Rome as a private city: the only salvation for the capital is to evacuate, privatize and liberalize as much as possible
Popular district of San Lorenzo, outside day: a small crowd of people with an ordinance mask and microphones and notebooks in their hands gather in front of an ocher building on which a socially committed writer has seen fit to write the demanding but lopsided motto " there is no speculation " .
There is the mayor, Virginia Raggi, in the front row. An institutional visit to the school complex that rises behind it, and which becomes an opportunity, in the face of a small protest from social centers and agitators on permanent service, to issue a declaration intended to ignite the controversy.
The Municipality of Rome, the first citizen says in summary, will buy the Cinema Palazzo and make it a cultural pole to be returned to its occupants, who are therefore imagined as guardians of the orthodoxy of the healthy and correct management of an asset. And he does not declare it to the citizens, but to the activists themselves.
The Cinema Palazzo is not a real cinema, in reality, no longer at least: it was, until it was ruined and abandoned for years, only to be occupied and become, pruning the various geological lemmas that have settled to hide the real essentially, a social center of the radical left.
I could have cited many other similar cases, on the other hand the occupations in Rome are swarming and the contempt for both public and private property seems to have become the distinctive feature of politics: in the summer of 2019, sources of the Interior Ministry estimated that there were well 82 occupied public buildings, hosting an impressive 11,000 people.
A considerable mass, and clearly partial compared to the real numbers also studded with other occupations perhaps not yet registered or hit and run: an army also electoral and pressure in terms of public opinion with which the politicians installed pro tempore to administer public affairs confront, both in the election campaign and after.
From time to time the competent Departments and the individual Municipalities draw up lists of occupied properties, a sort of Spoon River of palaces, houses, lands, ruins once fruitfully used by the Capitoline administration and then flowed back into discomfort and occupations. It is not a simple census work since very often the same Rome Capital does not have full and complete knowledge of its real estate assets.
But choosing the case of the Cinema Palazzo was inevitable, and for an absolutely and symbolically perfect reason, to restore the general climate of disvalue towards the property: a mayor who, as if the money of the body he manages and administers were his own, he coaxes the occupants who have just been evacuated, making it clear that their action of "culture from below" would have been carried out by the institution, then returning the property, purchased with the money of the community, to the militants of the social center.
To witness the disconcerting episode there is also a detailed article of 28 January 2021 published in the Art Tribune signed by Massimiliano Tonelli, a press release relaunched by the Ansa agency, the mayor himself who on Instagram said he was "on their side" (of the occupiers , of course ) and, above all, the press release from the former occupants who just recently returned, with their open letter addressed to the Rays, to ask for an account of that commitment.
On the other hand, already in December 2020 the City Council had approved a memorandum to "preserve the social vocation" of the space. And following that impromptu meeting on the road, some meetings of a technical table were held on the issue.
Why am I dwelling on this episode? I do not do it, in reality, to stigmatize the episode in itself as much as the climate that surrounds the eternal city, like an inancrenito shroud, and which by now has only the dust of the centuries.
To tell the truth, in cultural terms, the question also seems to transcend the important but geographically limited borders of the capital: the acquittal of some of the occupants has arrived in recent days, with the endorsement of a judiciary that has now revived its own "Social vocation", as it would have been said in the heart of the sixties when the theorization of the alternative use of law was formulated, that is the political activism of the magistrate.
But the story of the Cinema Palazzo is engraved in a broader discourse that involves the institutional sense of Capitoline politics: we are, on the other hand, in the year of the renewal of the City Council (technically, the Capitoline Assembly but beyond the nominalisms, Rome remains in an unsolved cocoon that relegates it to a mere Municipality) and elections that, although moved forward by the rage of the pandemic, will take place in a few months. Elections destined to slightly shift the general inability or impossibility of administering, in the absence of a radical rationalization of the institutional figure of the Roma Capitale body that is consistent with the new constitutional data and that recognized only with the reform of Title V, very belatedly respect to the original text of the Fundamental Charter, to the new article 114 Rome as the Capital of Italy.
Rome is objectively a giant with feet of clay, a capital that hosts in its womb, a unique case in the world, another state, the Vatican: a city that duplicates its functions and in which everything is suspended in the ambiguous indistinction between local authority and factors related to capital.
A lazy and grieving city that if on the one hand was sung with vivid participation by Goethe, Taine, Stendhal, Zola and by the romantic poets, then on the other hand it was despised and mocked by them for its filth, for its calling out of the history, for its irrationality.
Rome, even today, is that sleeping giant who doesn't give a damn, as the extraordinary Alberto Sordi screams in Luigi Magni's historical film “In the name of the sovereign people” .
But Rome, beyond its own faults, its lack of self-awareness, has a genetic defect that recovers in the consistency of its political class: the Capitoline left and right, although different, for other reasons, find themselves united by being polarized in an almost synchronicity on a general conception of welfare statism and unbridled economic protectionism.
Excluding the "left from the ZTL", for rich and bored intellectuals, and the "right from the extreme periphery", instead reaching out to pamper the Capitoline lumpenproletariat , there is a profound substance that binds the two sides.
