What do you think?
Rate this book
New Anthropologies of Europe
Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City
Is 21st-century Rome a global city? Is it part of Europe's core or periphery? This volume examines the "real city" beyond Rome's historical center, exploring the diversity and challenges of life in neighborhoods affected by immigration, neoliberalism, formal urban planning, and grassroots social movements. The contributors engage with themes of contemporary urban studies–the global city, the self-made city, alternative modernities, capital cities and nations, urban change from below, and sustainability. Global Rome serves as a provocative introduction to the Eternal City and makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship.
- GenresItaly
302 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2014
5 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 13, 2023
It's rare to find books in English on contemporary Italy. Lots of Roman Empire, Borgias, Mussolini, etc but this one tackles the recent past. It's a series of essays by different writers on various sociology related topics. Each is about 10 pages long so if you don't like one, keep going because they're fairly different.
Themes include a lot of coverage around Rome's housing situation. The forced move of marginal populations out of the city core to the outskirts, communities settling in unauthorized places, struggles of the Roma and other immigrants to maintain stable housing situations. A couple essays deal with the changes around the two Roman soccer teams and one on the changes brought to a neighborhood once a suburban shopping mall is built. One overriding theme is how much of Rome's development has been done with minimal involvement from the government and when government is involved, they are often colluding with big developers without much thought for the people occupying those spaces now.
This varied in readability for me. Some essays come across as wonky, sociology textbook language while others are very down to earth. Often the ones that are more difficult to wade through are the ones written in English so the translation is not the hindrance. In any case, it's an informative read for anyone interested in learning what's going on under the covers of Roman society. But the limitation of the book is that it deals minimally with economics and politics directly so you're not going to see evaluations of what migrating to the Euro did or changes in the political parties over the past 20 years. It's fairly focused on sociology.
Themes include a lot of coverage around Rome's housing situation. The forced move of marginal populations out of the city core to the outskirts, communities settling in unauthorized places, struggles of the Roma and other immigrants to maintain stable housing situations. A couple essays deal with the changes around the two Roman soccer teams and one on the changes brought to a neighborhood once a suburban shopping mall is built. One overriding theme is how much of Rome's development has been done with minimal involvement from the government and when government is involved, they are often colluding with big developers without much thought for the people occupying those spaces now.
This varied in readability for me. Some essays come across as wonky, sociology textbook language while others are very down to earth. Often the ones that are more difficult to wade through are the ones written in English so the translation is not the hindrance. In any case, it's an informative read for anyone interested in learning what's going on under the covers of Roman society. But the limitation of the book is that it deals minimally with economics and politics directly so you're not going to see evaluations of what migrating to the Euro did or changes in the political parties over the past 20 years. It's fairly focused on sociology.
Displaying 1 of 1 review