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This article examines forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism practised by two Roma communities in Rome. The groups live in self-made camps that exist in a legal limbo determined by municipal policies that fluctuate between 'tolerating' and threatening to demolish them. We argue that it is the simultaneous solidity and temporaneity of residents' DIY interventions that have delayed their eviction. We analyse how residents have sought to create dignified conditions through the informal architecture of their homes, to access water and electricity, and to create areas of beauty and safety around themselves. In doing so, they practice a form of tactical urbanism, generating environments for sociality and forging public spaces in apparent 'non-places': on a highway exchange and in a parking lot. Their DIY is accepted by the authorities as long as it is 'light', does not engage urban infrastructure and remains within abject locations.

Italy's urban camps for segregating the Roma minority have received much critical attention recently, yet few attempts have been made to explore how they have evolved historically and function as systems of social control from a theoretical point of view. This article seeks to fill that gap, drawing on Wacquant's framework for identifying constituent elements of ghettos past and present. It explores whether a genealogy can be traced between the early modern Jewish ghetto and today's camps, focusing on the Italian capital, Rome. It suggests that many of the original ghetto's functions operate in contemporary camps; however, it also argues that a crucial feature of the ghetto-its ability to strengthen solidarity within the segregated community-is being strategically undermined. The camps can thus be defined as neo-ghettos, rooted in the past but refined in the present and functional to their specific contemporary social and political context.

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This article examines Rome City Council's policies concerning the Roma during Francesco Rutelli's two terms as mayor (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001). It demonstrates that the Rutelli administration's policies for these minority communities shifted from a superficial but genuine attempt to overcome aspects of marginalization to a criminalizing strategy of exclusion. It is argued here that the failure significantly to improve the social conditions of the Roma was due to (a) a refusal to tackle the inter-related causes of their social exclusion and (b) submission to the anti-Roma hostility of parts of the voting public. Following the demolition of Rome's largest shanty town in October 2000, the Council was unable to house many of the Roma it had made homeless. It would seem that a 'cleaning-up' campaign was introduced to distance undocumented individuals and those with criminal records from the city through a notable rise in police raids. This change in approach was accompanied and justified by an intensification of ethnicized public order discourse.