Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights Movements and the Re-appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’ in Rome, Italy

Abstract

This paper scrutinises the phenomenon of collective squatting for housing in Rome (Italy), which has reached remarkable proportions and developed new characteristics since the start of the 2008 crisis. Based upon two pieces of ethnographic research within the housing movement organisations Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (Urban Coordination of Housing Struggles) and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Precarious Metropolitan Block), the authors aim to enlarge empirical knowledge of the case under study and provide renewed analytical instruments for understanding housing mobilisations. These organisations appear to be more than grassroots approaches to housing deprivation; they also represent alternative forms of social reproduction in post-welfare neoliberal cities. Indeed, squats configure themselves as sites for broader political elaboration. For this reason, we propose to analyse housing squatting using the notion of ‘urban commons’. The introduction of this notion to analyse housing movements helps in the theoretical elaboration of a re-appraised ‘right to the city’, in line with current urban challenges.

Full text

ORIGINAL PAPER
Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights
Movements and the Re-appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’
in Rome, Italy
Margherita Grazioli
1
•Carlotta Caciagli
2
International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2018
Abstract This paper scrutinises the phenomenon of col-
lective squatting for housing in Rome (Italy), which has
reached remarkable proportions and developed new char-
acteristics since the start of the 2008 crisis. Based upon two
pieces of ethnographic research within the housing move-
ment organisations Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per
la Casa (Urban Coordination of Housing Struggles) and
Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Precarious Metropolitan
Block), the authors aim to enlarge empirical knowledge of
the case under study and provide renewed analytical
instruments for understanding housing mobilisations.
These organisations appear to be more than grassroots
approaches to housing deprivation; they also represent
alternative forms of social reproduction in post-welfare
neoliberal cities. Indeed, squats configure themselves as
sites for broader political elaboration. For this reason, we
propose to analyse housing squatting using the notion of
‘urban commons’. The introduction of this notion to
analyse housing movements helps in the theoretical elab-
oration of a re-appraised ‘right to the city’, in line with
current urban challenges.
Keywords Housing Squatting Urban movements 
Commons ‘Right to the city’
Introduction
This research is located within the debate about the role of
housing rights movements in contemporary European
cities. In particular, it represents an in-depth case study of
the struggle for housing as it has developed in Rome during
the crisis. Hence, the paper has two main goals: (a) to
improve empirical knowledge on the case under study;
(b) to add new analytical instruments to explore the role of
these grassroots organisations in contemporary urban
landscapes. We contend that the topic pertains to social
movements and scholars concerned with urban phenomena
for two main reasons. First of all, the housing question is
assuming a renewed relevance in this period of economic
crisis. Indeed, severe housing precariousness is affecting an
increasing proportion of the population of Rome as well as
in many other urban areas. In this context, the role of
housing movement organisations is becoming more
important. Secondly, the topic also represents a theoretical
challenge. Indeed, the issues at the stake in the housing
struggle and the features of these movements seem to be
not fully explained through existing descriptive categories.
Recent figures show that in 2014 more than 1.7 million
renting families lived in condition of housing precarious-
ness. Indeed, various research estimates that rent takes up
more than the 30% of families’ income (Nomisma.it 2016).
Moreover, because of the progressive reduction in long-
term investments and substantial new social housing pro-
jects (Baldini and Poggio 2013), housing policies today
have a marginal role within urban planning (Puccini 2016).
And, when they are present, they are insufficient for
responding to the demand for accessible and affordable
housing. This situation is progressively deteriorating; in
2015, just one-third of the demand for affordable housing
was satisfied (Nomisma.it 2016). In this national scenario,
&Margherita Grazioli
mg320@le.ac.uk
Carlotta Caciagli
carlotta.caciagli@sns.it
1
School of Business, University of Leicester, Ken Edwards
Building, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
2
Scienza della Politica, Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza
Strozzi 1, 50123 Florence, Italy
123
Voluntas
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-018-9977-y

the case of Rome epitomises the Italian situation and at the
same time is a particular case of its reproduction, as tes-
tified by its statistics and multifaceted aspects.
In 2015, the Department of Project Development (Di-
partimento Progetti di Sviluppo e finanziamenti europei
2015) of the city of Rome referred to housing as the most
urgent economic and social challenge for present and
future urban governments. Indeed, more than 40,000 fam-
ilies were declared as being in a condition of housing
emergency during the same year, which represents 66% of
the overall housing demand (Dipartimento Progetti di
Sviluppo e finanziamenti europei 2015). The trend of
procedures of eviction also gives us an idea of the chal-
lenges of the housing question at this time. In 2014, the
total amount of evicted families was 8264, corresponding
to 1 family evicted for every 240 residents (against a
national average of 1 for every 334) (Ministero dell’In-
terno-Ufficio centrale di statistica 2015). Moreover, in
2015 about 3680 families were living in C.a.a.t Residences,
the temporary shelters provided by the administration to
host families waiting for public housing. In addition, more
than 3000 families are on the waiting list for public
housing, as well as 6000 who have undergone forced
cohabitation with other families (Puccini 2016).
In addition to this composite scenario, there are the
approximately 10,000 families (Puccini 2016) that have
opted to squat empty apartments alongside those organised
by the housing movement organisations who decide to
collectively squat abandoned buildings. Even though offi-
cial data are scattered and quite likely underestimated, our
empirical research has corroborated the estimate that there
are more than 100 squats for housing purposes in Rome,
inhabited by more than 12,000 people. In this complex
scenario, the social and political role of housing rights
movements is increasing day by day, providing the housing
issue a greater visibility on the political agenda (Mudu
2014; Armati 2015; Di Feliciantonio 2016). On the one
hand, these movements are representing an autonomous
response to a large part of the population not touched by
public policies. On the other hand, they also articulate the
housing struggle as a subset of a broader crisis of urban
reproduction. Accordingly, they propose a political frame
to the housing issue which starts from the primacy of social
necessities over capitalist enclosures (see Linebaugh 2008;
Federici 2010; Cattaneo and Martı
´nez 2014; Mudu and
Aureli 2016).
Yet, despite the increased importance of this activism,
theoretical studies coping with squatting for housing pur-
poses currently seem to lack the analytical depth to take
into account their complexity. The existing literature is
either too narrow or too broad. On the one hand, a large
proportion of research prevalently emphasises the aspects
of social marginality and illegality entrenched in the
phenomenon of housing squatting (see Di Feliciantonio
2016; Bouillon 2017). Indeed, most of the recent literature
frames housing squats as deprivation-based ones (Pruijt
2012,2013; Martinez 2007,2013), instead of considering
the peculiar features of the movements using squatting as a
tool for action. Hence, this kind of analysis fails to account
for the specificities of housing squats among the possible
configurations, since they tend to conceal the diverse
social, political and spatial layers into which housing
squatting is articulated. On the other hand, most of the
studies frame the struggle for housing under the conceptual
umbrella of the ‘right to the city’ in order to explain the
phenomenon of the re-appropriation (Lefebvre
1970,1972,1991,1996). Nevertheless, this concept seems
nowadays to have lost its descriptive potential; rather it has
been elaborated according a different, and eminently For-
dist, paradigm of the urban. Notwithstanding, we contend
that the ‘right to the city’’s radical openness and the
explanatory potential of its categories, should be retained
and re-articulated according to the challenges posed by the
contentious politics and issues at stake in the ongoing
mobilisations for housing rights and urban squatting. That
is to say that these urban movements can contribute to the
reshaping of a new ‘right to the city’.
Hence, the goal of this co-authored work is to start from
ethnographic approaches to the subject matter in order to
provide new analytical tools that might contribute to filling
the already-mentioned gaps in the existing theoretical
frameworks. More specifically, the contributions provided
in this paper are gleaned from two distinct pieces of
empirical research conducted for one year each in the
housing squats of two movement organisations active in
Rome: Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa
(Coordinamento) and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani
(BPM). The first has been explored through the method of
direct participant observation (see Balziger and Lambelet
2014); the second through the methodology of activist
ethnography (see Hale 2006; Juris and Khasnabish 2013).
In this paper, we have combined the collected data by using
five semi-structured interviews from each piece research
with the inhabitants, both squatters and activists, of Co-
ordinamento and BPM squats collected during the field-
work (Della Porta 2010). As a first premise, it is
worthwhile anticipating a distinction we use which is rel-
evant for the theoretical and political scaffolding of the
paper: the one between activists and squatters. The first
ones are understood as the squatters who are more actively
involved into the political matters pertaining the squats
internal management and mobilisation within the Move-
ments, while the second are understood as the plurality of
the squats’ inhabitants. Hence, this distinction is mainly
descriptive, whereas it acknowledges the differential levels
of engagement within political organising that the squatters
Voluntas
123

