica) and moral reeducation of white Italians (racial inclusion). As I show, the partial similarity between these three planning experiments - i.e. the Roma camps in Rome, the New Towns in central Italy, and the indigenous quarters in Ethiopia - is heuristic rather than coincidental. It is not limited to morphology, but signals the continuity of certain 20th century visions of the urban future in the 21st century.

The main value of this paper’s contribution arises from its relation to current research on urban planning, race and ethnicity. While this research focuses almost exclusively on Anglo-Saxon cities, where only colonialism and empire play a key role in the planning imagination (e.g. Roy 2006), my analysis opens a new window onto mainland urban Europe, where the combination of Fascist/Nazi and colonial planning legacies may be a distinctive element.

References

Beebeejaun, Y. (2022) Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and
imperial power. Planning Theory, 21(3), 248-268.
Mele, C. (2017) Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City,
New York: NYU Press,
Minca, C., Katz, I. and D. Martin (2018) Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a
Modern Political Technology. Lamham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Picker, G., & Pasquetti, S. (2015). Durable camps: the state, the urban, the everyday:
Introduction. City, 19(5), 681–688.
Roy, A. (2006). Praxis in the Time of Empire. Planning Theory, 5(1), 7-29.
Williams, R. A. (2024). From Racial to Reparative Planning: Confronting the White Side
of Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 44(1), 64-74.