Struggling for the production of space. Social movements, housing and urban transformation in Lisbon and Rome

UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA Instituto de Ciências Sociais Struggling for the production of space. Social movements, housing and urban transformation in Lisbon and Rome Claudio Carbone Orientador: Doutor Simone Tulumello Coorientador: Doutor Elio Trusiani Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Estudos de Desenvolvimento. 2024 UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA Instituto de Ciências Sociais Struggling for the production of space. Social movements, housing and urban transformation in Lisbon and Rome Claudio Carbone Orientador: Doutor Simone Tulumello Coorientador: Doutor Elio Trusiani Tese especialmente elaborada para obtenção do grau de Doutor em Estudos de Desenvolvimento. Presidente de Júri - Doutora Ângela Maria Barreto Xavier, Investigadora Principal com Habilitação e Presidente do Conselho Científico do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Vogais: - Doutora Sara raquel Fernandes Queiroz de Medeiros, Professora do Magistério Superior do Instituto de Políticas Públicas da Universidade Federal Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brasil; - Doutora Ana Isabel Drago Lobato, Investigadora Júnior no Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra; - Doutor Jorge da Silva Macaísta Malheiros, Professor Associado do Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território da Universidade de Lisboa; - Doutor Francesco Biagi, Investigador Júnior no Centro de Investigação em Arquitetura, Urbanismo e Design (CIAUD) da Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de Lisboa; - Doutor Simone Tulumello, Investigador Auxiliar do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa e orientador da tese. Esta investigação foi realizada com o apoio institucional da Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, através da concessão de uma bolsa de doutoramento (SFRH/BD/137033/2018), com a duração de 48 meses e com uma bolsa excecional (COVID/BD/153219/2023) com a duração de 5 meses para além dos 48 meses já mencionados. 2024 ACKNOWLEDGMENT “Il y a des mots qui font vivre et ce sont des mots innocents: le mot chaleur, le mot confiance, amour, justice et le mot liberté, le mot enfant et le mot gentillesse, et certains noms de fleurs et certains noms de fruits, le mot courage et le mot découvrir et le mot frère et le mot camarade et certains noms de pays de villages et certains noms de femmes et d’amis” (Eluard, P.). I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who played a significant role in the completion of my doctoral thesis. Their unwavering support and trust in me have been crucial in this journey. First of all, I would like to thank my family of origin. Despite the physical distance that separates us, they have always been there for me, constantly encouraging me and believing in my abilities. Their trust has been the driving force behind my achievements and their constantly demonstrated love is the basis of my human structure. I am also indebted to my family in Lisbon, who have been a fundamental pillar of intellectual and social support throughout my journey. Their guidance, wisdom, sincere friendship, and constant encouragement fuelled my growth as a scholar and beyond. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to my thesis tutor, Simone Tulumello, for his invaluable academic guidance that served as a guiding light throughout my research. His unwavering support and attention prevented me from losing my way on this challenging path. Beyond his academic contributions, Simone has exemplified remarkable human qualities and generosity, which are rare and refreshing in the academic environment. I am equally indebted to Elio Trusiani, my co-tutor, whose mentorship played a pivotal role in shaping me as a student. His dedication and passion for teaching have profoundly influenced my growth. Special thanks also go to Marco Allegra, who patiently imparted a wealth of knowledge about setting up an academic research project. Furthermore, I would like to extend my gratitude to all comrades and partisans who tirelessly fight for a better world. To those I have had the privilege of knowing personally and sharing struggles with – the All Reds, Sirigaita, Stop Despejos – as well as those I have never met. Whether I have encountered them on the streets of the cities I have passed through or whether they are scattered in every corner of the world unknown to me, their unwavering commitment to justice is a beacon of hope. The Palestinian people, the Kurdish people, and the indigenous Zapatista communities, exemplify a collective dedication to preserving the hopes and dreams of oppressed peoples, which is profoundly inspiring. To all the dreamers who continue to pursue a just world, I am eternally grateful. “Ci sono spazi che sono anche questo… Idee, belle idee. E le belle idee vanno difese ad ogni costo” (Acrobax). i ABSTRACT This doctoral thesis examines the conditions, actors, and power relations generated in contemporary cities regarding the ‘production of space’ through three conceptual dimensions that will structure both the analytical chapters of this thesis as well as the research questions and, thus, the conclusions: (i) As the structure of the environment in which ([Housing-Rights Movement]; hereafter [HRM]) operate; (ii) As the agency of collective actors struggling against the production of neoliberal space; (iii) As the scale of social actions. Examining the past five decades in two southern European capitals, Lisbon and Rome, this research investigates the role of institutions in shaping urban transformation through neoliberal urbanisation and housing policies. Additionally, it explores the response of HRMs through autonomous spatial proposals that challenge traditional capitalist frameworks. The thesis adopts an activist ethnographic methodology, recounting experiences within the HRMs in Lisbon and Rome. The focus is on the Arroios neighbourhood in Lisbon and the Ostiense neighbourhood in Rome, examining respectively the ‘coletividade’ of Sirigaita and the squat of Porto Fluviale. The proximity to the case studies through the use of this methodology