might have within their heterogeneous, plural composition.
However, this terminological distinction does not aim at
implying any normative, hierarchical relation among the
squatters in their day-to-day social reproduction and
struggle.
1
As a second premise, it is important to specify that
Coordinamento and BPM are not the only housing rights
movements in Rome; manifold organisations are engaged
on this field with diverse political and even organisational
approaches (see Mudu 2014). Yet they can be considered
among the most relevant ones at this moment, as they have
managed to mobilise consistent numbers of people and
assumed a role as catalysts of diverse kinds of mobilisation.
Furthermore, as we analyse in the following sections, since
the aftermath of the crisis period, Coordinamento and BPM
have begun a fruitful collaboration as an unitary political
actor (the Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare, Movement
for the Right to Habitation), which gained them a relevant
political role in the urban arena (Nur and Sethman 2017;
Grazioli 2017a).
Given the scope and the origin of this paper, it is divided
in two parts: empirical and theoretical. The first part con-
textualises the housing question in Rome with an historical
perspective and goes deeper in describing the origins of
Coordinamento and BPM. After this brief overall picture,
we investigate the housing struggle of these organisations,
focusing on the recent years of economic crisis. In partic-
ular, we will account for the potentialities coming from the
shared local network Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare in
order to account for how this coalition is allowing the
housing struggle to obtain a social and political role that
broadens the scope of demands from housing towards a
larger assertion of an alternative, solidarity-based modality
for experiencing the urban.
The second part discusses the epistemological implica-
tions stemming from empirical observations of the housing
rights movements’ action. Here we introduce the overar-
ching concept of the ‘urban commons’ (see Linebaugh
2008; Harvey 2012; Huron 2015; Stavrides 2016)to
explain the issues at the stake in current squatting practice.
Indeed, the housing squats of both Coordinamento and
BPM emerge as more than just emergency shelters for
hundreds of dispossessed families. These spaces rather
resemble autonomous infrastructures where alternative
forms of social reproduction are experimented with and
disseminated in the city. Hence, by introducing the concept
of the ‘urban commons’ we are also able to understand to
what extent it is possible to make a reappraisal of the
Lefebvrian notion of the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996),
updated according to the developments in the neoliberal
urban fabric and the period of crisis (see Purcell 2002;
Merrifield 2011; Sassen 2015; Grazioli 2017a). In the last
section, we provide some concluding remarks on the basis
of what has been highlighted in previous pages. Hence, the
purpose of our conceptual toolbox is not only to contribute
to filling the gaps in the existing literature, but to encourage
the development of further research. Indeed, far away from
being an exhausted topic, the struggle for housing seems to
be a promising subject to explore new approaches towards.
The Housing Question in Rome: Roots
and Contemporary Challenges
Housing deprivation and the social conflict around the
house have a decennial tradition in Rome. Since period
after World War II, the varied impossibility for low-income
families to have access to decent and affordable housing
has characterised its urban fabric, and in particular its
peripheral areas. The explosion of housing demand, com-
bined with the lack of accessible public housing, leads
many poor people to form informal settlements at the
borders of the city, creating spontaneous neighbourhoods
called (in the Roman dialect) borgate (working class
suburbs).
2
Far away from the core of social and political urban life,
these areas were largely neglected by public administra-
tions that for a long time did not face the extreme housing,
social and sanitary conditions of the many families living
there (Gregoretti 1976; Mudu 2014). Nevertheless, the
absence of structural policies in these marginalised terri-
tories paved the path for what has been termed a diffuse
‘self-making’ attitude of Rome’s inhabitants towards the
city’s development (Cellamare 2014a). In fact, given the
lack of a top-down organisation of urban services, native
and new urban dwellers developed autonomous organisa-
tional practices and strategies of survival capable of cre-
ating networks of resistance and solidarity, while tackling
the absence of institutions and even basic infrastructure
such as drainage systems and electricity.
Dwelling upon this historical heritage, autonomous
practices related to housing cannot be interpreted just as
illegal or as emergency actions; they actually represent a
grassroots attitude of constructing ‘a politics of affordable
housing and a socio-economic alternative system’ (Cella-
mare 2014b, p. 83) based on compelling social needs that
would not be accessible otherwise. This is evident from
1
The reader should look critically at the caveats between ‘activists’
and ‘squatters’. Thus, the two terms should be evaluated as raw
analytical instruments to facilitate the explanation rather than as
binding and rigid definitions.
2
These suburbs would be only later recognised in the official urban
toponymy and targeted for the planning of public housing (Villani
2012; Pietrangeli 2014).
Voluntas
123

looking at the origins and developments of Coordinamento
and BPM.
The Long-Lasting Presence of ‘Coordinamento
Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa’
Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa is the longer
standing housing movement organisation in Rome (De
Leone and La Forgia 2007; Mudu 2014; Armati 2015). Its
foundation is rooted in the brutal events occurred during
September 1974, when a young activist, Fabrizio Ceruso,
was shot and killed by a police officer in the peripheral
neighbourhood of San Basilio, during the eviction of
squatted public houses. Around this cruel episode, many
activists coming from the radical left movement Autonomia
Operaia decided to bring together the many people living
in the borgate who were suffering from housing dispos-
session and deprivation. After years of political engage-
ment and territorial rootedness, Coordinamento was
created as a political organisation in 1988. Its foundational
act was the squatting of 350 apartments for affordable
housing situated once again in the borgata San Basilio that
had not yet been assigned by the public administration.
Together with these families and former militants, many of
the young people of the neighbourhood joined the move-
ment, providing it with a large social base. Coordinamento
had the power to gather together the various forms of social
conflicts developing in different territories, giving them a
political, urban resonance. Because of the relevant issues at
stake, since this time the struggle for housing led by Co-
ordinamento was highly confrontation, as displayed many
episodes of street rioting. At the end of 1988, the move-
ment could boast about 2,000 squatted apartments scattered
in different areas of Rome.
The years between 1990 and 1996 were characterised by
the first crucial change in Coordinamento’s repertoire of
action. Instead of squatting unassigned residential apart-
ments, the movement started to occupy abandoned public
buildings like old schools, municipal offices and hospitals.
This shift allowed the movement’s organisation to focus
attention on another crucial contradiction of the urban
fabric of Rome: the presence, despite an increasing number
of families in housing precariousness, of hundreds of
unused and abandoned buildings. The campaign against the
waste of public estate heritage achieved their first crucial
achievement at the policy and legislative level: the
approval in 1998 of the law regulating the self-recovery
(autorecupero) of public heritage for the creation of more
environmentally sustainable housing and the eviction of
low-income families from the city centre. Yet, despite the
potentialities linked with the self-recovering projects, this
law has not become an everyday tool in Rome’s urban
planning.
The second substantial change in Coordinamento
occurred at the beginning of 2000s, this time pertaining its
internal social composition. While in its early decades
Coordinamento retained a territorial-based character, the
first waves of immigration increased the level of hetero-
geneity inside the squats, and together with the native poor,
precarious workers and low-income families, a consistent
proportion of migrant families coming from EU and
worldwide foreign countries joined the struggle. Indeed,
immigrants tended to be the first people to be exploited and
segregated within Rome’s patterns of housing distribution
(see Mudu 2006; Puccini, 2016). This posed for the first
time the urgency to link the struggle for housing with
broader issues connected with civic and political rights.
From these years onward, the Coordinamento’s struggle
thus started to be intrinsically linked with the fight for
migrants’ rights. The Coordinamento’s current role relies
on years of struggles which it ratified its presence in the
most deprived areas of Rome. Thanks to strategies of
actions refined over decades, this movement’s organisation
is nowadays able to match its social presence in the terri-
tories with the capability of pushing institutions to improve
policy instruments addressing housing precariousness.
Therefore, the house is at the same time, practised from
below, and also claimed as subset of broader urban issues.
Blocchi Precari Metropolitani: The Social Block
Against the Crisis of Social Reproduction
The legacy of Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la
Casa started in a Fordist context in which public housing
could still be contested within a welfare state framework.
By contrast, the history of Blocchi Precari Metropolitani is
rooted in a completely different historical scenario, namely
the ongoing housing emergency unfolding within a broader
crisis of neoliberal social reproduction (see Mudu 2014,
p. 147; Nur and Sethman 2017, pp. 82–83). Indeed, BPM
materialised for the first time during the social strike called
on 9 November 2007 in Rome. On that occasion, a group of
demonstrators blocked the streets in the peripheral zone of
Bufalotta, where a few days before a private empty
building had been occupied for housing purposes. There-
after, they reached the central gathering of the main
demonstration in the central square Piazza della Repub-
blica, bringing a banner in solidarity with the strikers
signed by the Metropolitan Precarious Block.
This deliberately non-directly-housing-related delin-
eation contains the main features characterising BPM’s
contentious politics. Since its appearance in 2007, this
housing movement’s organisation has experimented with
forms of cooperation with other grassroots political sub-
jects engaged in contrasting the multifaceted forms of
dispossession and precariousness characterising the
Voluntas
123

