The World as Mundus – Governing the City from Below

The authoritarian pressures sweeping across the European continent and the globe are not only reflected in Rome; they are also intensified and directed down new paths. But generations of multiform yet interconnected mobilizations of the past twenty years have expressed a concept of belonging and citizenship radically opposed to that of the powers that be.¹ Against the backdrop of the sleek imagined spaces of an authoritarian and free-market-driven Rome, we can discern the city’s rebellious and social double, generating and regenerating a material and unconditional citizenship of alterity and foreignness first expressed in its founding myth of the mundus.