allowed me to understand the movements through an academically rigorous but avowedly partisan approach. The absence of comparative studies on the relationship between the ‘production of space’ and the HRMs in Lisbon and Rome justifies the importance of this research. While there are studies on the Italian context, the Portuguese context is relatively unexplored, especially in terms of the movement’s spatial practices. This thesis contributes to the literature by demonstrating the emancipatory and political potential of the new autonomous spaces born in the Lisbon context. Overall, this research increases the visibility of the HRMs and their role as active political actors in shaping urban landscapes. By studying their spatial practices, the thesis sheds light on the importance of these movements in upholding the ‘right to the city’ and in creating and accessing new urban commons. The findings will contribute to understanding the complexities of contemporary urban transformations and the impact of grassroots movements on urban development. Keywords: production of space, social movements, housing, urban transformations, Lisbon, and Rome. ii RESUMO Esta tese tem como objetivo contribuir para o debate em curso sobre as condições, os atores e as relações de poder associadas à produção do espaço nas cidades contemporâneas. Ao examinar os quadros teóricos que elucidam a forma como a produção do espaço ocorre e os atores que a impulsionam em contextos urbanos, este estudo explora três dimensões teóricas interligadas: (i) a relação entre espaço e desenvolvimento nas cidades contemporâneas, (ii) a produção do espaço pelos movimentos sociais pelo direito à habitação (HRM) e (iii) o espaço como ambiente de debate e conflito entre instituições e HRMs. Estes temas fornecem um quadro abrangente para analisar as transformações urbanas e a trajetória das mobilizações em prol da habitação em duas capitais do sul da Europa. A produção do espaço nas cidades é um processo complexo e multifacetado que envolve uma série de atores e dinâmicas de poder. As formas como o espaço é produzido, controlado e contestado têm implicações significativas para as relações sociais, económicas e políticas nos contextos urbanos. Este estudo centra-se no papel da gestão de recursos humanos na produção do espaço nas cidades contemporâneas, com especial incidência em duas capitais do sul da Europa: Lisboa e Roma. A relação entre espaço e desenvolvimento nas cidades contemporâneas: As cidades contemporâneas estão a sofrer transformações rápidas e profundas, impulsionadas por várias forças, incluindo as políticas urbanas neoliberais, os fluxos globais de capital e as desigualdades sociais e económicas. Estas transformações têm implicações significativas para a produção do espaço e o direito à cidade. A mercantilização do espaço urbano, a crescente gentrificação e a deslocação de comunidades marginalizadas são algumas das questões-chave que emergem neste contexto. Compreender a relação entre espaço e desenvolvimento é crucial para analisar a dinâmica da transformação urbana e o papel dos HRMs na definição de práticas espaciais alternativas. A produção do espaço pelos HRM: Os HRMs emergiram como atores importantes na contestação das narrativas e práticas dominantes relacionadas com a produção do espaço. Estes movimentos lutam pelo direito a uma habitação adequada, por rendas acessíveis e pelo direito à cidade. Utilizam uma série de estratégias e táticas para reclamar e transformar o espaço urbano, incluindo a ocupação, as iniciativas de habitação cooperativa e a organização de base. Ao envolver-se ativamente no espaço, os HRM não só contestam a produção dominante do espaço, como também criam práticas espaciais alternativas que dão prioridade às necessidades da comunidade, à justiça social e ao bem-estar dos residentes. Para compreender a produção do espaço pelos HRMs, este estudo explora a sua relação com diferentes contextos espaciais, incluindo espaços públicos, espaços privados e bens comuns urbanos. Examina-se a forma como os HRMs navegam e transformam os territórios para criar espaços autónomos mais inclusivos e acessíveis. iii Espaço como local de debate e conflito entre instituições e HRM: A produção do espaço não é um processo neutro ou apolítico. Envolve vários atores, incluindo governos, urbanistas, promotores e residentes, cujos interesses e dinâmicas de poder moldam a paisagem urbana. As interações entre os HRMs e os atores institucionais conduzem frequentemente a conflitos e negociações sobre o controlo e a utilização do espaço. Este estudo analisa a dinâmica destas interações, explorando a forma como os HRMs navegam nas estruturas institucionais, formam alianças e desafiam as relações de poder existentes para influenciar a produção do espaço. Estudos de caso Lisboa e Roma: Os estudos de caso desta investigação centram-se em Lisboa e Roma, duas capitais do sul da Europa que passaram por transformações urbanas significativas e por lutas pela habitação. Estas cidades proporcionam contextos contrastantes para examinar a produção do espaço pelos HRMs. Roma tem uma longa história de mobilizações pela habitação, caracterizada por um vasto leque de movimentos e iniciativas. Lisboa, por outro lado, tem assistido a uma recente onda de ativismo pela habitação e a um crescente reconhecimento do direito à habitação. Comparando estas duas cidades, esta investigação identifica pontos comuns, diferenças e fatores contextuais que influenciam a produção do espaço pelos HRMs, centrando-se em dois espaços específicos: A ‘coletividade’ Sirigaita, inserida no bairro de Arroios, em Lisboa; e a ocupação habitacional Porto Fluviale, inserida no bairro Ostiense, em Roma. Metodologia: A investigação adota uma abordagem metodológica etnográfica ativista, combinando análise de documentos, entrevistas com ativistas, políticos e participação ativa nos eventos descritos. Envolvendo as principais partes interessadas, o estudo procura compreender as perspetivas, estratégias e desafios enfrentados pelos HRMs na definição da produção do espaço. A investigação reconhece as complexidades e limitações do estudo de um fenómeno dinâmico e em evolução como a produção do espaço. No entanto, esforça-se por fornecer uma compreensão matizada das práticas espaciais