ABSTRACT
The chapter offers an exploration of scalar processes, and the role that they play in efforts to reshape the Capital City of Italy, Rome, in light of processes on-going globally. We inquire into how and why the case of Rome is different from the scalar processes shaping other metropolises. To do so, we consider a variety of causal factors, whose interdependencies lie at the heart of the political construction of metropolitan Rome.
We assume that metropolitan features are not an end state or a pre-given characteristic of development but a historical outcome of a dynamic process, which can be conceptualized as metropolization. In particular, we construct and introduce an ideal-type, splitting metropolization into three main dimensions: economic, spatial and political. Using this ideal-type we identified some main evidences about the patterns of development in Rome: economic metropolization is weak; spatial metropolization is ambiguous; political metropolization (rescaling) is contradictory, in terms of governance structures and processes. In order to understand if and how changes of scale do occur, we consider how material and non-material ingredients are merged in different and place-specific politics of scaling. Recognizing that scale is not a pre-given level of action but socially constructed, and assuming also scale as part of a wider reconfiguration of the social and political spaces of contemporary capitalism and as a factor that helps explaining how accumulation strategies are currently shaped and work, we conclude that such patterns result from an accumulation strategy carried out by economic and political actors. Differently from what happens in most global and/or capital cities, the resulting development model is not led by main factors that shape this accumulation strategy are: the role of the economic interests that prevail in Rome, also in terms of political influence, because of its economic structure (high dependence of firms on state resources and high importance of land’s rent due to the existing property regime, as well as of the real estate sector); the form and content of political regulation carried out through national, local and intergovernmental policies, which assure and reproduce the firms’ dependence on national and local resources. This system of relationships stabilizes a trans-scalar urban regime, in which political actors exchange financial resources and regulation aimed at remunerating the interests of local economic actors with consensus and legitimacy. The extra-economic condition represented by the specific ‘morphology’ of the administrative territory of Rome, with the huge extension of the central Municipality, influences economic, spatial and political aspects of the strategy of accumulation since it provides the spatial and governance conditions for the exchange between the different actors (economic and political) of the urban regime. Said differently, material (economic; policy actions with physical and spatial impacts) and immaterial (representations, discourses) factors explain the ambiguity and contradictions of metropolitan development patterns in Rome. Since paths of development in Rome have no ‘linear’ metropolitan features, this case study provides a good term of comparison with stronger patterns of metropolitan development.