contemporary urban fabric. From this perspective, BPM
has co-operated at length with the grassroots trade union
Asia usb, concerned with the organisation of public hous-
ing assignees, evicted tenants and even squatters, and in
turn affiliated to the general Unione Sindacale di Base
(Grassroots Trade Union federation). After some years, this
organic collaboration has ceased due to the two organisa-
tions’ divergent strategies. Nonetheless, BPM has kept
experimenting with strategic alliances with other grassroots
collective subjects engaged in the struggle against precar-
iousness and inequalities in the city.
Differently from Coordinamento, which has historically
focused on the squatting of unused public properties, BPM
has also decided to target buildings in private ownership,
and in particular those belonging to large construction
companies, the so-called palazzinari in Rome’s vernacular
expressions. In this respect, one of the most renowned
examples is the case of the former Fiorucci slaughterhouse,
unused for production since the early Nineties. The
industrial wreck, owned nowadays by the biggest Italian
general contractor in the engineering sector, Pietro Salini,
is located in the peripheral borgata of Tor Sapienza and
was squatted in March 2009 by BPM activists with around
200 people. This regenerated space is nowadays known as
Metropoliz, La citta` Meticcia, since, besides the inhabiting
sector, it also hosts the self-managed Museum of the Other
and the Elsewhere (Careri and Gon
˜i Mazzitelli 2012; Mudu
and Aureli 2016; Grazioli 2017b). The manifold counter-
cultural activities deployed in this space constitute a
benchmark of BPM’s modality of addressing squatting for
housing as a way of nurturing alternative cultural and
social experiences and spaces.
From Housing Movement’s Organisations
to ‘Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare’: The
Current Challenges of the Struggle for Housing
The two distinct paths of Coordinamento and BPM became
entangled in 2012, when they decide to converge in a broad
coalition for common political elaboration and action. In
this year, the network called Movimenti per il diritto
all’Abitare (Movements for the Right to Habitation) orig-
inated. This collaboration, still ongoing, aims at giving the
specific housing struggles a shared political framework and
an urban resonance. Although these two housing move-
ment’s organisations retained organisational and social
differences in terms of the ethnicity and number of their
fellow-squatters, their unification under the same network
has allowed them to pool their political resources while
incrementing their capability to affect mainstream dis-
course around housing rights (De Leone and La Forgia
2007). Besides Coordinamento and BPM, other smaller
organisations have also participated in the network from
time to time, such as Comitato Obiettivo Casa (COC),
Resistenza attiva Metropolitana (R.A.M.) and Resistenza
Residences (a grassroots organisation composed of families
living in the temporary housing shelters of C.a.a.t. who
decided to start a contestation of the emergency manage-
ment of the ongoing housing crisis). Despite the important
role of these other movement’s organisations, BPM and
Coordinamento are with no doubt its leading actors.
3
The
current housing precariousness in Rome, exacerbated by
the economic crisis and by the contingences of the city,
presents the network with many new social and political
challenges.
In many cities around the world, the neoliberal paradigm
constructing the current urban contexts (De Lucia 2003)
produced the emergence of new, yet unfulfilled quests for
affordable and public housing that also involve middle
class-based sectors of society hitherto untouched by pat-
terns of socio-spatial segregation (Soja 1980,1989; Puccini
2016). Therefore, as result of the maximisation of capitalist
accumulation through indebtedness, in many European
cities housing rights movements are facing multifaceted
forms of severe housing deprivation caused by the con-
juncture of the crisis and neoliberal urbanisation (Harvey
1989; Squatting Europe Kollective 2013,2014; Pinson and
Morel Journel 2016). In the case of Rome, they also
overlap with the intersection of neoliberal benchmarks with
the historical inconsistency of urban planning, as well as
the established historical primacy of builders’ interests, and
also connected with administrative/political corruption and
mob businesses, as the recent ‘Mafia Capitale’ scandal has
partially disclosed (see Berdini 2014; Armati 2015; Cel-
lamare 2016; Grazioli, 2017a).
For these reasons, Rome nowadays seems to be ‘the city
of people with no homes and homes with no people’
(Ciccarelli 2015). The Italian capital has not only an
enormous number of families in difficult housing situa-
tions, but also a huge number of un-let apartments and
abandoned, purposeless buildings, both private and public
(Bertaglio 2011)., In this situation of increased housing
precariousness, combined with the structural lack of insti-
tutional solutions, the movements struggling for housing
rights are not just leading a political protest; they are also
providing solutions to this structural problem which is
almost totally neglected by public administrations.
The joint struggle conducted by the Movimenti per il
diritto all’Abitare over recent years has been characterised
by the attempt to assert the centrality of housing demands
3
Until 2013 the movement’s organization Action was part of
Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare, but nowadays it collaborates
with the network in a sporadic way. The same can be said for other
political social centres and grassroots organizations scattered in Rome
landscapes, which sometimes sustain the campaigns promoted by this
network without participating in it as leading actors.
Voluntas
123

in an urban panorama, concretising alternative modalities
of inhabiting the city. This general attempt has been shaped
by two main challenges: (a) the political and social chal-
lenge due to the massive migrant increase in the squatted
dwellings, and (b) the production of crucial, yet contro-
versial, results at the public policy level, in terms of
regional deliberation. Dealing with these two aspects, the
housing struggle appears to be something more than the
attempt to answer the need of the house. It rather appears as
the attempt to design a new, alternative way of experi-
encing the urban.
Migrants’ Issues
Our insider perspective on Coordinamento and BPM’s
housing squats confirmed to us that to consider these
spaces simply as temporary shelters for people in housing
emergency is misleading. The squat includes most of the
features that geographers and sociologists attribute to urban
environments: a complex division of space, strong cultural
differences and multiple territories (Soja 1989; Massey
2004). This complexity is increased by the different
nationalities of the squatters.
Even if the issue of migration in the struggle dates back
to the early years of 2000s and the rate of Italian citizens in
housing squats is progressively growing, the explosion of
the economic crisis made the immigrant dwellers of Rome
the strong majority of squatters. This has underlined the
stark juxtaposition between ‘native’ and migrant urban
population in accessing the housing squat. The patterns of
housing segregation affecting the latter have resulted in the
fact that, whereas within the mainstream housing circuit
migrants represent 20% of the overall population, inside
the squats they constitute roughly the 80% of the overall
inhabitants (Mudu 2014; Staid, 2014). Furthermore,
migrants’ presence in housing squats has configured these
spaces as alternative socio-spatial territories (Sack 1986)in
which cohabitation within a newly heterogeneous social
composition needs to be constructed and negotiated daily
(Massey 2004). Because of the complex processes occur-
ring within the boundaries of this territory, the squat is not
the static framework of a particular kind of social action
but the site of a more complex series of transformations
(O’Dochartaigh and Bosi 2010).
As the interviews with the activists and squatters of both
Coordinamento and BPM display, inhabiting and experi-
encing everydayness in common is a challenging process
that has to be sustained through day-to-day efforts of
negotiation and cooperation:
Cohabitation is not immediate. It has to be con-
structed day by day, with the effort of everybody. It is
hard, I cannot deny it. But we can do it. To be
embarked upon this kind of pathway is something
that changes you and your convictions. At the
beginning you think you are different from the others
because maybe you are Italian, and the other are
Tunisians, South Americans, Africans …But after a
while you understand that you are not so different.
We all have one crucial thing in common: we all need
a roof.
(Interview with a Coordinamento activist).
The squat goes through phases, time phases that
affect your way of thinking and living, for better or
for worse. You have the first stage, when people get
to know each other, and then what happens after the
group of people is defined, selected to live in the
place. And believe me, it is really difficult to put
many different cultures together. This is a societal
model, I think it is a model in any case. I’ve always
told you: if you brought the same people, the same
inhabitants and you gave them a different building,
that would be a different life from what happens here.
Because it is open, everything is in common…In a
regular building the context is different…Here, the
daily differences among people are at stake.
(Interview with BPM activist)
Therefore, with the daily embodiment of people in the
squatted space, the intersectional differences characterising
the squatters’ subjectivity in terms of nationality, ethnicity,
gender, cultural and religious habits are redirected towards
the creation of a new sense of community and identity
based on the common condition of economic precarious-
ness and severe housing deprivation that drove them to
squatting. In this sense, the daily proximity within the
shared space of the housing squat paves the way for
nurturing new social ties (Agnew 1987; Coleman 1988). In
this light, squats become more than ‘houses’, as bonds of
solidarity and sociability are forged through the re-estab-
lishment of the relation between the making of inhabit-
able spatialities and community building that has been
stripped away by the marketised and individual conceptu-
alisation of housing within neoliberal societies (Staid
2017). Reflecting this approach, the multi-ethnic character
of the housing rights movements, and the process of
involvement in it before and after squatting, is also crucial
for gathering diverse forms of social precariousness and
developing a consciousness of the urgency to have a united
claim, as the following interview excerpts testify:
Then I found myself unemployed out of the blue…
and then…through a friend of my husband we got to
know about Movements and squatting, and we sub-
scribed to the ‘waiting list’ for occupying […]We
did rallies, static demonstrations, anti-eviction
Voluntas
123

