ROME-NEW YORK SEMINAR
ROME, JUNE 2000

First Session - 19.6.2000
"Cities within the City: Identity and Governance"

Report by Elio Piroddi
(first summarized version - figures are in underlined italics)

Introduction and theory (entire text)

The features of the urban crisis - the disintegration of the form, fragmentation, sprawl, loss of identity, congestion and ingovernability - commonly affect, to a lesser or greater degree, all the large European cities. However, in Rome we are faced with some of the worst features due to the dramatic growth in the last 130 years and the lack of any background.
In a little less than a century the population of Rome has multiplied by about 14 times while the physical multiplier, that of the land area, has been noteably higher.
When the Papal city with its 200,000 inhabitants was incorporated with the strength of the Italian state and thus, became the capital, all the other European capitals and large cities had already entered the industrialization era, had already worked out townplanning programs and had by far much more numerous populations. However, also in Italy, Naples, not Rome, was the largest city while Turin, Milan and Florence were going through phases of townplanning evolution much more advanced than that of Rome. Moreover, Rome was surrounded by the so-called Roman desert at the time, immersed in a region with all the aspects of under-development.
Thus, compared to the other large European cities Rome can be considered as a recently formed city and therefore, a structurely fragile city, despite its ancient roots and its thousands of years of history. A "young" city which has still not entered into maturity and suffers the consequences of a real growth crisis which, proportionally, cannot be compared to any other European city.
This provides the measurement wherein lies the difficulty in assimilating and then metabolizing the enormous quantities of material which have flooded the area.
Along with townplanning fragility we also have economic weakness. Rome has gone through a post-unitary century between building and bureaucracy depending on its role as a dual capital and exploiting its unequalled historical patrimony. It has lived off this and as such, is rarely a forerunner of development. Today, the "bureaucratic income", derived from its role as capital of the state, is destined to be reduced while building can no longer be seen as the sustaining industry for the city. It's only been in the last few years that the signs of a more advanced economic potential have come to light, however, in a climate of instability and uncertainty. Therefore, it's not easy to draw up a "role for Rome in the world" which is not that of the well-known "great historical setting" (Fratini 2000).
However, in conferming its present historical role as well as that in research, quality training, international diplomacy, European agencies, Mediterranean capital, etc., so as to be able to represent a competitive "territorial offer" compared to the rest of the world, means that the city must change the direction of the townplanning drift that has brought it to the brink of the Third World.
This, of course, does not only involve a strategy aimed at urban marketing and at competition between cities, but also and aboveall, an improvement in the standard of living in its surrounding sprawling suburbs. Given that the two objectives - improving "territorial offer" and improving the standard of living - are completely convergent, there is only one strategy. It's what we have called "reshaping cities within the city".
We have a young, immature and fragmented city which has to face a long period of metabolization which many cities, Rome included, have experienced in their history. The difference is that compared to the past, today the amounts at play in metabolizing and reconstructing and, consequently, the resources needed, are much higher and so it becomes a difficult and uncertain process. However, there doesn't appear to be any historically credible alternatives.
Thus, our theory, shared by many others, is that the city must move towards a reshaping by establishing identities and centralities for each of its components, which are basically already there. This design cannot be superimposed using a large field manouvre, with marked signs on the territory, but can be achieved only with a capillary network of readjustment starting from the bottom, passing through, one at a time, each place for development and giving the outerlying suburbs an identity. Here, for example, we have the metaphor of the "archipelago" (Cacciari) proposed by Fratini (2000), where the "sea" should be the network of parks and ecological corridors, i.e. the green network. Literally, thought, from this, the metaphor would appear to be quite inappropriate - here the sea is not an undifferentiated liquid mass but, on the contrary, is the macro-structure which holds the islands together and which cannot give up its identity and recognizition of a higher level.
This theory is linked to some largely shared main principles for the Roman townplanning thinking - the policentric model, the idea of a "green belt", the strengthening of the public transport system, chiefly the railway - and should be recognized as they coincide to a great extent with the main guiding principles in urban townplanning for many large European cities.
If common strategies are adopted in urban situations as particular and different as Rome, Berlin, Munich, London and the Ranstad, this means that the scenarios drawn up for the urban macro-regions in Western Europe are not, according to planners, so different..
Yet, regarding this common strategy the differences fortunately remain and it is on this we need to focus in order to avoid the risks of a sameness. To achieve this we need to look at the fragmentation of the city and turn it about through a gradual process of identification. This is a thinking which is supported by an important study conducted by CRESME under Lorenzo Bellicini for the City Council and which has led to individuating about some one hundred micro-centralities. These, in some cases already exist, many are still in an embryonic stage and others are only nominal reference points. Paolo Colarossi and Fabiola Fratini have proposed the following step, to analyze the project - city project made up of a federation of suburbs, from some tens of "small cities" (Colarossi 2000) with their own townplanning, architectural and managerial identity which will in turn give rise to new metropolitan municipalities.
This may appear a reductive theory but it's not. Instead, think of a strong strategy: hindering at all costs the amalgamating, moving towards filling only the in between spaces, finding again the idea of a fabric and its established order, reducing the forced mobility, matching the townplanning organization to the probable local economic cycles and taking advantage of the individual specializations. It is a difficult game, much more difficult than the big real estate deals, but I believe that it's the decisive game for the long term to transform a city in tatters into a city of cities.

