Urban Theory
This scholar wrote about New York, London, and Tokyo as the world's top "Global Cities."
Who is Saskia Sassen
This informal, self-built neighborhood in Rome contrasts with planned middle-class areas like Nomentano.
What is Pietralata
This Latin phrase meaning "head of the world," found on construction signs around Rome, reflects the city's symbolic rather than economic global power.
What is Caput Mundi?
This famous Italian filmmaker met many of his future actors in Torpignattara, and murals of him can be found there today.
Who is Pier Paolo Pasolini?
This type of housing, where residents occupy buildings without paying rent or having legal title.
What is Squatting
Thomassen & Vereni describe Rome as "Diversely ___," meaning it's ____ in its own unique way.
What is Global
This neighborhood, visited in Week 5, is associated with gentrification and creative class migration.
What is Pigneto
The term for when a tight-knit immigrant community creates its own economic and social networks within a host city.
What is Enclave
This sanctuary south of Rome, visited in Week 10, shows how Catholicism works as both a local and global institution.
What is Divino Amore Sanctuary
Miriam Tola studies this Roman site where a spontaneous lake formed in a former factory ruin.
What is Ex-Snia Lake
The fact that shop owners in Pietralata stopped paying rent and began closing reflects competition from these, which killed street-level commerce.
What are supermarkets?
Rome's most multiethnic neighborhood, visited in Week 6, with many immigrant communities.
What is Torpignattara
The process by which wealthier residents move into a neighborhood, displacing poorer ones.
What is Gentrification
Street art has functioned as a voice for the marginalized since ancient times — this buried Roman city preserves some of the earliest known examples of crude public graffiti.
What is Pompeii?
The decade in which Rome experienced a massive speculative real estate boom and subsequent crash.
What is the 1880s?
Short-term rental platforms like Airbnb drive this process that displaces local residents from neighborhoods.
What is Touristification
The Torbellamonica neighborhood sits on land that was privately held by this noble family all the way up until the early 20th century, when they began selling it off piece by piece.
Who is the Borghese Family?
In the 1990s, when Rome's few industries shut down, Italian families left Torpignattara and these three communities moved in, transforming the neighborhood.
Who are the Chinese, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities?
John Agnew's 1998 article argues that Rome was an "impossible" version of this — a national capitol that could never fully modernize due to its ancient weight.
What is a capital city?
What percentage of Rome’s housing is informal?
What is 30%
Lefebvre's concept that all city residents deserve access to urban resources and decision-making.
What is The right to the city
The historic Jewish residential zone in Rome, now a heritage and food tourism destination.
What is The Jewish Ghetto
By the early 2000s, more than this percentage of students in Torpignattara's schools were foreign-born.
What is 80%?
Sean Wyer's reading describes how the Jewish Quarter was transformed by this tourism-driven phenomenon.
What is Foodification
This percentage of families in Torbellamonaca live in absolute poverty — compared to a national average of under 7%.
What is 41%?