pickets, we helped other people who found them-
selves in hard times for they couldn’t afford to pay
rent or that who ended up on the streets from one day
to another. By the way we also help those who need
help[Note: in other words, ‘we need help, so we
understand what means to be in necessity, so we are
also able to help the others’], on top of the fact that
we need it too.
(Interview with a BPM squatter)
Living in the squat I realized that I was not the only
one with no choice, no employment and no house. So
I understood that my problem was not only mine and
I also started to understand that if I wanted to get out
of this uncertainty I would have to figure out a col-
lective solution. I mean, if I have no voice, together
we are hundreds of voices.
(Interview with a Coordinamento squatter)
What emerges is that squatting represents a medium for a
broader political re-composition pertaining to the whole of
the daily experience of the urban, besides being a solution
to the condition of housing deprivation. Accordingly,
housing becomes the political propeller for demanding
other rights linked to the political sphere and the experi-
ence of everyday life (Di Feliciantonio 2016). In this sense,
the entanglement between habitation and the patterns of
urban social reproduction become the linchpin around
constructing a broader political awareness.
This effort of cohabitation by the squatting household
composed mainly by migrants with diverse statuses is
crucial not only on the side of determining how to articu-
late the ‘internal’ management of the squats, but also from
an ‘external’ political perspective, for it poses the necessity
of finding an appropriate narrative framework for this
complexity. This leads to the Movements’ idea of claiming
a ‘meticcia’ (mestizo) citizenship as a precondition for
contrasting widespread social marginality and putting in
common alternative ways of dwelling the city, beyond
exclusionary statuses and intersectional differences. This
allows the city network Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare
to expand the scope of their conflicts to other crucial urban
issues, ranging from income to freedom of movement and
anti-racism.
This happens because, besides adding big numbers to
the ongoing struggle, the new waves of migrants have
introduced new specific challenges and demands relating to
migration policies, freedom of mobility and settlement that
have changed the Movements’ internal equilibrium, polit-
ical articulation and slogans, as the following interview
with a BPM activist explains:
Here I think there is the innovation that could give
further development to the struggles towards a more
generalised and comprehensive sense, for freedom of
movement, against the drift towards urban securiti-
zation, against the attempt to erase the residence of
those who cannot guarantee their own economic
survival in the city…Erasing the poor by decree,
criminalising the activists using administrative
laws…This is the development upon which we are
currently reasoning as Movements, and on whose
basis we are trying to create the necessary organisa-
tional steps.
(Interview with a BPM activist)
Policy-Level Effects
The struggle for housing in the crisis period is not just
typified by a deep entanglement with migration issues.
Indeed, the establishment of the network Movimenti per il
diritto all’abitare also permitted some crucial achieve-
ments at the level of urban policy-making. After a pre-
liminary approval in January 2014, In April 2016 the Lazio
Region approved the Regional Deliberation 110, termed
the ‘Extraordinary plan for the housing emergency in Lazio
and the realization of the programme for the housing
emergency for Rome’ (Regione.Lazio.it 2016).
Even if inserted within an emergency framework, this
legislative tool presents relevant innovations both from the
political and symbolic standpoint. Firstly, it bucks the trend
of top-down housing-related policies by establishing the
self-renovation of the empty and unused public buildings’
stock as the path for tackling with the emergency priorities
dictated by the ongoing housing crisis. To this purpose, it
earmarks about 197 million Euros for financing the reno-
vation of at least 1200 public housing units, while recog-
nising the squatters as pro-quota recipients of these reused
pieces of empty public real estate (Armati 2015; Caciagli
2016).
Hence, besides these material achievements, the Delib-
eration also embeds a symbolic value, as it names the
housing squats as results of and containers of the housing
emergency. Consequently, it recognises the squatters as
legitimate assignees because of their proven condition of
severe housing deprivation and denial of housing rights.
This even marks a lexical shift in the naming of the
occupiers, who are described through the lexicon pertain-
ing the housing crisis instead of through the delegitimising
rhetoric of illegality.
The definitive approval of the deliberation can be con-
sidered confirmation of the political role gained by the
network Movimenti Per il Diritto all’Abitare. Indeed, this
policy instrument derives from years of conflictual and yet
dialectical dialogues between the Housing Departments of
the Lazio Region and the movement organisations.
Voluntas
123

Moreover, in the long process that led up to the definitive
approval, the Movements for the Right to Habitation have
shown themselves to be not just protestors but also political
actors who were able to propose feasible and articulate
solutions to housing problems. As declared by this BPM
activist in a public speech during a protest:
We know that the regional deliberation represents
just a drop in the ocean of the ongoing housing
emergency. But it testifies that a different way of
dwelling in the city is urgent and also possible. The
construction of new ghetto neighbourhoods is not the
only way to provide public, affordable housing. This
deliberation claims that we all have the right to live
the city and it is a step toward this goal.
(BPM activist during a rally in Porta San Paolo
14th–16th April 2016)
These words explain well how the ‘deprivation-based’
paradigm is incomplete for the analysis of squatting
practice. Indeed, Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare
underlines their potential for a grassroots process for a
broader urban reorientation, for example in terms of
transport. Promoting the opportunity for people to self-
recover squatted dwellings, the Regional Deliberation
promotes a sustainable idea of how to produce the urban
space, not oriented towards profit but rather based on the
needs of its inhabitants.
Despite its merits, the Deliberation is currently approved
but unimplemented because of the opposition from differ-
ent political institutions and urban stakeholders (primarily
the private builders and owners of the squatted buildings).
This conflict of differential orientation in dealing with the
squatting phenomenon is on the other hand epitomised in
the repressive political climax at national level by the
National Piano Casa (Housing Plan), outlined in 2014 by
the former Minister of Infrastructure Maurizio Lupi
(Governo.it 2014). The repeal of this law is one of the
principal demands of the Movimenti per il diritto all’abi-
tare campaigns in recent years. At the core of the protests
there is in particular Article 5, which they claim crimi-
nalises the struggle for social housing and the resilient
attempt by urban marginalised people to put it in place.
Indeed, Article 5 impedes the provision of services such as
electricity, water and gas to squatted buildings. Further-
more, it bans the squatters from registering their residence
in these spaces. The consequence of the latter is the
impossibility for squatters to access locally based social
welfare provisions (including school and health care, which
are only provided through local registration).
The impact of this legislation, therefore, has been dra-
matic, whereas it increases the social vulnerability of
already dispossessed urban dwellers by preventing their
access to essential facilities. Also, it significantly affects
the chances for non-native urban dwellers of obtaining
regular migration papers, whereas visa applications are
subject to the possession of a valid residence address.
Hence, Article 5 transforms the residency into a tool for
selecting the legitimate population and forms of inhabiting
a territory by making the squatters forcibly invisible to the
eye of the public administration because of their being
illegal, and thus socially undeserving and a possible danger
to public order (Gargiulo 2011; Grazioli 2017a). Conse-
quently, the explicit rationale of the law is not only to
sanction existing squatters, but to discourage the repro-
duction of squatting as a matter of public order and ille-
gality, without addressing the structural motivations that
led to the act of squatting in the first place. Therefore, the
Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare are mobilising on a
double front: on the one hand, they are leading the national
campaign demanding the repeal of Article 5; on the other
hand, they are denouncing its local impact, and demanding
local authorities to take responsibility for the political and
social consequences it is generating. On this front, BPM
nurtured the #kidzbloc campaign, also embraced by Co-
ordinamento, which culminated in a national demonstra-
tion on 16 October 2015 which saw the children living in
housing squats marching in the city centre and holding a
banner claiming ‘I bambini e le bambine non si cancellano’
(Boys and girls cannot be erased).
The way through which Coordinamento and BPM
combine politically diverse issues pertaining to migration,
access to welfare, and the struggle for the implementation
of the Regional Deliberation testifies the breadth of the
scope of the ongoing struggle for housing rights, as it
becomes the starting point of a demand for emancipation
through the repossession of material and social assets that
had been previously stripped for capital accumulation by
dispossession (see Harvey 1989; Linebaugh 2008). This
suggests that, through the specific controversy over hous-
ing, the Movements for the Right to Habitation broaden
their political scope towards others’ rights and benefits that
pertain the day-to-day experience of the urban fabric’s
daily routines. This shift is represented by the name itself,
Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare, whereas it alludes to
the fact that struggling for housing these days demand new,
alternative ways of inhabiting the city which are more
egalitarian and based on the fairer distribution of resources.
From Housing to the Right to Habitation
It is undeniable that the struggle for housing, and that
Coordinamento in particular, has always been charac-
terised by a specific demand: public housing for those
urban dwellers who cannot have access to the privatised
housing market. Therefore, the struggle which developed
from the early Seventies to the Nineties in particular
Voluntas
123

