Conference Program

The “Ex Mercati Generali” is a complex of structures established in 1922 in Rome, specifically in the Ostiense district. The area has remained abandoned since 2002; and then followed a long phase - lasting more than twenty years - of proposals, revisions, cancellations, and renegotiations of projects and concessions. In the meantime, nature has taken its course: a spontaneous ecosystem has emerged that today represents a significant example of urban renaturalization in the city center. The turning point for the future of the area came in 2025, when the concessionaire signed a new agreement with Hines, a large real estate investment fund based in Texas. The project involves the demolition of the pavilions and the construction of ten new buildings. Seven of these will be used as a luxury student accommodation.

In response to the project, grassroots protests quickly emerged, hybridizing online and offline tools (Treré, 2019). In particular it is worth noting the high level of youth participation, which has resulted in an online communicative style that combines memetic language (Mina, 2019), symbolic artwork elements (Stammen & Meissner, 2024), and participatory storytelling practices oriented toward civic engagement. In the agreement signed between Hines and the Municipality of Rome, the local community was consulted only after the contract had already been finalized, in a form of invitation-based participatory practice (Antonucci et al., 2024) without effective participation, resembling what has been defined as “participationism” (ivi).

The analysis therefore focuses on participatory practices and the activation of mobilization and public participation from an environmental risk perspective (Webler & Tuler, 2021), linked to the cementification and privatization of a large public area intended to become a luxury student residence, further exacerbating processes of gentrification (Chatterton, 2010). The participatory process is interpreted as a form of democratic learning for liminal communities (Barbas 2020; Antonucci et al., 2024), which tactically (de Certeau, 1988) uses media affordances (Nagy & Neff, 2015) and platform algorithms (Bonini & Trerè, 2024) to raise awareness within the infosphere, with a focus on the way in which a composite grassroots protest space can become a political laboratory that experiments with horizontal and democratic educational practices for the entire citizenry.

Methodologically, the study adopts a multimodal qualitative approach (Bussoletti & Belotti, 2022), which combines multiple data collection sources such as interviews and memos taken by the researchers during the committee meetings and protest demonstrations, along with posts of the @generaliliberi social media pages and whatsapp community. In this way the analysis explores both the frontstage and backstage dimensions of the protest organization (Treré, 2019). Through participatory observation (Kawulich, 2005) along with digital ethnography (Pink et al. 2016) of the instagram page of the committee and semi-structured interviews with campaign organizers and administrators, the analysis focus on the activists’ media literacy and practices (Bussoletti, et al. 2025), proposing that urban conflicts mediated through digital platforms can become spaces of collaborative civic practice.