Paper long abstract:

In this paper I criticize the standard global city theory (GCT) as it's been developed by economists and urban planners since the 1980s. According to GCT Rome shouldn't be a globalized city by any standards, since it is not the headquarter of transnational corporations, nor is it a basing point for financial industries, nor the site for really new forms of capitalism. Indeed, it is a city which has revolved for long around religious tourism and services connected to political bureaucracy. Yet nobody could deny Rome is undergoing a radical socio-cultural change because of the threefold movement of people, goods and information around the Globe. Relating my oral presentation to a documentary I'm working on with the film-maker Federico Gnemmi, the aim of my paper is to demonstrate how growing socio-cultural difference within Rome can be successfully represented and analytically processed through the visual representation of ethnographic fieldwork.