dos HRM e das suas implicações para as transformações urbanas. No meu caso, devo admitir que tenho um preconceito subjetivo em relação aos dois movimentos em que participo ativamente e observo de perto. Este preconceito é um desafio comum para os investigadores que optam pela metodologia do estudo de caso. Há sempre uma tendência para confirmar ideias preconcebidas sobre um tema específico (Grazioli, 2018). No entanto, Flyvbjerg argumenta que, na maioria das vezes, as nossas opiniões preconcebidas, suposições e noções são refutadas quando somos confrontados com o material de um caso. O estudo de caso obriga-nos a rever os nossos pressupostos em pontos cruciais, proporcionando uma oportunidade de verificação (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 235). Esta investigação tem como objetivo desafiar as narrativas negativas sobre os squats em Roma e realçar as práticas positivas dentro destes espaços. Procura também promover a colaboração entre as políticas públicas e o movimento dos squats para revitalizar as paisagens urbanas e responder às iv necessidades de habitação. Além disso, o meu objetivo é reconhecer o trabalho social e político dos HRMs e dos espaços sociais nos bairros do estudo de caso. Por fim, pretendo contextualizar o papel dos HRMs na promoção do direito à cidade, mostrando que a sua luta vai para além das meras questões habitacionais. Esta metodologia permitiu-me narrar as experiências de reprodução social e auto-organização relacionadas com a produção de espaços no seio destes movimentos. Partilharei estas experiências através de uma metodologia que me permitiu posicionar-me politicamente em relação às minhas análises académicas, estando pessoalmente envolvido em ambos os processos que irei descrever. Questões de investigação: 1) Quais foram as estratégias de desenvolvimento institucional encontradas nas cidades estudadas e que tipo de políticas habitacionais e transformações urbanas produziram? 2) Quais são as práticas espaciais e sociais alternativas propostas pelos HRM e como contribuíram estas para o desenvolvimento local das cidades estudadas? 3) Que interações políticas (conflituosas ou colaborativas) se desenvolvem entre as instituições e os HRM a partir da produção espacial divergente destes dois atores? Esta tese vai para além das conclusões puramente académicas, pretendendo enfatizar a importância das experiências autónomas nas cidades estudadas, na medida em que estas apoiam os direitos fundamentais dos cidadãos, incluindo o direito à habitação, o direito à cidade e o direito à participação política ativa nos seus espaços de vida. O meu objetivo é contribuir para a legitimação política destes atores que há muito lutam por estes direitos através da produção de espaços e da ação direta nos territórios que irei analisar. Em conclusão, esta tese oferece uma análise abrangente da produção do espaço no contexto dos HRMs em Lisboa e Roma. Ao examinar a relação entre os HRMs e o espaço, o estudo realça o significado destes movimentos como atores centrais no desenvolvimento urbano e na contestação da cidade. A investigação contribui para a compreensão das transformações urbanas, dos movimentos sociais e do direito à cidade, ao mesmo tempo que fornece informações para ativistas e políticos que procuram responder às necessidades de habitação e promover paisagens urbanas mais inclusivas. Palavras-chave: produção do espaço, movimentos sociais, habitação, transformações urbanas, Lisboa e Roma. v INDEX OF ACRONYMS A.s.i.A.-USB - [Unione Sindacale di Base - Associazione Inquilini e Abitanti] i.e. [Union of Basic Trade Unions - Tenants and Housing Association] ACER - [Associazione Nazionale dei Costruttori Edili] i.e. [Association of Building Constructors of Rome and Province] Action - [Action-Diritti in Movimento] i.e. [ActionRights in Movements] AML - [Área Metropolitana de Lisboa] i.e. [Lisbon Metropolitan Area] AMR - [Area Metropolitana di Roma] i.e. [Roman Metropolitan Area] ARU - [Áreas de Reabilitação Urbana] i.e. [Areas for Urban Rehabilitation] BE - [Left Bloc Party] BIP/ZIP - [Bairros e Zonas de Intervenção Prioritária] i.e. [Neighbourhoods and Priority Intervention Areas] BPM - [Blocchi Precari Metropolitani] i.e. [Metropolitan Precarious Blocks] CAB - [Comitato di Agitazione Borgata] i.e. [Borgata Agitation Committee] CCLC - [Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa] i.e. [Citizens’ Coordination of Struggle for Housing] CdR - [Comune di Roma] i.e. [Rome City Council] CML - [Câmara Municipal de Lisboa] i.e. [Lisbon City Council] COPCON - [Comando Operacional do Continente] i.e. [Continental Operations Command] CSOAs - [Centri Sociali Occupati Autogestiti] i.e. [Self-managed Squatted Social Centres] DC - [Christian Democrats Party] EAC - [European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City] EEC - [European Economic Community] ERP - [Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica] i.e. [Social Housing] ERS - [Edilizia Residenziale Sociale] i.e. [Social Residential Housing] EU - [European Union] EXPO 1998 - [1998 Universal Exhibition] FCT - [Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia] i.e. [Foundation for Science and Technology] FNRE - [Fundo Nacional para a Reabilitação do Edificado] i.e. [National Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Built Environment] GDP - [Gross Domestic Product] GESCAL - [GEStione CAse per i Lavoratori] i.e. [Workers’ Housing Management] xii 1 CHAPTER 1. Introduction With this thesis, I want to contribute to the discussion of what are the conditions, the actors, and related power relations that are generated concerning the ‘production of space’ in contemporary cities (Harvey, 1989, 2003, 2012; Lefebvre, 1991, 1996 [1968]). In the specific cases, I will analyse on the one hand how institutions, through the process of neoliberal urbanisation and the enactment of housing policies, contribute to the development and urban transformation of contemporary cities, while on the other hand, I will analyse the response of the ([Housing-Rights Movement]; hereafter [HRM]) that, not recognising themselves in this model, produce new autonomous and post-capitalist spatial proposals that in turn contribute directly or indirectly to the development of the territories in which