Red Lives

All Reds Rugby Roma, a popular sports team based on self-management creates an inclusive political project in an illegally occupied place.

At the end of the eighties, in Rome we have witnessed a process of re-appropriation of some unused places and buildings, where political collectives give new meaning to abandoned spaces of the city through the illegal occupation of public and private buildings. Thus is born the auto-recovery phenomenon of municipal buildings as a possible solution to the housing problem. The local and national politics timing is in fact irreconcilable with the emergencies of the city. The effects of privatization and sale system for the public entities continue to create new exclusions. In 2002, there was a new round of occupation, for example, empty buildings in Via Bruno Pellizzi, abandoned schools such as Casalbertone, the Cinema Impero in Torpignattara district and the ex-Greyhound racing track of the capital at Viale Marconi.

And exactly at the ex-Greyhound racing track (Today LOA ACROBAX) that the All Reds Rugby Roma team was born in 2005, with a female, male and youth project teams. Promoting a popular sport as a moment of aggregation based on anti-fascism, anti-racism and anti-sexism ideals, they decide to clean up the old track for greyhound racing, abandoned for years, and turning it into a Federation-approved playground where you can now practice the sport, in freedom and freeway.
The All Reds Rugby Roma sports club is not for profit. All athletes, participating in the active life of the association, share the organization and all the decisions. Sports practice does not require a monthly fee but active participation in management and self-financing.

In this space, arise and grow new forms of aggregation, living, organization, transforming and reinventing spaces and uses. Recognizing the outcome of the stabilization process and the knowledge of these urban spaces reflects on the relationship between these and the success-failure of public programs and services for citizens. In the background, the action of autonomous collective that are organized for the recovery spaces that work according to self-made and collective management models, becoming integration sites and social aggregation triggering forms of urban regeneration.