Ricerc@Sapienza

The city of Rome displays a marked infrastructural deficit, if compared to other fellow European cities. The difficulty to organise a sound and capillary urban railway network in Rome is evident, and it is generally associated with archaeological and geological issues in the city’s underground.
The ‘Metro C’ project – the case study of this research – is the name of the third underground line of Rome, now under construction. The implementation of this important transportation project (nearly 4 billion euros of public money to this day) has been so far slow, over budget, and over time.
Urban projects of this sort are outstanding elements for investigating institutional change and continuity in the government of mega-projects. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the defects inherent to the regulative framework applied to the Metro C project – the Legge Obiettivo. This ‘exceptional’ regulative regime (now abrogated) aimed at strengthening the power of the private contractor (hollowing out that of the client) in public projects’ management. Such approach, though, can lead to two different consequences: on the one hand, it might invest the private company with higher pressure for innovative solutions and overall performances, or it can, on the other hand, trigger a domino effect of opportunistic behaviour, if responsibilities are not re-allocated coherently and strategically. Here we provide insight about how it is this second result that has been reached, in the case of the Metro C in Rome.