The anti-politics of housing policies in Italy: a medium/long term perspective

Abstract

Placing the ‘house’ and its connotation as a housing issue in Italy at the centre of the ethnographic field, shows the need to give depth to the present through a medium/long-term perspective on housing policies, connecting politics and culture. In the institutional treatment of housing hardship, crucial themes converge, including the production of ‘useful’ or ‘undesirable’ poor people and population control dispositives; as well as the processes of construction, materially and symbolically, of the peripheries, of displacement and gentrification, of financialization, and of (re)configuration of the Welfare State. Precisely because stories of structural violence are woven around dwelling, the analysis proposes a national scale, as well as an opening up to other disciplines, to identify fils rouges that run through housing policies from the Second World War to today, relying on a consolidated literature for the choice of the period, and building the discussion with counterpoints from ethnographies, researches and studies.