SQR / Outskirts of Rome, 2019
Fifteen million people live in Italian suburbs today. The territories on the outskirts of the cities suffer from lack of infrastructure, the illegal occupations of buildings and the illegal disposal of waste. The outskirts surrounding the main Italian cities are often synonymous with social decay, as those have become dormitory neighborhoods deprived from essential public and urban services.
Rome was among the first cities in Europe to build suburban hamlets. Designed and built in the 1920’s, they grew uncontrolled in the post-war period on agricultural land, without respecting master plans. It is no coincidence that Pasolini defined the Roman periphery as “the crown of thorns that surrounds the city of God”. From the 1950’s onwards, urban planning policies dealt with social housing, trying to cope with massive unemployment and built new housing for the huts that lived on the edges of the city center.
Starting from the second half of the 1970s, when the private construction sector eventually went into crisis and the housing discomfort took on even greater proportions, the municipal administration started a massive investment program to relaunch the construction of social housing.
Badly connected to the heart of the city, but totally dependent on it for commercial functions and services, the suburbs have continued to grow in isolation over the last few decades. The city has ultimately grown without control, becoming a place of strong economic and social unease, constituted of marginalization, violence and, often, occupied by the various local mafias. The economic crisis of 2008 has exponentially accentuated those social risks.
Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 1960’s wrote: “Rome would be the most beautiful city in the world if, at the same time, it was not the ugliest city in the world. Naturally beauty and ugliness are linked: the latter makes the former pathetic and human, the former makes one forget the latter.
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