Heirs To The Ghetto
In Italy today, politicians have become the lead architects of a low-cost human-warehousing system designed to contain the minority Roma, or Gypsy, community. Visitors to the city remark that the visibility of the Roma -- especially around train stations, restaurants and tourist sites -- is lower than in past decades. What they do not realize is that this superficial change reflects a series of political actions which have profoundly reshaped the Roma’s status within the Italian state.
For years, and most notably with the closure in February of the Casilino 900 enclave, Italian authorities have pushed the Roma out of squatter settlements that were unofficially tolerated and into sanctioned housing developments, where fences, gates, guards, flood lights and surveillance cameras box in and monitor the residents. Legislation passed in 1985 enabled the provincial government to build special camps in undesirable areas on the periphery of the capital. This ordinance, together with special police powers granted in 2007, and the subsequent declaration of a regional state of emergency, allowed municipal authorities in Rome to create and subsidize a separate zone -- a separate reality -- for the Roma. Operating through this loophole, politicians delivered on their increasingly xenophobic campaign platforms and at the same time evaded the constraints of human rights covenants established by the European Union. Other EU nations followed suit. This summer's Roma eviction campaign in France prompted Italian Foreign Minister Roberto Maroni to complain that the French were "doing nothing more than copying Italy."
Today Italian provincial governments -- particularly in Rome, Milan and Naples -- are busily creating and expanding camps for the nation’s most reviled and historically mistreated minority. The result is deepening hardship; of the approximately 140,000 Roma in Italy, including 7,400 in Rome, 35 percent are settled in enclaves built or tolerated by the government, 15 percent are itinerant, 75 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 3 percent will live beyond 60 years -- fully twenty years behind Italy’s national average.
The nine authorized Roma enclaves of Rome are bleak places. Water and sewage are inadequate, housing is crowded and uncomfortable, proximity to neighbors is tight and inflexible (and does not take into account the affinities and antipathies among Roma groups of different national origins). The only places for children to play are the concrete slabs between the boxy housing containers. Inoffensive when new, the containers are quickly degraded by high occupancy and insufficient maintenance. Manufactured and marketed as temporary housing for disaster relief and humanitarian emergencies, the units have thin walls with little insulation, and in Rome they have been adopted as a permanent response to the "Emergenza Nomadi". This is in part because some Italians believe the Roma prefer lightweight dwellings, a notion woven into the nomadic mythology that surrounds them, and in part because the Roma are deemed unworthy of the housing options available to others.
read the rest here at Design Observer
For years, and most notably with the closure in February of the Casilino 900 enclave, Italian authorities have pushed the Roma out of squatter settlements that were unofficially tolerated and into sanctioned housing developments, where fences, gates, guards, flood lights and surveillance cameras box in and monitor the residents. Legislation passed in 1985 enabled the provincial government to build special camps in undesirable areas on the periphery of the capital. This ordinance, together with special police powers granted in 2007, and the subsequent declaration of a regional state of emergency, allowed municipal authorities in Rome to create and subsidize a separate zone -- a separate reality -- for the Roma. Operating through this loophole, politicians delivered on their increasingly xenophobic campaign platforms and at the same time evaded the constraints of human rights covenants established by the European Union. Other EU nations followed suit. This summer's Roma eviction campaign in France prompted Italian Foreign Minister Roberto Maroni to complain that the French were "doing nothing more than copying Italy."
Today Italian provincial governments -- particularly in Rome, Milan and Naples -- are busily creating and expanding camps for the nation’s most reviled and historically mistreated minority. The result is deepening hardship; of the approximately 140,000 Roma in Italy, including 7,400 in Rome, 35 percent are settled in enclaves built or tolerated by the government, 15 percent are itinerant, 75 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 3 percent will live beyond 60 years -- fully twenty years behind Italy’s national average.
The nine authorized Roma enclaves of Rome are bleak places. Water and sewage are inadequate, housing is crowded and uncomfortable, proximity to neighbors is tight and inflexible (and does not take into account the affinities and antipathies among Roma groups of different national origins). The only places for children to play are the concrete slabs between the boxy housing containers. Inoffensive when new, the containers are quickly degraded by high occupancy and insufficient maintenance. Manufactured and marketed as temporary housing for disaster relief and humanitarian emergencies, the units have thin walls with little insulation, and in Rome they have been adopted as a permanent response to the "Emergenza Nomadi". This is in part because some Italians believe the Roma prefer lightweight dwellings, a notion woven into the nomadic mythology that surrounds them, and in part because the Roma are deemed unworthy of the housing options available to others.
read the rest here at Design Observer