they are inserted, in the specific case of two neighbourhoods in two southern European capitals, Lisbon and Rome. My interest in the concept of ‘production of space’, and thus in this research, is part of a long academic, militant, and artistic journey. Academic, because ever since my university course at the University of Architecture La Sapienza in Rome, I have often questioned myself on the concept of ‘space’ both public and private, where through our projects in the various courses, I had to learn how to analyse and design specific spaces and above all to understand how and by whom they would then be used. This also led me to investigate with a critical lens how these spaces were conceived and designed by the institutional actors, especially about the design of public space, i.e. reproducing the dominant models reflected in the territories, taking little account of what might be the actual needs or demands of the communities that would then have to pass through and use that specific space. This critical analysis of the ‘production of space’ remained central to my personal experience even when, in the same university years, I became an active militant in a squat, the [Squatted Self-Managed Laboratory] ([Laboratorio Occupato Autogestito]; hereafter [LOA]) Acrobax in Rome, self-managed by various collectives. In this squat, space was designed and produced collectively. Designed collectively because what and how to do was decided in a horizontal assembly among all the militants of the space, and produced collectively because the works were done by the space’s militants themselves, who would then use that space directly without delegating an external figure to do it. My active participation in these practices of self-construction and self-management also led me to seek out experiences that would allow me to bring together these two points of view, the academic and the militant. This research led me to develop my thesis project in architecture in an experimental academic environment by creating a participatory project with the communities of a favela in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. Regarding my artistic path, I am a documentary filmmaker. Following what I said about my professional and militant approach, the object of my documentaries has always been to show 2 alternative spatial practices to the dominant model. Therefore, to show post-capitalist patterns reflected in space, produced directly by attentive and resistant communities in different territorial contexts, such as the self-managed squats in Rome, within the autonomous indigenous territories in Costa Rica and Mexico, or the informal neighbourhoods in the suburbs of Lisbon. All these experiences just described thus led me to reflect with respect to different disciplines and life experiences on the concept of the ‘production of space’, through both the critical analysis of the point of view of the executors of urban and legislative projects (the institutions) and through the research and active integration within those autonomous spaces produced by urban movements that claim the right to housing and the right to the city. For these reasons, when I decided to give linear continuity to my academic career, I wanted to develop a PhD project; my choice fell on this specific theme, which has fed my academic, militant, and artistic curiosity for many years. Regarding the specific choice of case studies, in this research, I wanted to use the approach of activist ethnography as my principal methodology, applied to two case studies (thus involving active participation within the movements described). The choice could only fall on experiences within which I was already active (such as the case of Lisbon) or on those I had integrated in the past and still maintain active contacts today (such as the case of Rome). The fact, therefore, of knowing the sociopolitical context in which these two cities are embedded and, above all, the point of having been part of the HRM in Rome in the past and still being part of some collectives of the same movement in Lisbon led me to choose these two cities as case studies for my thesis project. Given my proximity and active participation in the two movements, there is no doubt that I have a subjective bias against them. This is undoubtedly one of the problems that any researcher who chooses the case study as a methodology of action has to face, in the sense that there is a process of verification understood as a tendency to confirm what are preconceived ideas about a given topic. In this regard, Flyvbjerg responds that most of the time they faced such a situation, their opinions, assumptions, and preconceived notions were wrong and that the case material forced them to revise their assumptions on essential points. In other words, the case study forces the researcher to revise their opinions and is, in a way, an opportunity for verification (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 235). According to Flyvbjerg (2006), the most advanced level of understanding is achieved when the researcher places themselves in the studied context. This is true even if one assumes that research, like other learning processes, can be described by the phenomenology of human learning. Researchers can understand the views and actions of researchers, which are characteristic of social actors, only in this way (Ibid., 2006: 236). Therefore, proximity to the context of the case study, through participation in the activities, will be a prerequisite for advanced understanding, as mutual knowledge shared by the researcher and the key actors whose actions reconstitute the social world can be generated. 