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This essay explores the political struggles around the making of the peripheral neighbourhood of Nuova Ponte di Nona in Rome, examining the place that housing occupies in securitarian domopolitics as a politics of protecting one's home while at the same time (re) producing the materiality of the neighbourhood along class and race divides. The essay calls for a greater analytical focus on issues of materiality in the recently emerging debates on 'domopolitics' or 'the politics of home'--a politics which constructs various scales of territory as a 'home' to be protected against invading outsiders cast as enemies. It conjoins debates around urban materiality with debates around the fear of racialized others outside the home as constitutive of the development of the 'domestic fortress'. In this regard, the essay takes up the argument on the centrality of race in securitization moves, providing empirical support for the increased analytical emphasis on the workings of race alongside those of class, and on the embeddedness of racializing practices in corporeality and urban material culture.1The fieldwork covered a range of actors (police, a neighbourhood patrol, inhabitants of a nearby Roma camp) whose practices I examined through interviews and participant observation--including during police and neighbourhood patrols--and digital ethnography.

This introduction to the special section charts the ways in which the concept of vigilance has been loosely conceptualized at the intersection between security, surveillance, and border studies. It rethinks vigilance through the conceptual lens of vigilance regimes, as well as through the productivity of watchfulness in different contexts. Vigilance is conceptualized as an assemblage of moral ideas, belonging, increased attention, and social practice, located in certain sociopolitical contexts, concrete spaces, and technologies. Regimes of vigilance are defined as complex assemblages of practices and discourses that mobilize alertness for specific goals, which are embedded in particular materialities of watchfulness, and which in turn have effects on social practice and processes of subjectivation. This introduction calls for greater analytic attention toward the agency that vigilance produces, and seeks to define vigilance and the regimes that it constitutes, offering a productive lens for the study of socially mobilized alertness.

Between 160.000 and 180.000 Roma and Sinti live in Italy, amounting to less than 0.3% of the population. 1 Notwithstanding this insignificant percentage, in the spring of 2008, following an episode of moral panic around a murder perpetrated by a Romanian citizen of Roma background in Rome, the Italian government declared a state of emergency spurred by the presence of numerous "nomad settlements" in the regions of Latium, Lombardy and Campania. The ruling was motivated by the "massive invasion" of what in popular parlance, but also administrative labels, are commonly called "nomads": a heterogeneous group made of various Roma from ex-Yugoslavian countries, as well as from new EU member states (in particular Romania and Bulgaria), but also Italian Roma (including Sinti and Caminanti 2). The declaration of a state of emergency provided prefects with exceptional powers and resources to combat "nomad criminality". This episode, referred to as emergenza nomadi, was neither a real emergency-the declaration of a state of emergency being limited to natural catastrophes 3-nor about "nomads": most of the Roma and Sinti in Italy, like in most European countries, have been sedentary for at least three generations. A "fictitious state of emergency" 4 declared by decree, the emergenza nomadi was ruled unconstitutional in November 2011. 5 Yet, 10 years after the declaration, some of the structures and dynamics brought about by the emergency decree pursue unimpeded their insecuritization work in Rome's peripheries. The "Public and Emergency Security" 1 Piasere 2012.-I am thankful for their constructive comments to Maria Ketzmerick, Regina Kreide, Andreas Langenohl, and the participants of the concept group on power within the project SFB-Transregio 138 'Dynamics of Security. Types of Securitization in Historical Perspective', funded by the German Research Foundation. An earlier version was presented at the 14th EASA Biennial Conference "Anthropological legacies and human futures"