Visibility as Justice: Immigrant Street Vendors and the Right to Difference in Rome

Abstract

Dominant constructions of what looks “appropriate” enable the exclusion of poor immigrants from public spaces around the world. This paper analyzes how Bangladeshi vendors challenge exclusion by tactically appearing and disappearing in Rome’s iconic landscapes. While xenophobic, pro-decorum regulations seek to banish marginalized subjects from the tourist-friendly city center, immigrant vendors mobilize their own visibility by emplacing urbanisms of opportunity, refuge, and belonging. Learning from these urbanisms, planners can deploy a spatial lens of visibility to advance the right to difference. I propose In Plain Site, a policy and place-making approach that helps empower oppressed groups to see and be seen in the city.

In the name of history: (De)Legitimising street vendors in New York and Rome

“…Carried out between 2016 and 2019, archival research in Rome involved analyses of city documents, police reports, and correspondence of Roman Jewish vendors from 1870 to after the Second World War. This research combined with ethnographic fieldwork in the historic centre of Rome, where Piazzoni carried out participant observation and interviewed vendors, tourists, residents, police officers and policy makers (Piazzoni, 2020(Piazzoni, , 2022. In New York, archival research included analysis of city records, press archives, minutes of council meetings, and agency correspondence.…”

Empowering Difference: Just Urban Design for the Immigrant Street Vendors of Rome

“…Interviews lasted forty-five to ninety minutes, were carried outside of selling hours, and took place in locations chosen by the interviewees (usually in cafés or on streets near vending areas). As detailed elsewhere (Piazzoni 2020;2022), recruitment and interviewing methods evolved through time, as relationships of trust emerged between respondents and the first author of this chapter, who undertook the fieldwork.…”

Just city planning competitions in Helsinki: between the power of image and many images of power

“…Such a relation between people and places has been further studied in place making literature and contextualised by many scholars (Relph, 1976;Tuan, 1974Tuan, , 1977Augé, 1995;Gustafson, 2001;Aravot, 2002;Friedmann, 2010;Lew, 2017). However, immigrants' right to space and their visibility in European cities is faced with space politics (Piazzoni, 2020). In seeking inclusion in the cityscape, immigrants' usage of urban space is their attempt at social participation (Babacan, 2006).…”

“…The influence of such powers varies according to the society's openness to the other. First, there is the question of the embedded power in urban planning that may restrict some groups from urban space (Piazzoni, 2020). Second, planning can act as a social regulatory body controlling the production of space (Yiftachel, 1998).…”