coincided with the claim for a greater amount of affordable
housing (Mudu 2014; Armati 2015). Yet, the unfolding
effects of the crisis produced an altered housing demand
that could not be fulfilled by a residual welfare system, nor
through the resources made available by social housing
shaped through a public–private- partnership (Puccini
2016). Hence, movement organisations like Coordina-
mento and BPM have acknowledged that the demand for
affordable housing for everyone was no longer an achiev-
able solution to housing precariousness. For this reason, the
struggle progressively started to move from demanding
housing to demanding new conditions of dwelling that
could be realised through the transformative and organi-
sational capacities deployed by the dispossessed urban
dwellers. From this perspective, the housing squats assume
the role not only of shelters; they come to embody the
grassroots, autonomous preconditions that allow the urban
poor and dispossessed to keep living in the city, and thus to
resist patterns of segregation and expulsion.
This is to say that nowadays, through the squatting
practice, squatters and activists in these movements are
taking back their right to live in the consolidated urban
fabric despite economic conditions of precariousness and
dispossession. Besides this, they re-appropriate the right to
a central location that had been established as a prerogative
of the well off and upper classes who can afford to sustain
themselves through marketised social reproduction.
According to this, the squats represent a concrete attempt
to counter the patterns of spatial segregation ensuing from
gentrification and housing-commodification processes
(Mudu 2006; Semi 2015). This is clarified by an interview
with a Coordinamento squatter:
The only way for me and my family to live in Rome
is to live in a squatted dwelling. We do not have a
car, but my husband works here, so we need to live in
this city. The rent costs in Rome are extremely high:
almost 1,000 Euros per month. In addition, if you do
not have a stable job nobody wants to rent you even a
bed. To squat is our only option. Why should we
renounce the benefits of living in an urban space? We
need it, we deserve it.
(Interview with a Coordinamento squatter)
This is to say that we could read in the performances of
these social actors the claim of a right that goes beyond the
already relevant point of having a roof over one’s head; one
that configured as the practice of a ‘right to stay put’
(Hartman 1984; Wyly and Newman 2006) in the city and
the right to produce the urban dimension as such as
dispossessed dwellers. From this perspective, the squats
contribute to designing an alternative urban map. While the
neoliberal paradigm compels low-income families to the
margins of the cityscape, Coordinamento and BPM resist
this pattern by enacting an alternative use of the urban
space and, consequently, prefiguring radically alternative
ways of experiencing everyday life in the urban context
(Andretta et al. 2015).
According to our argument above, even if squatting
starts as a deprivation-based action, squatters and activists
become active actors and catalysts in the contestation of
patterns of socio-spatial segregation, indebtedness and
exploitation reproduced by the neoliberal model of city
construction. It follows that housing squats also change
their function in the city from ‘deprivation-based’ housing
arrangements (Pruijt 2013) to resistant, inherently political
spaces where a new model of urban space and social
reproduction is prefigured and experimented with. In this
respect, in the following section we clarify the potentiali-
ties of the formulation of ‘urban commons’ for the analysis
of the issues at stake in the contemporary struggle for
housing rights.
Rethinking the ‘Right to the City’ Through
the Concept of ‘Urban Commons’
In this section we will clarify to what extent the concept of
‘urban commons’ should be added to the theoretical
framework used to interpreted the issues at the stake in
contemporary housing struggles. In particular, we contend
that this concept, emerging within the burgeoning debate
about the commons in the prolonged aftermath of the
economic crisis, is generative for updating the original
formulation of the Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ according
to its situated articulations in the action of grassroots urban
movements. Secondly, we argue that Coordinamento’s and
Bpm’s squats can be qualified as ‘urban commons’ whereas
they configure spaces where the neoliberal, profit-oriented
logic underpinning the property-based design of the urban
fabric is challenged through direct and collective re-ap-
propriation (Galdini 2015; Huron 2015). The latter
becomes the precondition for regenerating abandoned, yet
enclosed urban spaces into spaces where experimenting
alternative forms of daily life and urban cooperation open
not only to their inhabitants, but to all the dispossessed and
more precarious urban dwellers sharing the city’s daily
routines and odds (Grazioli and Caciagli 2017). We will
now examine more deeply how these ‘urban commons’ are
articulated within the space of the squats.
The Squatted Spaces as ‘Urban Commons’
As mentioned above, squatting constitutes a form of direct
social action that, instead of bending to the waiting time of
institutional negotiation, responds immediately to housing
need. Nevertheless, focusing only on this aspect could be
Voluntas
123

misleading. Indeed, alongside the attempt to provide a
shelter, squatting for housing purposes also becomes a way
of countering the simultaneous environmental and social
degradation affecting the city. In this sense, squatting
practice is intrinsically linked with the possibility to take
into account all the different social necessities that are
neglected in the contemporary urban fabric (Harvey 2012;
Bresnihan and Byrne 2014; Huron 2015; Sassen 2015;
Stavrides 2016), as the following excerpt of interview with
aBPM activist contends:
The issue of income is articulated using the re-ap-
propriation of housing as re-appropriation of income.
Putting a roof over one’s head and so solving the
blackmail of paying rent and bills is a way of giving
more value to the precarious income that charac-
terises many of those who have become closer to our
Movements’ experience. […] This suggests the con-
figuration of a sort social trade unionism which could
go out from the workplace and manage to produce
inside the city and its neighbourhoods a shift that
nowadays is utterly necessary.
(Interview with a BPM activist)
This form of grassroots, urban trade unionism implicates
the opening up the spaces squatted for housing purposes in
order to provide manifold social, political and cultural
spaces primarily to the neighbourhoods in which they are
located, and then to the rest of the city. Some of the more
prominent examples in this respect are represented by the
already-mentioned BPM squat Metropoliz, crafted by the
autonomous regeneration of the former Fiorucci slaugh-
terhouse in the borgata Tor Sapienza, which nowadays
hosts the self-managed Metropolitan Museum of the Other
and the Elsewhere (MAAM) (Grazioli 2017a,b). Another
‘popular’ case is the one of the former barracks of via del
Porto Fluviale, in the Ostiense area, that currently hosts
diverse social activities such as a tea room, a language
school, and plenty of recreational and political gatherings
that squatters and activists organise alongside the dwelling
space.
Both these squats have become important points of
reference for the surrounding inhabitants. As remarked by
an interviewee, ‘every time that a squat takes root in a
territory, it makes a difference’ (Coordinamento activist).
From this perspective, it is sufficient to look at the long
series of initiatives directed to the external urban dwellers,
as the anti-eviction activities and the legal info points
provided by activists of the struggle for the house. In this
sense, while squats work as shelters for squatters, they also
play an important role in the neighbourhoods in which they
are embedded. According to this, squatted spaces should be
approached as a specific type of ‘urban commons’.
Scholars provide different definitions of what an ‘urban
commons’ is. Some conceive of it as a social process
(Hardt and Negri 2000,2009; Linebaugh 2008), others as a
space (Federici 2010). Huron (2015) invokes ‘urban com-
mons’ as something theoretically and materially distinct
from the broader ‘commons’. Indeed, ‘commons’ is a term
used to generally indicate collective self-organisation out-
side capitalistic logic. Adding the urban dimension, we are
not just specifying the domain of this process, we are also
saying that it deals with the reproduction of the daily life
(Federici 2010). Besides this, the notion of ‘urban com-
mons’ demands a double understanding of counter-hege-
monic production of space and resistance, where these
spaces which are re-appropriated and radically repurposed
vis-a
`-vis financial speculation become points of contrast to
the mainstream, profit-oriented paradigm of the urban
fabric through top-down processes of regeneration (Galdini
2015; Mudu and Aureli 2016). Therefore, summing up
these different conceptualisations, in our understanding,
the ‘urban commons’ are theorised as the material articu-
lation of the daily engagement to transform against the
neoliberal urban fabric. This does not imply they are ‘open
to the public’ sources; they are addressed to those who
have the necessity and willingness to experiment para-
digms of urban reproduction that are radically alternative to
the mainstream one.
In this sense, housing squats—through the re-appropri-
ation of empty and unused spaces—produce autonomous
geographies (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Vasudevan
2015) and infrastructures (Larkin 2013; Papadopoulos
2014) through the commoning and recombining of existing
materialities and structures for meeting housing and
broader social needs. In this sense, they are both ‘urban
commons’, and propellers of the production and dissemi-
nation of manifold ‘urban commons’ directed towards
those precarious, dispossessed urban dwellers who are
rejected by the profit-oriented paradigm, and then priori-
tised into the Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare’s con-
tentious politics and re-signification of the conflicted,
saturated and densely populated urban fabric (Bresnihan
and Byrne 2014; Huron 2015). This is to say that, from the
action of squatting to the negotiation of the terrain of
policy-making, Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare insert
themselves in the contradiction of neoliberal cities and
propose an alternative, autonomous geography of the city
that is based on autonomous, environmentally sustainable,
ethical ways of responding to social needs (Gibson-Graham
2006; Hodkinson 2012). According to this argument,
although the primary purpose of the squats is housing, they
are not merely shelters, as the cases of sites like Metropoliz
and Porto Fluviale demonstrate (Grazioli and Caciagli
2017; Grazioli 2017b). They are ‘urban commons’ where
financial speculation and profit-oriented urban management
Voluntas
123

