Abstract

This essay deals with a quarter in the outskirts of Rome, the Pigneto. This is the object of an ethnographic research which I began on September 2001 as a doctoral dissertation in the Anthropology of Contemporariness at the University of Milano-Bicocca. It is a community study, mostly worked out by studying the everyday life's activities and practices by the members of Pigneto Residents' Association, a political Committee born in the Nineties. This essay aims at demonstrating that, if we want to understand the process of transformation in progress in this area in the last ten years, we have to analyze the representations produced by the inhabitants, as if they were a power's field. The transformation of this popular outer suburb into a trendy area, indeed, is not a result of a natural process, but is due to high-income social groups' settlement and, at the same time, the expulsion of low income social groups. If, on the one hand, this involved a concrete improvement of the conditions of the buildings, on the other hand it implied the beginning of new and specific forms of social segregation for this area.