When Housing Policies Are Ethnically Targeted: Struggles, Conflicts and Contentions for a “Possible City”

Abstract

In November 2011 the Italian Council of State declared unlawful the state of emergency concerning Roma settlements that had been in force since 2008. This decision gave rise to a new political phase, which started in 2012, characterized by a new National Strategy for the Inclusion of Roma people. One year later, in the city of Turin, the still unspent financial resources that had been assigned to the ‘emergency’ were converted into funds for ‘Roma inclusion’. This chapter addresses the question of how the implementation of the National Strategy at the local level was influenced by the so-called ‘Roma emergency’ politics. Through fieldwork in the informal slum of Lungo Stura Lazio, which has turned into the biggest rehousing project ever implemented in the city, called La Città Possibile (The Possible City) we were able to detect the persistence of an emergency, punitive and strongly selective logic at work, applied to a neoliberal approach to housing policies. The role played by local NGOs has been particularly significant in the reproduction of this logic, through the arbitrary selection between “good” (deserving) and “bad” (undeserving) Roma. The investigation was carried out between 2011 and 2016 and is based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 25 camp dwellers, 12 civil servants, 11 social workers from private NGOs, and 4 civil-society actors from grassroots movements.