are challenged and disrupted in respect to a number of
further issues (i.e. cultural rights) that resonate with the
polyphonic, radically open nature of the ‘right to the city’.
Besides this, squats should be described as ‘urban
commons’ not just in respect to the role they exert towards
the outer city, but also because of the implications of their
alternative forms of internal daily life onto the subjectivity
of the squatters. Firstly, in the light of the overall crisis of
social reproduction affecting urban life, the action of
squatting represents a way of re-appropriating the income
snatched by the trap of indebtedness produced in the first
place by the privatised housing market (see Lazzarato
2013). This re-appropriated surplus can thus be redirected
towards a plurality of aspects that are no longer subsidised
by the welfare state (i.e. specialised health care and higher
education). In the case of migrants, living in a housing
squat can also be a way of supporting their mobile com-
mons, understood as tricks of survival and strategies of
existence fostering settlement and mobility (Papadopoulos
and Tsianos 2013). This is to say that squatting for housing
purposes becomes an intermediate need, since it allows the
satisfaction of manifold individual and collective needs
that would not be achievable otherwise (Cattaneo and
Martı
´nez 2014, pp. 29–30). In this sense, the traditional
division between a ‘deprivation-based’ squat and political
spaces (Pruijt 2013) characterised by pre-established
political purposes and distinctions between activists and
squatters along ideological and class lines, are inadequate
to describe the issues at stake in squatting for housing
because of their spatial and subjective fixity.
This relates to the second point that the Movimenti per il
Diritto all’Abitare are constantly underlining as a bench-
mark of their mobilisation: the alternative understandings
of citizenship based on solidarity and common action,
instead of formalised statuses and crystallised identities.
Indeed, BPM and Coordinamento do not hide their com-
position and life modalities. They rather claim that they
constitute a blueprint for radically rethinking the politics
and sociability governing daily life and relations among
urban dwellers according to the principles of collective
sharing and cooperation instead of on individualism,
competition and mutual annihilation. Indeed, the hetero-
geneous social composition of the squats demonstrates that
new models of social relation and reproduction can be
experimented with through the autonomous effort of
combining a set of non-negotiable principles (e.g. non-
commodification of common spaces; anti-racism; anti-
sexism) and anti-capitalist politics with daily praxis.
Therefore, they modulate cohabitation in the squats though
consensus-based organisational modality (Pickerill and
Chatterton 2006; Linebaugh 2008; Federici 2010;
Kokkinidis 2015a,b).
Moving to our conclusion, conceptualising squats as
‘urban commons’ makes evident the existing link between
housing and city. Thus, this analytical instrument is crucial
for understanding to what extent the housing rights
movements, through squatting, claim and perform a
renewed urban experience for marginalised, precarious
people. Based upon the empirical scrutiny of the practices
of the Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare, we finally pro-
vide a set of theoretical coordinates for updating the
Lefebvrian categories of the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre
1996; Purcell 2002; Merrifield 2011; Harvey 2012)
according to the situated challenges posed to grassroots
urban movements nowadays.
Beyond and Through the ‘Right to the City’
The formulation of the ‘right to the city’ by Henri Lefebvre
in Le Droit a` la Ville ([1968] 1996) has been largely
employed in recent decades in order to describe the polit-
ical demands emerging in urban mobilisations. Neverthe-
less, the existing literature mostly tends to apply this notion
to different empirical cases without contextualising it
spatially or historically. First of all, as Purcell (2014) has
noted, modern scholars use it to refer to grassroots initia-
tives inscribed in a liberal-democratic context, with the
result that the term no longer designates a revolutionary
aim. Also, the Lefebvrian account is ingrained in a Fordist
design and conceptualisation of the city in both spatial and
subjective terms (as epitomised by the reference to the
working class) (Purcell 2002; Merrifield 2011; Grazioli
2017a). Therefore, in the absence of a systematic re-con-
ceptualisation, the ‘right to the city’ seems to have lost its
descriptive potential in accounting for the contentious
politics deployed at quite diverse geographical scales.
Nonetheless, we argue that its analytical categories
should be retained and hybridised with other theoretical
notions such as the ‘urban commons’ in order to describe
the ongoing challenges and retain the radical openness and
potentialities entrenched in the formulation of the ‘right to
the city’, which is, notably, still largely used in the political
jargon of grassroots urban movements, including Movi-
menti per il Diritto all’abitare. Hence, we contend that
there are many potentialities of this concept yet to be
explored, especially in the light of operationalising it in
order to move from a critical urban theory to a radical
urban practice (Marcuse 2009, p. 194). Our empirical
research identified three main lines through which this
concept should be reworked.
First of all, the diversified local tactics, objectives and
spatial proliferations characterising the action of Movi-
menti per il diritto all’Abitare currently allow us to criti-
cally assess the Lefebvrian emphasis upon the right to
centrality. Indeed, acts of re-appropriation are practised in
Voluntas
123

diverse and multi-scalar spaces of the city, which are
characterised by the internal proliferation of borders and
the upsetting of boundaries (de Certeau 1984; Mezzadra
and Neilson 2013; Sassen 2015). The housing movement
organisations nurture new types of spaces in the cracks
opened by the neoliberal paradigm underlined in the city.
Indeed, they recover abandoned dwellings, giving them a
new role and fulfilling them with horizontal, consensus-
based dynamics. Moreover, they practise these territories
through solidarity ties instead of basing the urban experi-
ence on consumption. The various services provided by the
squats are examples of that. As our empirical investigations
sought to underline, alongside protest events, the housing
struggle develops on a daily basis in constructing spaces in
which alternative, horizontal dynamics are nurtured.
Therefore, more than demanding a ‘right to the city’, these
collective actors practise the right to stay put in the city
through the construction of the squats.
Secondly, these collective actors retain the original
radical openness entrenched in the notion of ‘right to the
city’ to encompass all those other rights involved in urban
living (e.g. environmental and cultural rights; freedom of
movement and mobility) that are immanent to the situated
materiality of the everyday experience of dispossessed
urban dwellers (Purcell 2002; Stephenson and Papado-
poulos 2006; Merrifield 2011; Cuppini 2015). This restores
the materiality and situatedness of the ‘right to the city’
that was diluted in its generic, immaterial use. On the other
hand, interpreting the right to the city according to the
situated, contingent acting of specific political actors, and
in this case of those demanding and re-appropriating
housing rights, allows it to take root in a materiality that
was present in Lefebvre’s original formulation in relation
to the peculiar context of late Sixties Paris.
Lastly, the contentious politics deployed by Movements
for the Right to Habitation in Rome allow the rethinking of
one of the more contested theoretical conundrums of
Lefebvre’s formulation: the critique of the ‘formal’ citizen
as the enfranchised subject for exerting urban transforma-
tional action. As pointed out by Purcell, at the core of the
‘right to the city’’s claim there are the inhabitants, since
‘inhabitance, not nationality, forms the basis for political
community and the decision making authority’ (Purcell
2003, p. 566). Yet Lefebvre narrowed the subjective
referral of the inhabitants practising their ‘right to the city’
to a delimited portion of urban dwellers, described as ci-
tadins—the urban dwellers allowed to practise this right on
the grounds of their daily inhabitance and sharing of the
city’s routine, and that he conflates with the urban working
class, then the protagonist of urban social movements and
mobilisations (Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2002).
Nonetheless, as emerges in the empirical part of this
article, the internal composition of both Coordinamento
and BPM is made by different types of urban dwellers,
whose intersectional differences cannot be interpreted
solely through the line of class: migrants, native precarious
workers, young professionals, fragile subjects expelled by
the access to the welfare system. Even though they used to
share a common condition of housing deprivation and
economic precariousness, they cannot be identified only
through the paradigm of class because of two main reasons:
the Fordist characterisation of the concept of working class
(see Negri 2014); and the relevance of the squatters’
intersectional differences in the organisation of the
Movements’ everydayness and political elaboration.
Instead, we contend that the Lefebvrian descriptive cate-
gory of citadins can still be useful for describing their
subjective role into the contemporary urban fabric. Nev-
ertheless, if the notion of working class is not a represen-
tative one in this case, the one of citadins can still be.
Indeed, whereas the citadins gain their entitlement to
producing the urban space through the experience of its
daily routines, they materialise it in acts of re-appropria-
tion, the emphasis on day-to-day interactions, and regard-
less of their formal enfranchisement. In this light, the
squatters currently organised with movements for the right
to inhabit the city of Rome can be deemed to epitomise one
of the possible materialisation of the Lefebvrian citadins
within the contemporary grassroots urban movements
(Grazioli 2017a).
These three main inputs suggest three corresponding
paths through which the content of the ‘right to the city’
could be reworked by scholars in order to make it appli-
cable to the understanding of current urban conflicts.
Firstly, hybridisation with the theoretical framework of the
‘urban commons’ allows us to encompass the problem of
scale of their production, and the consideration of the
autonomous geographies entrenched in grassroots pro-
cesses of urban regeneration. Secondly, the emphasis upon
daily social reproduction in the squats appears crucial for
understanding the changes in the political paradigms
underpinning these Movements’ political actions inside the
city. Lastly, their action underlines the necessity to seri-
ously rework the notion of urban citizenship beyond legal
enfranchisement in order to encompass all those autono-
mous experiences aimed at autonomously gaining the right
to exert a transformative power on urban space through re-
appropriation and inhabitance (Lefebvre 1996; Merrifield
2011; Vasudevan 2015). The following concluding section
summarises the main points emerging throughout the
empirical and theoretical analysis, and sets this paper’s
contribution for further research and enquiry upon the
relevance of squatting for housing purposes and the ‘right
to the city’s’ claims in the ongoing aftermath of the 2008
crisis.
Voluntas
123

