Re/Constructing Domestic Space: INA-Casa and Public Housing in Postwar Rome or Women’s Space in a Man-Made World

Abstract

The notion of construction, so integral to the mythos of Italian Fascism, continues, following the fall of the Regime, to play a cardinal role in national politics in the immediate postwar period.¹ Postwar public housing projects, and the competitions that brought them to life and into public discourse, offer one way in which Italy sought to disentangle—and disengage—from its recent fascist past. In diet with literary and cinematic representations, the discourse surrounding public housing helps reveal the spatialization of gender relations in the postwar period, a rich topic too large to be examined entirely within the scope of this essay. In these pages, consequently, I focus on the role that the 1949 Piano per l’incremento dell’occupazione operaia, agevolando la costruzione di case per lavoratori [Plan to increase employment, thus aiding in the construction of domiciles for workers], known more commonly as the “INA-Casa (Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni) Plan,” played in the reconstruction of post-fascist Rome. An examination of the Plan reveals the creation of domestic space; further, literary and cinematic exempla of the period, I argue, illuminate the social subject’s access to public space and navigation of the built environment.² Both aspects, as I show, signify for women in postwar Italy.

Taking possession of space is the first gesture of living things.

Le Corbusier, “L’espace indicible”

Everywhere you shut me in. Always you assign a place to me. Even outside the frame I form with you … You set limits even to events that could happen with others … You mark out boundaries, draw lines, surround, enclose. Excising, cutting out. What is your fear? That you will lose your property. What remains is an empty frame. You cling to it, dead.

Luce Irigary, Elemental Passions