The ‘Eternal City’ is made of infinite agencies, argues Federica Giardini, through an impassioned portrait of Rome and its antagonistic forces and scintillating myths. In this short text, Giardini positions insurgent practices against the more-than-human philosophical ideals of Plato, Averroes and Al-Fārābī. This essay was excerpted from WIEN/ROMA – AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING a special edition of ARCH+ (May 2025), guest-edited by its curators Sabine Pollak, Michael Obrist, and Lorenzo Romito. This issue of ARCH+ is dedicated to the Austrian Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
The authoritarian pressures sweeping across the European continent and the globe are not only reflected in Rome; they are also intensified and directed down new paths. But generations of multiform yet interconnected mobilisations of the past twenty years have expressed a concept of belonging and citizenship radically opposed to that of the powers that be.1 Against the backdrop of the sleek imagined spaces of an authoritarian and free-market-driven Rome, we can discern the city’s rebellious and social double, generating and regenerating a material and unconditional citizenship of alterity and foreignness first expressed in its founding myth of the mundus.
"Against the backdrop of the sleek imagined spaces of an authoritarian and free-market-driven Rome, we can discern the city’s rebellious and social double, generating and regenerating a material and unconditional citizenship of alterity and foreignness first expressed in its founding myth of the mundus."
The mundus, according to Plutarch, was a ritual pit dug at the designated center of burgeoning Rome, in the place where the comitium, the space for popular assemblies, was later to be established: a circular hole in the ground, a threshold between the nether world and the world of the living, but also between the goddess of agriculture Ceres and humans, between the sacred and the profane2. Into this liminal space, uncovered three times a year, those who joined the city’s community would cast a handful of soil from their place of origin, along with the first fruits of the harvest. This foundational act over time transformed the mundus into a material archive of different identities, a place where the city’s multiple origins mingled and contributed to its constant regeneration.
This ancient practice sheds light on the generative character of the holes gaping in the urban fabric of the present: these ruins are not mere sites of occupation, but rather gateways where different provenances can meet and mingle, where the city’s past resurfaces and reinvents itself, providing new opportunities for belonging. As in the original mundus, each new group brings along its own practices, memories, and ways of life and offers them up to the city, thereby contributing to the continual extension of its mythological and material foundations.
"As in the original mundus, each new group brings along its own practices, memories, and ways of life and offers them up to the city, thereby contributing to the continual extension of its mythological and material foundations."
Contested Citizenship
Rome, the seat of power that would rather have it be level and flat, or Rome, the city of layers, with its combination of surface and depth, of amalgamation?
The former presents a vision of citizenship shaped by a new urban morality — one founded on “decorum” and securitarian violence — where ownership is a prerequisite for participation, while social conflicts are penalised. This is not merely an abstract “vision” but a fully operationalised framework designed to strip social struggles of an essential dimension: space.
In September 2024, the Italian government introduced the now-infamous Ddl Sicurezza (Public Security Bill) to the Chamber of Deputies, sparking widespread condemnation from opposition movements and large segments of the population, who took to the streets in protest against the proposed law. The bill’s centerpiece is the addition of twenty new offenses to the penal code, effectively criminalising various forms of resistance — an attack not only on the right to dissent but also on the principle of proportionality in punishment. Even a simple sit-in could now carry a prison sentence of up to seven years. Acts of dissent are redefined as criminal offenses. Squatting in abandoned buildings is recategorised under more severe charges of “vandalism” or “defacement of property,” while street protests may be prosecuted as “trespassing on public land.” More specifically, the government’s primary concern seems to be focused on protecting “properties undergoing structural renovation or environmental restoration, as well as any other properties where such actions disturb urban decorum.”
On the opposite side, a vision of citizenship crafted in the gaps in the urban fabric: autonomous, self-managed spaces where people experiment with new ways of living together. The relentless assault on the city according to a produce-or-die principle faces a proud, generative resistance. In the course of transnational right-to-the-city mobilisations against policies privatising both services and urban spaces, 2008 saw the beginning of the era of the commons. The right to housing became the right to inhabit: This led to a new wave of collective action that for a number of years has been turning neglected, closed-down, and abandoned buildings into re-appropriated and participative spaces that meet collective needs. A counter-map could now be drawn of Rome’s urban space — an atlas of the constellation of occupied, liberated, autonomous, and legalised spaces.