Concluding Remarks
The paper has aimed to underline the theoretical relevance
of Housing Rights Movements in the neoliberal urban
fabric of Rome. In particular, we aimed to (a) provide an
insight into the potentialities coming from the collective
network Movimenti per il diritto all’abitare, in which both
Coordinamento and BPM are addressing their struggles. In
addition, we aimed to (b) develop the empirical observa-
tions into analytical instruments that could contribute to the
burgeoning debate about the role of these collective actors
into post-Fordist urban fabrics. Indeed, we employed the
concept of ‘urban commons’ to analyse the role of housing
squats in Rome and to propose a modality for updating the
framework of the ‘right to the city’ according to current
challenges.
Indeed, movements for the right to inhabit are not the
only social actors claiming a renewed ‘right to the city’,
nor are they the only ones using squatting experiences as a
political and social strategy for repossessing space to craft
‘urban commons’. Nonetheless, we argued that the inno-
vations they present in terms of political elaboration,
readjustment of their message, goals and strategies
according to their new composition and the altered political
context distinguish them for a number of reasons. The
paper emphasised the day-to-day modalities of organising
both social reproduction and political mobilisations
according to horizontal, consensus-based social practices.
Besides this, their extension into the neighbourhoods where
they are located for the dissemination grassroots forms of
welfare and manifold ‘urban commons’ have reinforced
their urban role as propellers of social mobilisations and
even of alternative policy-making on the subject of hous-
ing, as the roversial case of the Regional Deliberation
displays.
This is to say that these movements have been capable
of combining the realm of political demands sustaining the
struggle with the everydayness of the social relations
shaping the life of their social composition, without
undermining one aspect in favour of the other; rather, they
are mutually immanent and complementary. Through the
scrutiny of the alternative social configurations that the
squatters devise and negotiate in their everyday life, we can
understand how the maintenance of these movements is
grounded mostly in ‘everyday life more than concentrating
in rare moments of concerted action’ (Tilly 1991, p. 596).
Indeed, as emerged within another interview with an
activist:
The truth of the housing struggle is based on the
many demonstrations, pickets, rallies we organize in
the urban spaces. But it is also rooted on the dispo-
sition of squatters and activists to live in the squats, to
put their daily life into the ‘resistance site’. Without
this embodiment, the protests would be meaningless.
(Interview with a Coordinamento activist)
According to these words, the daily life of people in the
squats and their local rootedness in the neighbourhoods and
the broader city are intrinsically entangled with the
political message they articulate in the sites and moment
of mobilisation. On the one hand, the imperceptible yet
crucial politics of daily living in the local areas and their
routines allow the squatters to gain social legitimacy and
relate to the other urban dwellers. On the other hand, the
more visible political action provides these forms of life
with a visibility that defeats the myth of marginality and
deprivation-based approaches to self-made habitation.
Ultimately, this article is considered a first step for
updating the current theoretical framework concerning
the role of Housing Rights Movements in current urban
fabrics by drawing from the theoretical toolbox of both the
‘urban commons’ and the ‘right to the city’ and mutually
hybridising them. Nevertheless, the topic is far from
exhausted. Further analysis should go deeper in this
direction, for example enquiring if these considerations
can be accurate for describing other cases under study in
different geographical contexts.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest
References
Agnew, J. A. (1987). Place and politics: The geographical mediation
of state and society. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin.
Andretta, M., Piazza, G., & Subirat, A. (2015). Urban dynamics and
social movements. In D. Della Porta & M. Diani (Eds.), The
Oxford handbook of social movements. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Armati, C. (2015). La Scintilla. Dalla Valle alla Metropoli, Una
Storia Antagonista della Lotta Per La Casa. Rome: Fandango
Editore.
Baldini, M., & Poggio, T. (2013). The Italian housing system and the
global financial crisis. Journal of Housing and Built Environ-
ment, 29(2), 317–334.
Balziger, P., & Lambelet, A. (2014). Participant observation. In D.
Della Porta (Ed.), Methodological practices in social movement
research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berdini, P. (2014). Le citta` fallite. I grandi comuni italiani e la crisi
del welfare urbano. Rome: Donzelli editore.
Bertaglio, A. (2011). Legambiente: il cemento si sta mangiando
l’Italia.Il Fatto Quotidiano. Retrieved Feb 28, 2018 from http://
www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2011/04/12/legambiente-il-cemento-si-
sta-mangiando-litalia/103913/.
Bouillon, F. (2017). Why migrants’ squats are a political issue. In P.
Mudu & S. Chattopadhyay (Eds.), Migration, squatting and
radical autonomy (pp. 67–77). London: Routledge.
Voluntas
123

Bresnihan, P., & Byrne, M. (2014). Escape into the city: Everyday
practices of commoning and the production of urban space in
Dublin. Antipode, 47(1), 36–54.
Caciagli, C. (2016). ‘La Questione abitativa a Roma: Politiche di
Emergenza e Azioni Collettive’, Urban@it 2, pp. 1–12.
Careri, F., & Gon
˜i Mazzitelli, A. (2012). Metropoliz, De la Torre de
Babel a la Pidgin City. Nuevos Imaginarios Multiculturales,
Vistos Desde La Etnografı
´a, En La Ciudad Informal. Anuario de
Antropologı´a Social y Cultural en Uruguay, 10, 81–93.
Cattaneo, C., & Martı
´nez, M. A. (2014). Squatting as an alternative to
capitalism: An introduction. In Squatting Europe Kollective
(Ed.), Squatters’ movement in Europe: Commons and autonomy
as alternatives to capitalism (pp. 1–23). London: Pluto Press.
Cellamare, C. (2014a). Roma citta` autoprodotta. Ricerca urbana e
linguaggi artistici. Rome: Manifestolibri.
Cellamare, C. (2014b). Autorganizzazione e vita quotidiana. Storia di
citta
`, a Roma. In C. Cellamare, R. De Angelis, M. Ilardi, & E.
Scandurra (Eds.), Recinti urbani. Roma e I luoghi dell’abitare.
Rome: Manifestolibri.
Cellamare, C. (2016). Le Diverse Periferie di Roma e le Forme di
Autorganizzazione. Urban@it Background Papers, 2, pp. 2–12.
Ciccarelli, R. (2015). Viaggio a Roma, La citta
`delle case senza gente
e di gente senza casa. Il Manifesto. Retrieved Feb 28, 2018 from
http://ilmanifesto.info/viaggio-a-roma-la-citta-delle-case-senza-
gente-e-di-gente-senza-casa/.
Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital.
The American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120.
Cuppini, N. (2015). Verso una Teoria Politica della Citta
`Globaliz-
zata. Scienza & Politica, XXVII(53), 247–262.
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
De Leone, F., & La Forgia, A. (2007). La Partecipazione fra
Concertazione e Conflitto: il Caso dell’ Emergenza Abitative. In
E. D’Albergo & G. Moini (Eds.), Partecipazione, Movimenti e
Politiche Pubbliche a Roma. Rome: Aracne.
De Lucia, V. (2003). Il nuovo piano regolatore di Roma e la
dissipazione del paesaggio romano. Meridiana, 47–48.
Della Porta, D. (2010). L’intervista qualitativa. Rome: Laterza.
Dipartimento Progetti di sviluppo e finanziamenti europei. (2015).
Sviluppo urbano sostenibile. Le strategie di Roma Capitale.
Retrieved Mar 1, 2018 from http://www.agenziacoesione.gov.it/
opencms/export/sites/dps/it/documentazione/PON_metro/Strategia_
Sviluppo_US/ROMA_CAPITALE_Allegato_3_Strategie_di_
sviluppo_urbano_e_allegati.pdf.
Di Feliciantonio, C. (2016). ‘Pensare le Occupazioni Come Spazi del
Comune’, MEMOTEF, Annali del Dipartimento di Metodi e
Modelli per l’Economia, Il Territorio e la Finanza (Special Issues
‘‘Commons/Comune’’), pp. 43–59.
Federici, S. (2010). Feminism and the politics of the commons in an
era of primitive accumulation. In C. Hughes, S. Peace, & K. Van
Meter (Eds.), Uses of a whirlwind. Movement, movements and
contemporary radical currents in the United States (pp.
283–294). Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Galdini, R. (2015). L’Uso del Temporaneo nei Processi di Rigener-
azione Urbana. Sociologia Urban e Rurale, 107, 20–34.
Gargiulo, E. (2011). Welfare Locale o Welfare Localistico? La
Residenza Anagrafica come Strumento di Accesso ai -odi
Negazione dei -Diritti Sociali. Retrieved Jan 7, 2018 from http://
www.espanet-italia.net/conferenza2011/edocs2/sess.16/16-gar
giulo.pdf.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Governo.it (2014). Decreto Legge 28 marzo 2014, n. 47. Retrieved
Feb 25, 2018 from http://www.governo.it/sites/governo.it/files/
75134-9334.pdf.
Grazioli, M. (2017a). From citizens to Citadins: Rethinking right to
the city inside housing squats in Rome, Italy. Citizenship Studies,
21(4), 393–408.
Grazioli, M. (2017b). Abitare, Rigenerare, Ridefinire i Confini
Urbani: il Caso delle Occupazioni Abitative a Roma, Sentieri
Urbani/Urban Tracks, 22 (Urban Boundaries), pp. 78–83.
Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2017). The right to (stay put in) the city.
The case of Porto Fluviale in Rome. iQuaderni 13(Mag-
gio_Agosto 2017), pp. 79–85.
Gregoretti, U. (1976) Dentro Roma [film documentary].
Hale, C. R. (2006). Activist research v. cultural critique: Indigenous
land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthro-
pology. Cultural Anthropology, 21(1), 96–120.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Hartman C. (1984/2002).Right to stay put, reprinted in Between
Eminence and Notoriety. New Brunswick, NJ: CUPR Press.
Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The
transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Human
Geography, 71(1), 3–17.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities. From the right to the city to the urban
revolution. London/New York: Verso.
Hodkinson, S. (2012). The return of the housing question. Ephemera:
Theory & Politics in Organization, 12(4), 423–444.
Huron, A. (2015). Working with strangers in saturated space:
Reclaiming and maintaining the urban commons. Antipode,
47(4), 963–979.
Juris, J. S., & Khasnabish, A. (2013). Ethnography and activism
within networked spaces of transnational encounter. In J. S. Juris
& A. Khasnabish (Eds.), Insurgent encounters. Transnational
activism, ethnography and the political. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press.
Kokkinidis, G. (2015a). Post-capitalist imaginaries: The case of
workers’ collectives in Greece. Journal of Management Inquiry,
24(4), 429–432.
Kokkinidis, G. (2015b). Spaces of possibilities: Workers’ self-
management in Greece. Organization, 22(6), 847–871.
Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343.
Lazzarato, M. (2013). Governing by debt. South Pasadena, CA:
Semiotext(e).
Lefebvre, H. (1970). La re´ volution urbaine. Paris: Gallimard.
Lefebvre, H. (1972). Espace et politique. Le droite a` la ville II. Paris:
Anthropos.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of everyday life. Vol. 1: Introduction.
London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writing on cities. Oxford/Malden, MA: Black-
well Publishers.
Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and
commons for all. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Marcuse, P. (2009). From critical urban theory to the right to the city.
City, 13(1–2), 185–197.
Martinez, M. (2007). The squatters’ movement: Urban counter-
culture and alter-globalisation dynamics. South European Soci-
ety and Politics, 12(3), 379–398.
Martinez, M. (2013). ‘The squatters’ Movement in Europe: A durable
struggle for social autonomy in urban politics. Antipode, 45(4),
1–22.
Massey, D. (2004). Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska
Annaler, 86(B), 5–18.
Merrifield, A. (2011). The right to the city and beyond. City, 15(3–4),
473–481.
Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method, or, the
multiplication of labor. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Voluntas
123