3 As the case studies are diverse, so are the outputs to which I aspire for this research: Challenging negative narratives about the squat in Rome and highlighting positive practices within squats, supporting collaboration between public policy and the squat movement to regenerate urban landscapes and respond to housing needs, recognizing the social and political work of HRM and social spaces in Lisbon’s Arroios neighbourhood, and contextualizing the role of HRM in promoting the right to the city by demonstrating that their struggle goes beyond the struggle for housing. Therefore, I decided to use an activist ethnographic methodology to achieve these descriptive outputs. Although I could not apply it entirely, which I will explain more in the methodological chapter, it allowed me to narrate the experiences of social reproduction and self-organisation related to the production of spaces of these movements. As specific case studies, I will recount experiences in two central neighbourhoods of the two cities under investigation: the Arroios neighbourhood in Lisbon and the Ostiense neighbourhood in Rome. The central spatial cases of the thesis will be Sirigaita’ coletividade in the case of Lisbon and the squatting of Porto Fluviale in the case of Rome. I will narrate these two experiences using a methodology that will allow me to position myself politically in relation to my academic analyses as part of both processes I will describe. This is also because, as mentioned at the beginning, my interest and scientific curiosity in this research topic arose from my personal experiences, both academic and militant. In addition to having chosen them because of my previous experiences both academically and as an active activist in the ranks of HRMs in both cities (a fact that certainly facilitated my insertion into the contexts I was going to study), I believe that there are academic shortcomings in terms of comparative perspectives on peripheral housing systems with the European context, which although they are a secondary aspect to the aims of this thesis, analysing them will help me understand how and why HRMs arose in the two cities and especially what spatial practices they developed to counter it. I believe that the analysis of housing policies is essential in order to understand the urban transformations that have occurred in the two case studies, since housing, especially in recent decades, has assumed not only a social value for the population but also a real estate asset value through its financialization (Tulumello et al., 2020), thus becoming one of the main factors of inclusion and exclusion of specific communities in the city territories, as well as the leading promoter of both economic and territorial development of the urban fabric of contemporary cities. The Portuguese housing model, as well as the Italian one, is in line with that of the southern European countries (Allen, 2006), i.e. it is made up of a high share of owned housing and a low share of rented housing (Lucciarini, 2018), due to a specific policy carried out in the previous decades by all the successive governments, which have favoured the purchase of housing in the Italian and Portuguese populations. This has led some scholars to define the late 1990s and 2000s as the years of 4 the Europeanisation of Italian (Cotella & Rivolin, 2011) and Portuguese (Oliveira & Breda-Vazquez, 2011) planning systems. For some authors such as Brenner and Theodore (2002), this Europeanisation of planning systems has characterised weaker forms of State intervention and, consequently, a more significant role of private interests. This model, therefore, suffers from the absence of a real system of Social Housing policies promoted at any level of government (Braga & Palvarini, 2013). So much so that in Italy, housing policies are considered by some authors to be the ‘cinderellas’ of social policies (Negri & Saraceno, 1996), where there is (especially in recent years) supremacy of the market over the State in providing answers to the social demand for housing. The importance of comparing these two cases also derives from the fact that they have aspects in common concerning the social policy choices proposed by the institutions, such as the factor briefly mentioned on peripherality to the European context as well as for residual housing welfare policies (even though the specific policies and programmes may differ between the two countries). However, simultaneously, the two cases I will analyse present divergent factors concerning the composition and organisation of the HRMs born to counter the lack of structural housing policies in the two countries and which represent the other leading actor in this research. Both cities under study are experiencing a profound housing crisis. Unsurprisingly, citizens have organised themselves to demand better conditions or even to solve the housing problem by organising themselves into a movement. Despite the crisis in both cities, the forms of organisation of the two movements are not the same; in the Roman case, for example, HRM already had a solid autonomous, political, and social base during the years of the 2007/08 crisis, with a history of militant continuity of HRM going back to the 1970s with several social actors active on the issue and with dozens of housing squats organised by those collectives that identify with HRM. While in Lisbon, immediately after a robust activism on the housing issue during the 1974 revolutionary process, the following years witnessed a weakening of civil society action both on the housing issue and on that of autonomous social, cultural, and spatial practices, with some sporadic and brief exceptions. However, this process was only reactivated in the years following the global crisis of 2007/08 due to the intense pressures that Portuguese society had to endure the oppression of austerity policies that markedly attacked the country’s housing market. For this reason, I decided to begin my analysis of the cases from the 1970s, analysing the urban transformations and housing policies of the two countries, as well as the activist responses to understand the dynamics that have conditioned as much to the current housing crisis as the practices of contemporary urban movements. This historical continuity or discontinuity has affected how contemporary HRMs in Rome and Lisbon have organised themselves regarding formation, practices, approaches, and relations with institutions. For example, HRMs in Rome directly produce autonomous spaces through squat practice. 