This rebellious city is partially hidden and is often described as having a “karstic trait”: much like the cracks and crevices of eroded limestone formations, spaces and practices emerge and disappear unexpectedly throughout the Roman cityscape, creating a discontinuous temporal and visibility structure. This karst metaphor, however, risks reducing the complexity of urban struggles to a dynamic of emergence and immersion, although something persists beyond what is evident to the naked eye, a transformative capacity that — like water in karst terrain — is still active even when it is out of sight. Visibility is not a necessary prerequisite for the ability to take action.
"Visibility is not a necessary prerequisite for the ability to take action."
Generations of struggles for social justice dwell in the ineffable yet tangible character of certain neighbourhoods, creating a material memory that may lie dormant for years before it again lends itself to being the soil for new re-insurgencies.3 Rosa Luxemburg had already described the forms of the revolutionary movement in fluid terms — “Now [the mass strike] floods like a tidal wave over the whole empire, now it recedes into a huge web of narrow streams; now it springs up from underground like a fresh spring, now it trickles away into the earth”4 — accounting for a political ability that was not executive and centralised but rather transformative, manifold, and yet regulatory.5
Indeed, urban space, nowadays overwritten by the operational rhetoric of security, productivity, and decorum, is a vast arena for multiple regulatory conflicts taking place amid silence, collective action, and resistance. This political stage has been and still is experiencing a push to regulate and neutralise the social movements along with their ability to realise alternative practices of urban coexistence. As fundamental rights are gradually transformed into market assets and liabilities within a revived timocracy — a state form in which only property ownership ensures participation — public and state bodies increasingly neglect their duty to ensure equal opportunities for individuals to fully exercise their civil rights.
"This political stage has been and still is experiencing a push to regulate and neutralise the social movements along with their ability to realise alternative practices of urban coexistence."
New Rules for an Unruly City
And yet, in Rome, the progressive erosion of the concept of citizenship has been met with various regulatory inventions. One of the karstic flows, in the form of the city’s Kurdish-speaking population, links the 1990s and the 2010s. Following the 1998 arrest of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the militant group PKK, in Rome, Kurdish refugees, emerging from the cardboard shacks and basements in which they had found shelter, together with the organisations Azad and Stalker, occupied a building that was part of the former Campo Boario slaughterhouse complex in the Testaccio6 neighbourhood. The slaughterhouse had been vacant since 1975. Over the following months, the building, renamed Ararat after the sacred mountain and eponymous, short-lived, breakaway Kurdish Republic, became a meeting place for the Kurdish community. It was also a laboratory for artists, architects, researchers, and ordinary citizens invited to share this experience of space, setting an example of self-organisation across and co-existence between different cultures.
The medley of languages and lifestyles, of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, was unprecedented and constituted a necessary counterproposal to urban development models that, in their adherence to Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” systematically excluded the very people who were now part of this affirmative and alternative re-insurgency.7 Unsurprisingly, the persistence of the Kurdish community and its culture resurfaced as flows from the Spanish anti-austerity 15-M movement and the Arab spring converged with the student-led Onda (wave) movement and the campaign for a referendum against the privatisation of local water-supply services, linking up together in a multi-pronged effort to establish a new commons. The novel Kurdish operative proposal of a “democratic confederalism,”8 a form of government based on pluralism and a decentralisation of power through layers of assemblies, served as an inspiration to the various movements; the proposed participative democracy brings to mind the melting pot of the mundus. By drawing up similar charters to govern their internal organisation, the various groups eschewed the vertical institutionalism of the municipal administration in favor of reconnecting with the profound dynamics of social mobilisations.9
Other forms of regulatory inventiveness can be found all across the city. Take, for example, the long-standing community around Lago Bullicante, where conflict between ways of living and legal regimes in urban territories have given rise to new eco-social structures. Here, the almost literal meaning of mundus – a flooded excavation pit as a place of commoning – also serves to describe the legislative vacuum surrounding the site that, depending on whom you ask, provides an opportunity for either land speculation or the rise of another form of governance. Consequently, the 2020 designation of Lago Bullicante as a natural monument bolstered the activists fighting for its survival by using legal language to effectively extend administrative protections for the natural site to its cultural and symbolic relevance.
