A quiet claim to citizenship: mobility, urban spaces and city practices over time

Abstract

The article discusses the relations between mobility and ‘citizenship’ in two Italian cities, in the frame of two chronological contexts: early modern Rome and contemporary Turin and Marseille. The article’s aim is twofold: on the one hand, it explores the role of transient individuals in shaping urban space; on the other hand, it discusses individuals’ spatial practices as forms of citadinité and being part of the city. The long-term, interdisciplinary approach that we adopt in the article aims to address the question of settledness/unsettledness in contemporary cities through the prism of urban societies of the past, where citizenship and most of the institutions operated at the scale of the city. The final aim of this article is to ‘reinsert’ the presence of transient inhabitants into the framework of forms of urban belonging and unseat the dichotomy between settled and unsettled, formal and informal, legal and illegal ‘citadins’.

Keyword:

• Mobility
• citizenship
• citadinité
• early modern Rome
• contemporary Turin

Notes

1. We will continue to use the French term throughout the paper because we did not find a satisfactory translation in English.

2. Except for agriculture and hotel industry; domestic and care work; building; machine-building; managerial and highly qualified work.

3. The Italian Constitution, Community law and International conventions ratified by Italy guarantee the right to education to all children, without discrimination based on nationality, the legality of their residence status or any other circumstances. As for access to medical care, Italian law and the Court of Appeal have repeatedly stated that health is a constitutional and universal value and, in the case of a foreign person without a residence permit, this value prevails over the state’s interest in expelling him/her. As a consequence, all essential services must be guaranteed without discrimination.

4. These groups arrived in the late 2000s. We use the ethnonym ‘Roma’, although the term does not fully account for the complexity of the identities/ethnic minorities living in the contexts we studied. Notwithstanding this problem, the term Roma is commonly used in representations of and discourses of the Roma question. As for the people we met, they refer to themselves as both ‘Romanian’ and ‘Roma’.

5. In 1568, an ordinance ordered vagrants and oziosi (‘idle people’, meaning the unemployed) to leave the city within ten days, and the same bando was issued repeatedly throughout the century. ASR, Bandi del Governatore, vol. 410, 23/9/1564, 6/9/1608, 15/7/1642, 18/1/1649; Ibidem, vol. 411, 6/4/1672. Again in 1676, an ordinance targeted four groups of people: besides ‘idle people’ and vagrants (who had to leave the city), unemployed immigrants were prevented from entering the city and former soldiers from bringing arms with them (Ibidem, 6/4/ 1676).

6. ASR, Ospizio apostolico di San Michele, part II, Esami dei poveri, vol. 201, 1674.

7. ASR, Ospizio apostolico di San Michele, part II, Esami dei poveri, vol. 201, 1673.

8. Examples can be found in the Archivio storico del Vicariato di Roma (ASVR), Parrocchia di Santa Maria in Trastevere, Stati anime, 1677; ASR, Camerale II, Decima, 1644.

9. Campi nomadi (literally ‘camps for nomads’) were put in place by the Italian government in the 1980s in order to spatially contain the Roma presence (see Sigona 2011).

10. A kind of bar, these shacks are regularly shut down by the authorities as they do not have a license to sell liquor. They are subsequently reopened by their inhabitants.

11. Field notes, Turin, July 2014.

12. This Regulation includes, among forbidden behaviours, ‘washing in public fountains or anywhere else on public soil’ and ‘immersing [oneself] in or misusing public fountains’.

13. Field notes, Turin, September 2014.

14. Field notes, June 2013.

15. Field notes, Turin, August 2014.