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Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights Movements and the Re-appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’ in Rome, Italy

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Abstract

This paper scrutinises the phenomenon of collective squatting for housing in Rome (Italy), which has reached remarkable proportions and developed new characteristics since the start of the 2008 crisis. Based upon two pieces of ethnographic research within the housing movement organisations Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (Urban Coordination of Housing Struggles) and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Precarious Metropolitan Block), the authors aim to enlarge empirical knowledge of the case under study and provide renewed analytical instruments for understanding housing mobilisations. These organisations appear to be more than grassroots approaches to housing deprivation; they also represent alternative forms of social reproduction in post-welfare neoliberal cities. Indeed, squats configure themselves as sites for broader political elaboration. For this reason, we propose to analyse housing squatting using the notion of ‘urban commons’. The introduction of this notion to analyse housing movements helps in the theoretical elaboration of a re-appraised ‘right to the city’, in line with current urban challenges.

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Notes

  1. The reader should look critically at the caveats between ‘activists’ and ‘squatters’. Thus, the two terms should be evaluated as raw analytical instruments to facilitate the explanation rather than as binding and rigid definitions.

  2. These suburbs would be only later recognised in the official urban toponymy and targeted for the planning of public housing (Villani 2012; Pietrangeli 2014).

  3. Until 2013 the movement’s organization Action was part of Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare, but nowadays it collaborates with the network in a sporadic way. The same can be said for other political social centres and grassroots organizations scattered in Rome landscapes, which sometimes sustain the campaigns promoted by this network without participating in it as leading actors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, University of Leicester, Ken Edwards Building, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

    Margherita Grazioli

  2. Scienza della Politica, Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza Strozzi 1, 50123, Florence, Italy

    Carlotta Caciagli

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  1. Margherita Grazioli
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  2. Carlotta Caciagli
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Correspondence to Margherita Grazioli.

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Grazioli, M., Caciagli, C. Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights Movements and the Re-appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’ in Rome, Italy. Voluntas 29, 697–711 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-018-9977-y

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