The artistic practices that have come to inhabit those urban vacuums have developed normative powers of their own. Stalker’s artistic interventions at the lake have resurfaced the rituals of ancient Rome to emphasise the more-than-human nature of the community taking shape in the area and to make tangible emerging types of habitus.10 And in the case of Metropoliz, an occupied former meat-processing plant on the eastern outskirts of Rome, the establishment of the internationally acclaimed MAAM – Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove poliz (Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere Metropoliz) within the structure has reinforced the site’s recognition by officials, therefore strengthening the inhabitants’ hand in their battle against evictions.11 In the same vein, Lucha y Siesta — an occupied cultural center established as one of the many safe houses to protect against gendered violence, combining hospitality practices and the circumvention of legal frameworks with tactics taken from speculative fiction — has become part of a transfeminist, diverse, planetary city, a true mundus.12 Lucha y Siesta is closely connected to the transnational feminist movement Ni Una Menos (Not one [woman] less), which fights gender violence and promotes grassroots organising. Rather than relying on institutional policies to combat gendered violence, the movement develops its own feminist action plans — collectively designed strategies for resistance and social change. In this way, it redefines the operational concept of “plan”: not a rigid, top-down directive, but a flexible, horizontal, tactical tool for activism.13
Citizenship Beyond the City
Rome today is conflicted between a technocratic, illiberal model of governance and the ecosystemic awareness of its social struggles, capable of generating “mythological lenses on history and catalysts of socio-ecological renewal in the present”. And here, the memory of a Mediterranean Rome emerges — much more than a city, the setting of cultural encounters and exchanges that fostered the idea of a planetary citizenship.14 Indeed, there is a “general intellect” in struggles for social justice, a kind of shared knowledge that connects critical urban theories15 with non-European traditions. In particular, Islamic philosopher Averroes’s idea of a universal, more-than-human intelligence serves as a foundation for this way of thinking.16
"Rome today is conflicted between a technocratic, illiberal model of governance and the ecosystemic awareness of its social struggles, capable of generating 'mythological lenses on history and catalysts of socio-ecological renewal in the present'."
It is also reminiscent of the early Islamic philosopher Al-Fārābī, known for blending Plato’s theories with his own, who dedicated a significant part of his work on cities to exploring different forms of life — both human and plant life — which he referred to as al-nawābit. This term includes both the spontaneous growth of weeds, which are pervasive and deep-rooted, and the life of those who oppose the powers that be. The nawābit present various forms of life, diverse and unequal in capability, but it is through them that the madina al-kāmila (perfect city) can come to life.17 However, this city’s completeness is not about closure: Al-Fārābī constantly stresses that the city is not one of isolation but of resilience, openness, and a citizenship that is multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious.18 The two perspectives of nawābit and mundus converge and blend into each other, showing us an alternative to the perspective of the hostile, securitarian city looming over the present.
Bio
Federica Giardini is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts at Roma Tre University. She is the Director of the Master’s Program in Gender Studies and co-founder of the Master’s in Environmental Humanities. Her research focuses on gender, social movements, and political topology, and she has led several research programs on violence in urban spaces and human and non-human relations. Her publications include I nomi della crisi: Antropologia e politica (2018), which explores the intersection of anthropology and politics.
Notes
1 See Rosa Mordenti et al., Guida alla Roma ribelle (Rome: Finestre, 2014).
2 Cf. Plutarch, “Romulus,” in: Lives, vol. 1, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), 119.
3 The term crosses Anna L. Tsing’s elaborations on the natural-cultural concept of resurgence with the concept of “insurgent” knowledge, cf. Undisciplined Environments Collective, ed., Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2024).
