Urban commons and freedom of movement The housing struggles of recently arrived migrants in Rome

ABSTRACT

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.

KEYWORDS:

• Border control
• mobile commons
• housing struggles
• migrant struggles
• urban commons

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this article we use the term ‘migrant’ interchangeably for ‘economic migrant’, ‘undocumented migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’, unless one of these terms is required for more technical reasons and for the sake of clarity. By migrants we mean those persons who exercises their right to move to another country for better opportunities and living conditions. In this sense, there is no distinction between ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘economic migrants’, a distinction that has often been politicised and reified in order to classify and divide between ‘deserving’ and ‘non-deserving’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migrants.

2. ‘Freedom of movement’ usually refers to the specific right of EU citizens to move more or less freely across the EU along with goods, services and capital. However, we use this definition either to identify the ‘secondary movement’ to another EU country or the right to move within Italy without the geographical restrictions implied by being hosted in the reception system.

3. Available at http://fuoricampo.medicisenzafrontiere.it/Fuoricampo.pdf.

4. All the interviewees’ names are replaced with pseudonyms.

5. Referring to the contracted company that managed the centre’s services such as food and laundry until 2015.

6. This quote is an excerpt from a broader interview conducted in August 2018 during the eviction of the Sudanese centre at via Scorticabove, where the interviewee used to live prior to moving to 4 Stelle Occupato.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicola Montagna

Nicola Montagna, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Middlesex University and has researched on social movements, radical activism, far right, urban conflicts, international migration, borders, and migration policies. He has an extensive research experience and has published in several leading international journals. He co-edited with Nick Dines and Elenea Vacchelli the SI for Sociology on Migration and Crisis and some of his recent publications include: “Dominant or subordinate? The relational dynamics in a protest cycle for undocumented migrant rights” (2018, Ethnic and Racial Studies), and the co-edited book Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender and Sexuality in the 21stCentury, Palgrave, 2018.

Margherita Grazioli

Margherita Grazioli, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Urban Studies unit of the Social Sciences Department of the GSSI (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila, Italy). Her main research interests are urban geography, housing policies and urban social movements, nurtured by her activism within Housing Rights Movements in Rome. As an activist ethnographer and researcher concerned with qualitative methodologies, she got the PhD title awarded at the School of Business of the University of Leicester (UK) after discussing her doctoral dissertation entitled ‘The right to the city in the post-welfare metropolis. Community building, autonomous infrastructures and urban commons in self-organised housing squats in Rome, Italy’.