5 In contrast, in Lisbon, these rely on other spaces that, while supporting the housing movement, are not part of the central demands of these collectives, which nevertheless pay regular rent. In Lisbon, the relationship between the movement and the institutions is more collaborative than in Rome, where the illegal presence of squats has resulted in copious legislation that frontally attacks HRM militants, also exacerbating relations between the two actors. These differences will shape the analysis and, thus, the following chapters, focusing on the conflictual relationship between the movement and institutions in Rome and the factors that contributed to the revival of HRM in Lisbon. In both cities, these movements are active political players on the urban stage. However, more often than not, they are portrayed in the media, and occasionally even in academia, as sporadic movements associated with specific urgencies. In other words, they only gain visibility when the issue they address becomes prominent in the media at that particular moment. One of the significant outputs to which I aspire with this thesis is to give a new centrality to these practices, which, thanks to their spatial presence in the territories, are, in my opinion, central actors for the development and contestation of the city, as well as central to claiming the ‘right to the city’ and as actors that favour the creation of and access to new urban commons. Therefore, the central theme of this thesis will be to compare the spatial practices proposed by these two urban social movements embedded in the economic and social context of two southern European capitals. There are a number of recent studies on the direct relationship that exists between the production of space and HRM in Rome (Caciagli, 2022; Davoli, 2018; Grazioli, 2017, 2019, 2021; Mudu, 2014a), while the same cannot be said for the case of Lisbon. Furthermore, there is a lack or even a complete absence of comparative studies concerning HRMs in the Portuguese and Italian contexts. The lack of comparative studies, therefore, on the relationship between space production and HRMs in the two cities under study is thus justified by the fact that Portuguese HRMs have reorganised relatively recently, as well as having very recently begun to elaborate new spatial practices as practices of struggle in the territories, while in Rome, as briefly mentioned, there is a long history of social movements directly producing autonomous spaces, particularly in the form of self-managed social centres. Moreover, within the Portuguese academic literature, the production of these new autonomous spaces born in the city has been analysed more concerning new cultural practices than for their emancipatory and political claiming potential by the HRM, and this point, in my opinion, represents the significant contribution this thesis can make to the existing literature on the production of space in the Portuguese context. Social movements’ production of autonomous spaces in Rome and Lisbon reflects a broader trend of grassroots organisation and community building in response to social and political issues. These spaces are important sites for political and cultural resistance and the development of alternative social and economic structures. Therefore, comparing these two realities can help me better 6 understand the dynamics of social and political change proposed by HMRs, providing valuable insights into the dynamics of social movements and their engagement with urban space in different contexts. More effective political strategies can be developed by analysing their successful and unsuccessful practices to build more just and equitable societies. Furthermore, I believe this comparison can be beneficial for militants belonging to the new movement born in Lisbon, where thanks to both historical and recent analysis of the Roman case, one can understand which spatial practices have worked more and which less, or which practices one can adopt and which ones one decides to abandon with respect to one’s context. In this thesis, therefore, I will analyse the emergence of new political subjectivities linked to this movement and these spaces, which I argue have the right to take a space, design it according to their own needs and practise new forms of everyday about the territory in which they are embedded. Through this new production of space fomented from below, these collectives promote new forms of citizenship, distancing themselves from the processes of real estate speculation and creating new urban commons for themselves and the community they want to address. Following these processes, therefore, this thesis will aim to recount the production of space promoted from below following the political perspective of HRM in the two case study capitals and what developmental, conflictual, or debating consequences these spaces open up in the current territorial formation in contemporary cities. As I argue that these spaces represent a fracture point with respect to the neoliberal policies that shape the contemporary city, opening a debate concerning issues such as the right to inhabit and who has the right to govern and shape cities, and this issue obviously involves both the movement and the governmental institutions that will be the main actors that will be analysed in this thesis. Moreover, having chosen to follow specific case studies, this research will be based on trying to answer, with respect to those events that have already happened or were happening, the questions of how and why that particular event has or is developing. So, one of the very first conditions of research concerns how to set research questions (Hedrick, Bickman & Rog, 1993). I put these research questions by following a basic categorisation through the series ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ (Yin, 2009). The definition of the research questions allowed me to structure all the chapters of the thesis as well as to better prepare my data collection within the fieldwork, thus directly and definitively conditioning all the subsequent stages from data collection to data analysis. For this reason, I devoted much of the initial phase of my research, through a careful review of the literature, to developing more precise questions in which to include insights yet to be addressed in previous research. Therefore, in order to achieve this, the critical methodology I have adopted within my project consists of the three theoretical branches on the production of space, which I will analyse in more 7 detail in the following chapter (see Chapter 2) and which will then be transformed into the three main research questions: (i) Reflection on the relationship between the concept of development proposed by institutions and the importance of housing policies on the production of space in contemporary cities. (ii) Description of how HRM (comparing the two case studies) through the production of space propose new social and political practices that contribute to the development of contemporary cities. (iii) Reflection on the mutual influences between these two main actors (social movements and institutions) to understand the convergences and conflicts generated by the production of space in the case study cities. These aspects were refined in the following research questions: 1) What institutional development strategies were within the cities studied, and what kind of housing policies and urban transformations did they produce? 