4 Rosa Luxemburg, “Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions,” trans. Barry Gorden, International Socialism, vol. 21 (Summer 1965), 24.
5 See “UnLeading Project,” York University, accessed March 3, 2025, https://www.yorku.ca/edu/unleading/; see also Mie Plotnikof et al., “Towards a Politics of Dis/Organization: Relations of Dis/Order in Organization Theory and Practice,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization, vol. 22, no. 1 (February 2002), 1–26.
6 See Francesco Careri and Lorenzo Romito, “Stalker e i Grandi Giochi Del Campo Boario,” Building Material, no. 13 (2005), 42–47.
7 Cf. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942).
8 See Abdullah Öcalan: Democratic Confederalism (London: Transmedia Publishing, 2011). Democratic confederalism was first introduced by Öcalan in 2005 and adopted in Rojava in 2014. This political model was widely circulated in Italy through a popular graphic novel; see Zerocalcare, Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria, trans. Jamie Richards (St. Louis: The Lion Forge, 2017). [Editor’s note: The manifest antisemitism in Öcalan’s writings and the antisemitic conspiracy theories they propagate are largely ignored in leftist receptions of his political concepts; for an overview, see Chaia Heller, “Questioning Öcalan’s Jewish Question,” Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology, no. 2 (Winter 2023), accessed March 3, 2025, harbinger-journal.com/issue-2/questioning-ocalans-jewish-question/.]
9 See Federica Giardini et al., Teatro Valle occupato: La rivolta culturale dei beni comuni (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2014); see also “Carta di Lampedusa,” Melting Pot Europa, February 1, 2014, accessed March 3, 2025, www.meltingpot.org/2014/02/la-carta-di-lampedusa/.
10 See Allan Wei and Valeria Cirillo, “Penser avec les zones humides: En quête d’avenirs désirables,” Le journal de culture et démocratie, vol. 57 (2023), 9–11.
11 See Giorgio de Finis: “Ripensare la città passando per il museo,” Crítica urbana, vol. 3, no. 13 (2020), 52–56; see also Miguel Ángel Chaves Martín, “Metropoliz, ciudad mestiza: Arte, ocupación y autogestion en la periferia de Roma,” in: Marie-Caroline Leroux et al., eds., Cultura (audio)visual y espacios públicos: (re)inventando la Ciudad (Limoges: Université de Limoges, 2024), 113–24. See also Giorgio de Finis, “Metropoliz: Das bewohnte Museum,” ARCH+ 258: Urbane Praxis (December 2024), 40–45.
12 See Federica Giardini, “Ni Una Menos: Politics on a Planetary Scale,” Soft Power, vol. 15, no.1 (2021), 42–58.
13 Cf. “Abbiamo un piano: Contro la violenza maschile sulle donne e la violenza di genere,” Non Una di Meno, accessed March 3, 2025, nonunadimeno.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/abbiamo_un_piano.pdf.
14 Stalker has dedicated a number of practices to reactivate the planetary citizenship imagined and ratified in the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 CE; see “Monumento alla Cittadinanza Planetaria,” Stalker, accessed March 3, 2025, 23223b6c-c810-4b0d-bfb9-277cdd44ac44.filesusr.com/ugd/b331ca_3f5b2f89407f4d33ac416f98dcae0bb5.pdf; see also “Walking to Planetary citizenship | Lorenzo Romito | TEDxRoma,” posted on YouTube by TEDx Talks on July 16, 2018, accessed March 3, 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao1KPuIauUk&ab_channel=TEDxTalks.
15 See Paolo Virno, “General Intellect,” Historical Materialism, vol. 15, no. 3 (2007), 3–8.
16 See Augusto Illuminati, ed., Averroè e l’intelletto pubblico: Antologia di scritti di Ibn Rusha sull’anima (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996).
17 See Ilai Alon, “Fārābī’s Funny Flora: Al-Nawābit as ‘Opposition,’” Arabica, vol. 37 (1990), 56–90.
18 See Alexander Orwin, Redefining the Muslim Community: Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics in the Thought of Alfarabi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
