ROMA 2025: Infrastructures and Interruptions in the Year of the Jubilee

Ten years ago, twenty five design schools, including Columbia GSAPP, jointly proposed a vision for the future of Rome, a city known mostly for its past. Roma 20-25 was an ambitious international investigation across neighborhood, urban, and regional scales, dividing the Comune di Roma’s extents into a 5 by 5 grid of 10km by 10km square parcels, and assigned one parcel to each design team. The teams were tasked to think both internally about their interventions and holistically about how these projects situate themselves amongst the broader design proposal. The projects were compiled into an exhibit at the MAXXI (National Museum of 21st Century Arts) titled “Roma 20-25: New Life Cycles for the Metropolis” and accompanying published volume of the same name by Quodlibet.

The project drew both conceptual and logistical inspiration from the 1978 collaboration and exhibition Roma interrotta (Rome interrupted), which saw a dozen architects and designers working from the Nolli plan to re-imagine equal subsections of the center of Rome. The exhibition was re-installed at the MAXXI in 2014, and created a direct correspondent to dialogue with the proposals of Roma 20-25, which sought to extend the design laboratory beyond the historic city center and encompass the broader metropolitan territory (50km by 50km). Now, ten years later, 2025 has arrived, and the projects warrant another re-evaluation.

What reflections and retrospective understandings can we draw from the last ten years of politics, culture, and urbanism in Rome as they relate to the Roma 20-25 proposals? How do the infrastructural upheaval of the Linea C metro construction and the preparations for the 2025 Jubilee reshape how life in Rome operates in the context of these reflections, and what do they say about the way architects and urbanists develop the future(s) of a city known so well for its past? What can we infer about the Rome of 2035 or 2050 as a result of our work?