Fighting for the City at the Neighbourhood Scale: The Comitati di Quartiere in 1970s Rome

The comitati di quartiere (neighbourhood associations, or literally committees) exemplify the new forms of grassroots activism of the 1970s and played a key role in the urban social conflicts in Italian cities—especially in its speculation-ridden capital, Rome. A comparison of two particularly influential Roman neighbourhood associations—Comitato di quartiere Magliana and Comitato di quartiere delle Valli—sheds light on similarities and differences regarding actors, approaches, watchwords and repertoires of action. While the former implemented self-organized rent strikes and supported squatters in the working- and lower middle-class neighbourhood to occupy hundreds of flats in what they interpreted as an urban front of a more general class struggle, the latter mainly aimed at the defence of a 20-hectare meadow at the southern fringe of the middle-class neighbourhood from development plans, but also fought for the improvement of the local social infrastructure and organized a variety of social and cultural activities. In both Magliana and Quartiere delle Valli—albeit in different forms and with different outcomes—autonomous collective actors mobilized for what Castells describes as ‘the city as a use value’, focusing on collective consumption demands, and for ‘the city as a political entity of free self-management’.