2) What does the HRM propose the alternative spatial and social practices, and how have they contributed to the local development of the cities under study? 3) What political interactions (conflictual or collaborative) develop between institutions and HRM from the divergent spatial production of these two actors? Examining these three research questions makes it evident that the aim of this thesis extends beyond purely academic conclusions. It is both my interest and the interest of the movement that entrusted me with this research that this essay is, above all, a contribution to the legitimisation of those autonomous practices from below that shows a new way of experiencing the practices of everyday being that foment the social reproduction of grassroots urban movements. In this way, I would like to emphasise the importance of autonomous experiences within the case study cities as promoters of fundamental rights for the everyday life of citizens, such as the right to housing, the right to the city and the right to active political participation in the territories in which one life, where the main hope is to contribute to the political legitimisation of those subjects that for years have been engaged in the claiming of these rights through the production of spaces and direct action in the territories I will analyse. OUTLINE CHAPTERS: Chapter 2 is dedicated to the existing literature review on the topic of ‘production of space’ and will explore the main concepts and past research that will give the theoretical structure to my thesis, where it will analyse which theories to follow and with respect to which concepts, I would like to distance myself. In addition to a brief introduction to the concepts of the ‘production of space,’ ‘autonomy,’ and ‘urban commons,’ the chapter will be divided into three subchapters analysing theoretical 8 productions on the ‘production of space’ (Harvey, 1989, 2003, 2012; Lefebvre, 1991, 1996 [1968]) with respect to the following themes: (i) the institutional relationship between space and development in contemporary cities (ii) the production of space by urban social movements for the right to housing (iii) space as a site of debate/conflict in the relationship between institutions and social movements. I am Adopting a diagonal approach to these three categories mentioned, where the concept of production of space will act as the theoretical glue. Chapter 3, on the methodological plan, will examine the activist ethnographic methodology I decided to apply to my field research (Boni et al., 2020; Squatting Europe Kollective, 2013, 2014). The choice of this methodology was dictated by the fact that my activist research project was avowedly partisan and aimed to make the issue of the right to housing and the right to the city a topic of public and political interest and to help create a link between the activist world, the academic world, and the governmental world, starting from the point of view of HRM activists in the two study cities. Despite everything, however, this methodology could not be the only one applied to this thesis, which is why I was compelled to create a hybrid methodological tool that could be flexible concerning the events that occur and that could best be applied to what will be my analytical and empirical fieldwork. For this reason, I decided to incorporate the case study methodology published by Bent Flyvbjerg (2006), as it emphasises that a researcher’s learning process and skill development occur through the implementation of their own experiences in the context of the case study. Another methodology that will be applied to my work is the emerging Grounded Theory methodology which fits well with a predominantly activist/ethnographic methodology, as constructivists argue that everything becomes part of the process and product of research (Charmaz, 2008). That is, more flexibility is given to the researcher, who can change both methodological approaches and theoretical goals during fieldwork. Chapter 4 opens the analytical session of the thesis; from this point onwards, the chapters will always be divided into two, analysing first the Portuguese case and then the Italian case for the main theme of the chapter. In this chapter, the two case studies will be historically contextualised through the analysis of housing policies and urban transformations, on the one hand, and the activist trajectories of urban movements in response to these transformations, on the other, over a time span from the early 1970s to the global economic crisis of 2007/2008. That is, the environment in which HRM operates in both case studies will be contextualised, analysing similarities and differences more in the political macro-structures that conditioned the transformations of these two countries during those years, such as the end of the dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, while for both countries through the accession to the European Union, the advent of the neoliberal economic model and the model on housing imposed by the institutions focused on fomenting home ownership in the populations. And at the same time, it will identify those extra-parliamentary experiences that have somehow laid the 9 foundations, historicising the militant processes in the two countries, for contemporary movements’ activist and spatial experiences. Chapter 5 will analyse