Geographic and administrative framework (Abstract)

Regional and metropolitan context

(Regional Map)
(Map of the Metropolitan Area)

Rome is also the capital for the Region of Lazio.
The Region of Lazio has about 5 million inhabitants with almost 3 million of these living in Rome itself.
It is a very unbalanced Region which has still not taken on the features of the large urban regions surrounding the other capital cities.
The Metropolitan Area of Rome is about to be formed. The alternative hypotheses for the administrative organization are: a "Federal District" or a new super-City Council (Metropolitan City) divided into municipalities with a large degree of autonomy. This would lead to a real formation of true cities within the city.

The territory of the Municipality

(Map of territory, of the Districts and Suburbs)

Demographic and territorial sizes, territorial form, administrative subdivisions, Districts and Suburbs.
The most evident feature is that the territory of the Rome Municipality is as large as a province and equal to the sum of all the other nine Italian metropolitan city councils. Given a not exceedingly high population (about 2.7 million), this has resulted in a quite high proportion of the land being non-urbanized and actually used for agriculture.
The present 19 Districts register about 150,000 to 500,000 inhabitants in each (they are all larger than Latina, the second largest city in Lazio which has little more than 100,000 inhabitants), but they have few competencies and their inhabitants mainly identify with the City Council. The sense of belonging is felt more at a suburb level or even at a "micro-city" level, that of the District. However, there are within the Municipality of Rome also territorial situations which are quite identifiable, actual cities such as Ostia and Acilia.

The network of large parks

(Map of parks within the Rome area)

Despite the intense post-war urbanization the area of Rome still has wide open spaces, highly valued for their environment, nature and history. The green wedges penetrate well into the urbanized areas and one of these, the park of Appia Antica continues almost without any interruption right up to the Campidoglio in the centre of Rome. So, the large parks make up the basic structure for the territory of Rome.

Morphology of the city

(Map of the built-up and open areas and their relative measurements)
(Map of the fabric typologies and central places)
Fabric map)

The most densely urbanized part of the urban region has been examined. This includes the area within the "Grande Raccordo Anulare"(Ring Road)(about 35,000 hectares). The morphological study has led to individuating about 15 characteristic types - from the intricate and compact historical centre to the reticular types of the late 18th century city and parts of the "historic" outer-suburbs, to organisms to those parts of the contemporary city which, because of the vast increases in space and the sizes of the buildings, mark the loss of the idea of the fabric.

Scenarios(Abstract)

The "small cities" and their relative sizes

(Map of the "small cities")
(Tables with population and density data)

The above study associated with individuating central places and the main axes shows the wide variety in forms found in the city and its natural policentric role.
Inspite of the amalgamating due to the wide expansion, the degree of divisions is still high and often the places and roots of identity and old formations are recognizable. This, aided by the large green wedges, leads quite naturally to individuating, within the metropolitan city, a series of numerous small cities with their own life and characteristics.
The existence, even if only potentially, of these cities is also shown in the socio-urbanistic analysis carried out by Bellicini (1998), in Fratini's book (2000) and in the research of Colarossi (2000).

The green network as a structure

(figure of the green network on a municipal territory scale)

By linking up the present wedges, corridors and green areas and drawing up a new Town Plan we can create a green continuum which, using the metaphor of the "archipelago" (Fratini 2000), represents the "sea". In reality, it involves a high-level macro-structure which encompasses urban parks and all the established natural and environmental components in the city and draws a network of potential pedestrian, cycle and protected paths which would allow people to cross through the city.

The new Municipalities

(Map of a possible subdivisions into Municipalities)

We could come up with different hypotheses for individuating the new Municipalities, although, we would probably not stray very far from the already established perimeters of the present Districts.
However, the problem is not so much "which and how many" Municipalities but the power they will hold and their ability to represent their constituents. As always we are looking at rather large-sized "cities" (medium to large cities in the Italian ranking) and it will have to be seen how, through further divisions closer to the social and morphological situations mentioned above, it will be able to relate to as directly as possible the needs of its citizens.

The information and participation network
Of course, the system must operate at the necessary level of efficiency.
Therefore, we cannot think of an "infinite" decentralization. Instead, we must think about creating a network that has as many capillaries as possible and which will produce information and participation - Urban Centers, suburban Workshops and actual and virtual Forums.

Rome 12.5.2000