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Abstract
This article explores residency, a form of municipal membership that plays a strategic role in Italy. Residency is a formal status and a means to have access to rights. Therefore, it is a sort of local citizenship that, at least in part, equalises citizens and non-citizens. Due to its strategic role, many local authorities have paid serious attention to it recently. Municipalities have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or introduced new requirements. Stressing the different mechanisms of exclusion from residency, this article explains that they often work as administrative borders. These are bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to regulate, symbolically and sometimes materially, the composition of the people living within municipal territories and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As such, administrative borders fragment individual statuses and provoke an increase in civic stratification.
Notes
1. A legal definition of residency (residenza) is provided for by article 43 of the Italian civil code, which says that ‘residency is where a person has she or her habitual dwelling’.
2. The enrolment at the registry office (iscrizione anagrafica) is regulated by law 1228 of 1954, modified by decree 5 of 2012 (becoming law 35 in 2012), and the decree of the President of the Republic 223 of 1989, containing the implementation regulations.
3. These requirements, modified over time by some ministerial decrees and circulars, are provided for by legislative decree 30 of 2007, which implements EU directive 38 of 2004, concerning the regulation of European citizens’ movement within the EU space. This legislative decree establishes that those EU citizens who want to stay in Italy for more than three months are supposed to declare their presence and apply for enrolment at the registry office of the municipality they live in. In order to be enrolled, differently from Italian citizens and non-EU citizens, they have to satisfy some requirements concerning their economic and working conditions as well as health insurance ownership.
4. As explicitly stated by article 2 of law 1228 of 1954.
5. Being settled in a municipality does not necessarily mean living in a home or apartment. According to national regulations, residency must be awarded even to people who live in caravans or slums as well as to homeless people. Indeed, the recognition of this status is completely unconnected with the material conditions of where one lives, as also clarified over the years by some ministerial circulars (8 of 1995 and 2 of 1997).
6. Actually, some categories of non-EU citizens can enrol for the first time in the National Health Service (NHS) without having residency by simply declaring the place where they live de facto. However, in order to renew the enrolment, they need a residency. With regard to EU citizens, the requirements they must meet to be enrolled in NHS are more or less equal to those needed for municipal registration. Thus, people lacking the latter likewise do not meet the former. With respect to Italian citizens, the link between residency and enrolment in NHS is quite tight: basically, people are enrolled in the same municipal district in which they reside. Provisional exceptions are made for people who temporarily live in a municipality different from that in which they are registered. Moreover, the Italians who live in other countries must enrol in a specific register for citizens living abroad (called AIRE), having been withdrawn from both Italian municipal registers and NHS. However, within the Italian legal system, all those who do not have the right to enrolment in NHS have the right to basic and emergency assistance, regardless of their legal status.
7. For Italian citizens, the right of free movement is sanctioned by article 16 of the Italian Constitution. For EU citizens, this right is protected by article 18 of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. Regarding third country citizens, the right to free circulation within state boundaries is guaranteed by some international treatises: article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and article 2 of protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
8. Generally, the local police are entrusted with this kind of check.
9. This order was the most famous and reproduced one. In fact, since its issuing, many other municipalities have used it as a model.
10. This regime of enrolment was previously illustrated in note 3.
11. Later turned into law 125 of 2008.
12. In 2011, the Italian Constitutional Court, with the sentence 115, declared to be unconstitutional the part of law 125 of 2008 that had extended mayors’ powers.
13. Turned into law 80 in May 2014.
14. In some cases, mayors give officers a sort of ‘decalogue’ of rules, namely a list of illegal requirements to ask people who want to register.
15. Clearly, they can be more visible for other authorities, for instance police forces.
16. Obviously, only with regard to local and European elections, given that EU citizens do not have the right to vote in national elections.
17. Regarding this, Sassen talks about the Japanese housewife, ‘a person whose very identity is customarily that of a particularistic, non-political actor’ (Citation2006, 296).