On the one hand, a left, within which I also place the experience of Rays who more than once winked at social centers and similar realities, who looks at these experiences of "occupations from below". But on the other side of the political spectrum, the "social right", a world-label very useful for explaining the conceptual coordinates that bind the Brothers of Italy and the Roman League, both originating in fact from the same cultural humus.
The concrete referents and social classes change but both sides seem to be devoted to considering only the reasons of those who, for one reason or another, seem to have to depend on welfare or protectionist intervention in the public sphere.
Productive categories, property owners, entrepreneurs, on the contrary, seem to become children of a lesser God in the general theorem of institutional representation of interests and politics.
Take, for example, the historical battles of the Roman right, which led Alemanno to settle in Palazzo Senatorio: the categories subject to attention always seem to be the same. Street vendors, taxi drivers and NCC, in some cases concessionaires of public goods or services as in the case of the managers of the maritime state property that has been lying placid and untouched for decades in Ostia.
All respectable categories, for heaven's sake, but which in common have a total aversion to any canon of market logic, competition and liberalization: we all remember the chronicle punctuated by controversy and ferocious protests against the tender for beach services, especially after the entry into force of the infamous Bolkestein Directive, and we remember equally well the street demonstrations of taxi drivers with consequent blocking of traffic.
The Roman right seems unable to ignore this statically conservative logic, thus becoming the champion of the rent of the position of licenses and concessions which, very often it is forgotten, deeply affect the well-being of citizens: in fact, no one ever invokes the market as if it were a punishment with respect to a given subject holding a license or a concession, the market on the contrary is the rationality of management and allocation of resources which should in hypothesis lead, without distorting public interventions, to the well-being of the various actors that it populates, not last are the citizens who are struggling with services managed in a tendentially monopolistic way.
The discourse becomes even more alive if we shift our gaze to the universe of Capitoline investee companies, a true cross and delight of the Roman panorama: delight for the electoral reservoirs, between invasive trade union presences and packages of votes, an authentic cross for citizens who find themselves with waste collection, public transport, poorly performing and equally poorly satisfying cultural heritage (euphemism).
The tongues of flame that envelop the twisted metallic shape of some bus, or the carnage swarming along broken escalators, and the structural delays of the races, and the mountains of garbage on which wild boars and rats graze testify in an irrevocable way in doubt how much the wearily monopolistic management is doomed to failure and weakness in the quality and quantity of the services provided.
Rome would need a massive privatization campaign: of its services, its goods, its assets. For so long the dust of public management has settled, grain by grain, that the heart of the problem is now invisible: the managerial and decision-making incapacity of politics, its lack of courage in gently facing structurally gangrenous problems.
The mere thought of privatizing goods and services horrifies politicians who would feel naked and alone, no longer having an electorate of reference: yet, they seem not to understand that every service rendered more efficient is the satisfaction of the citizens who benefit from that service.
Ordinary citizens also vote, if ever one has forgotten it. The votes lost against some single category are recovered, with broad interests, in the body of a citizenship happy and satisfied for the services rendered.
Parks in public hands dirty, neglected, badly populated by stragglers, it is believed that the mere fact of keeping them open to all as public is a favor given to citizens: but are they really "open" only because they are public? I wouldn't say: no one in their right mind would take their little family to a park infested with waste, wild boars and stragglers, with the risk of stepping on a syringe or being robbed.
No more than one might think that a social center is a meeting place open to citizenship and that "recovers" some social value of a given property. It is only a political venue in which traffic, activities, concerts, catering services take place, all almost always outside any canon of legitimacy and legality, in unfair competition with restaurateurs and concert venues that instead must comply with regulations. safety, authorization, hygiene, and so on.
In Rome, monopolistic position rents must be overcome, otherwise the city will never come out of the swamp into which it has plunged. The key words to restart the capital are protection of property, market and competition: and by market I mean the real market, not reliance on a single private individual perhaps favored by his true or presumed political affiliation.
All occupied spaces must be cleared and returned to their public dimension or to private legitimate owners. There is no presumed "social vocation", which very often is just a convenient cultural alibi.
Taxi drivers' licenses should be put up for competition, bathing services should be banned, large city parks and floodplain areas of the Tiber should be privatized.
I prefer to pay an entrance ticket and be able to enjoy a lush, well-kept and safe park, rather than grazing on the sun-baked moor populated by gaunt figures of drug addicts and various stragglers.
It is not a question of wealth or discrimination, any person with common sense and reasoning would prefer to spend two or five euros rather than enter for free and step on a syringe after three meters. It is a titanic challenge, I realize, especially for a weakened political class and hardly willing to question itself. Will anyone want to collect it?
The post Rome private city: the only salvation for the capital is to evacuate, privatize and liberalize as much as possible appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/roma-citta-privata-lunica-salvezza-per-la-capitale-e-sgomberare-privatizzare-e-liberalizzare-il-piu-possibile/ on Mon, 29 Mar 2021 04:55:00 +0000.