Ministero dell’Interno-Ufficio Centrale di Statistica. (2015). Gli
sfratti in Italia. Andamento delle procedure di rilascio di
immobili ad uso abitativo. Retrieved Jan 28, 2018 from http://
ucs.interno.gov.it/FILES/AllegatiPag/1263/Pubblicazione_sfratti_
2014.pdf.
Mudu, P. (2006). Patterns of segregation in contemporary Rome.
Urban Geography, 27(5), 422–440.
Mudu, P. (2014). Ogni Sfratto Sara
`Una Barricata: Squatting for
Housing and Social Conflict in Rome. In Squatting Europe
Kollective (Ed.), Squatters’ movement in Europe: Commons and
autonomy as alternatives to capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Mudu, P., & Aureli, A. (2016). ‘Il Cammino Tortuoso per ‘‘Mettere in
Comune’’. Le Occupazioni Come una Pratica di Definizione dei
Diritti’, MEMOTEF, Annali del Dipartimento di Metodi e
Modelli per l’Economia, Il Territorio e la Finanza (Special Issue
‘‘Commons/Comune’’), pp. 81–94.
Negri, A. (2014). Il Polmone Comune della Metropoli. Intervista ad
Antonio Negri in Guisa di Appendice a La Comune della
Cooperazione Sociale. Retrieved Feb 28, 2018 from http://www.
euronomade.info/?p=2675.
Nomisma.it. (2016). Comunicati stampa Nomisma-Federcasa. Retrieved
Mar 1, 2018 from http://www.nomisma.it/images/COMUNICATIS
TAMPA/2016-01-29_NOMISMA_FEDERCASA_rev.pdf.
Nur, N., & Sethman, A. (2017). Migration and mobilization for the
right to housing in Rome. New urban Frontiers? In P. Mudu & S.
Chattopadhyay (Eds.), Migration, squatting and radical auton-
omy (pp. 78–92). London: Routledge.
O’Dochartaigh, N., & Bosi, L. (2010). ‘Territoriality and Mobiliza-
tion: The civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland. Mobiliza-
tion: An International Journal, 15(4), 405–424.
Papadopoulos, D. (2014). Generation M. matter, makers, micro-
biomes: compost for Gaia. Teknokultura, 11(3), 637–645.
Papadopoulos, D., & Tsianos, V. (2013). After citizenship: Autonomy
of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons.
Citizenship Studies, 17, 2178–2196.
Pickerill, J., & Chatterton, P. (2006). Notes towards autonomous
geographies: Creation, resistance and self-management as sur-
vival tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 30(6), 730–746.
Pietrangeli, G. (2014). La Zona Industriale di Tor Sapienza.
Trasformazioni Produttive e Politiche Urbanistiche a Roma nel
Secondo Dopoguerra. Contemporanea, 2 (aprile-giugno),
pp. 219–249.
Pinson, G., & Morel Journel, C. (2016). The Neoliberal city—theory,
evidence, debates. Territory, Politics, Governance, 4(2),
137–153.
Pruijt, H. (2012). Squatting in Europe. Partecipazione e Conflitto, 1,
19–44.
Pruijt, H. (2013). The logic of urban squatting. International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1), 1–29.
Puccini, E. (2016). Verso una Politica della Casa. Dall’Emergenza
Abitativa Romana ad un Nuovo Modello Nazionale. Roma:
Ediesse.
Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its
urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal, 58, 99–108.
Purcell, M. (2003). Citizenship and the right to the global city:
Reimaging the capitalist word order. International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research, 27(3), 564–590.
Purcell, M. (2014). Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to
the City. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36(1), 141–154.
Regione.Lazio.it. (2016). Deliberazioni della Giunta Regionale.
Retrieved Feb 28, 2018 from http://www.regione.lazio.it/bin
ary/rl_main/tbl_delibere/291575.pdf.
Sack, R. D. (1986). Human territoriality: Its theory and history. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Sassen, S. (2015). Old borders and new bordering capabilities: Cities
as frontiers zone. Scienza & Politica, XXVII(53), 295–306.
Semi, G. (2015). Gentrification. Tutte le citta` come Disneyland?.
Bologna: Il Mulino.
Soja, E. W. (1980). The socio-special dialectic. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 70(2), 207–225.
Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of
space in critical social theory. London: Verso.
Squatting Europe Kollective. (2014). The squatters’ movement in
Europe. Commons and autonomy as alternatives to capitalism.
London: Pluto Press.
Squatting Europe Kollective. (2013). Squatting in Europe. Radical
spaces, urban struggles. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson:
Minor Compositions.
Staid, A. (2014). I dannati della metropoli. Etnografie dei migranti ai
confini della legalita` . Milan: Le Milieu.
Staid, A. (2017). Abitare Illegale. Etnografia del Vivere ai Margini
dell’Occidente. Milan: Le Milieu.
Stavrides, S. (2016). Common space. The city as commons. London:
Zed Books.
Stephenson, N., & Papadopoulos, D. (2006). Analysing everyday
experience. Social research and political change. Basingstoke:
Palgrave McMillan.
Tilly, C. (1991). Domination, resistance, compliance…discourse.
Sociological Forum, 6(3), 593–602.
Vasudevan, A. (2015). The Makeshift city: Towards a global
geography of squatting. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3),
338–359.
Villani, L. (2012). Le Borgate del Fascismo. Storia Urbana, Politica
e Sociale della Periferia Romana. Milano: Ledizioni.
Wyly, E. K., & Newman, K. (2006). The right to stay put, revisited:
Gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City.
Urban Studies, 43(1), 23–57.
Voluntas
123