Urban Capitalism Concreteness without New Cementation: Gentrification and Grassroots Resilience

A large body of political and scientific literature certifies that the success of capitalism, ever since its emergence in the history of economics, is due to its great "transformative capacity". In the contemporary city, characterized by a post-productive structure, the regression of welfare, and a lack of trust in the political class, capitalism no longer needs to build new structures to extract value from the land: the line of the best income is represented by the "temporary population", made up of tourists who visit a city for a few days, seeking moderately priced accommodation, and are then replaced by other tourists. Such a mechanism does not require additional constructions: in neighborhoods with an established or innovative tourist vocation, the B&Bs offered on informal tourist accommodation platforms are created from apartments that previously housed the local population, who can no longer afford the cost of living in the gentrified neighborhood.

What are che social consequences of this phenomenon? Central districts, semi-peripheral areas, and the entire "consolidated city" become depopulated and lack generational renewal because new families, seeking long-term contracts, are not temporary enough. There arem howeverm some seeds of resilience: through in-depth interviews and focus groups, this paper has investigated a group of apartment owners in the city of Rome who have decided to offer rentals at controlled prices, i.e., in line with the low wage levels of the labor market in Italy. Their goal is to encourage the arrival of young couples or individual renters, rejecting the "allure" of short-term informal tourist accommodation through sharing platforms.

The analysis has been conducted with tne Nvivo and IRAMUTEQ programmes. Though the survey is still in progress, the paper offers some finding useful to capture general trends of tourism industry in Rome, just at the eve of 2025 Jubilee.