Borderline technique: a semiotic strategie for controlling the urban space in Italy

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on recent practices of urban control in Italy, and particularly in the city of Rome, investigating the handling of the public space in a new middle class suburban district. Especially focusing on spatial privatization, visibility construction and pathways control, the article tries to depict some manipulation strategies of people’s competence for moving throughout the public space. Control tools and strategies are put in relation with some urban security regulations recently adopted by Italian government and cities municipalities, in order to avoid spontaneous settlements of immigrants and roma gypsies and sinti people. Using some analytical instruments of the structural semiotic theory, the article argues that it’s possible to consider spatial organization and political speeches as parts of an intersemiotic translation process and that the goal of this process is to create a new form of urban marginality, composed by a mass of people forced to continuously move. In order to describe the specificity of this kind of situation are finally taken in consideration the differences with the panoptical organization depicted by Michel Foucault and his reflection about control and security.