Too many rights: too many people without rights—two opposite case studies of claiming spaces and rights in Turin and Geneva

Abstract

Introduction: The multiple forms of living in the contemporary city clearly demonstrate how the relationship between living space and rights reveals itself in many ways, even to the point of being divergent and contradictory. Case description: In order to analyze this point, we decided to observe two case studies that are emblematic for the divergence of issues that they are able to highlight. The neighbourhood of Les Grottes in Geneva can be described as a ‘manifesto of living’ based on sharing, solidarity, and freedom. On the other hand, the former Olympic Village in Turin expresses the “individual need to exist” of a population (of political refugees and migrants) not legitimatized to be in that place but one which, generally speaking, has nowhere to live. Discussion and evaluation: These two situations are able to highlight how the right to housing today no longer has a universal meaning as in the struggles of the last century (70 s) but explodes in very different meanings. Conclusions: For this reason the aim of this paper is try to rethink the concept of housing rights in order to emphasize how this term is still able to tell a lot about the urban and social transformations in contemporary cities.