how the 2007/08 financial crisis, triggered by the finance-housing nexus, affected housing policies and urban transformations in two case study cities. The crisis highlighted the fragility of the system of home ownership financed through bank credit and resulted in the implementation of different housing policies in the post-crisis period. Housing took on various functions in the market and social sphere, contributing to the inscription of the logic of financialization in the economies of the two countries and the trend of household indebtedness. Housing also significantly transformed urban economies and produced social living spaces in metropolitan territories, exacerbating social inequality. Southern European cities present relevant cases for studying the effects of the financial crash on housing markets and urban transformations. The chapter will analyse the policies developed by institutions to cope with the crisis and the urban transformations that followed, including the liberalisation of housing, the attraction of foreign funds, and tourism. Finally, the chapter will examine the extraordinary measures taken by governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapter 6 is a continuation of chapter 5 and analyses the same time frame but from a different perspective. This chapter will analyse the interactions and conflicts of civil society organisations in the movement for the major transformations that took place in two southern European countries. The global economic crisis of 2007/08 represented a turning point for urban social movements that claimed the right to housing and the city as fundamental human rights. This chapter will analyse how civil society organised itself into an urban social movement to try to solve the housing crisis both through practices of producing autonomous spaces and through practices of direct conflict with institutions. I will also analyse how HRMs in both cities denounced the commodification and financialization of the housing sector and the extreme privatisation of public space. In Lisbon, the economic crisis of 2007/08 laid the foundations for the re-emergence of HRM, while in Rome, HRM had to undergo a process of reorganisation, characterised by the formation of new collectives and the adoption of new spatial practices, as a response to the austerity policies proposed by the institutions. Chapter 7 of this thesis examines two specific cases: the Arroios neighbourhood in Lisbon and the Ostiense neighbourhood in Rome. The session on Arroios draws extensively on the research conducted by Marco Allegra and me (2023) in writing the article ‘Housing activism and urban space during the Covid-19 pandemic. Research notes on the Bairro of Arroios’. This neighbourhood has rapidly redeveloped from a problem area associated with drugs and prostitution to a highly valued neighbourhood. However, parallel to this transformation, non-mainstream cultural autonomous spaces known as ‘coletividades’ have emerged, offering a countercultural and politicised alternative to the speculative nature of the neighbourhood. The focus is on the coletividade called ‘Sirigaita’, which 16 as Nicholls (2008) argues, provides a basic framework for studying how the dynamics of conflict and control between institutions and movements change. In the two cases highlighted, HRMs perceived the urban and territorial level as a potent site of mobilisation against inequalities. The production of space thus has the qualities that support those relational dynamics that are complementary in social movement networks (Nicholls, 2008). When these relational dynamics are reflected in an autonomous space, activist networks become strong enough to maximise local mobilising capacities and open enough to stimulate the inclusion of new innovative capacities in the movement, thus becoming political actors contributing to the territorial development of cities. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND THE CONCEPT OF DEVELOPMENT IN CONTEMPORARY CITIES Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and blueprint for a more ‘inclusive’ city To introduce the topic of development in the city, one cannot fail to mention the recent 17 SDGs born at the ([United Nations]; hereafter [UN]) General Assembly in 2015, where member countries agreed to adopt this new set of goals to “end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all” (United Nations, 2015). The SDGs are much broader and more ambitious than the previous ([Millennium Development Goals]; hereafter [MDGs]) as they apply to all countries of the world and not just developing countries (Liverman, 2018: 177). The SDGs are thus a central element of the ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda’ that focuses on people, the planet, prosperity, and partnership (United Nations, 2015). With regard to the city specifically, however, there is a significant imbalance with respect to these SDGs, as cities are often only mentioned for their potential contribution to economic rather than social development goals (McGranahan, 2016). Concerning this, I would argue that this is a point that needs to be corrected because cities represent the setting where social conflicts and inequalities are expressed most visibly and forcefully and therefore represent the physical and especially social space where the trade-offs and contradictions that these goals want to combat can be reduced. The 17 SDGs, soon after their publication, have been widely subject to criticism by various authors as they have a large number of goals and targets, which are considered too complex to be easily understood by civil society and equally complicated to guide international policies to achieve them, because they are too absolute to be successful (Langford, 2016; McGranahan, 2016). For example, the Economist, through an article dedicated to them entitled ‘Stupid Development Goals’ and the ‘169 commandments’, stated that these goals are doomed to failure (Economist, 2015). Other authors, on 17 the other hand, argued that written in this absolutist manner, they are a way of not decisively addressing the central goal of eradicating human poverty (Liverman, 2018). Other authors have noted that many of the goals contradict each other, especially the economic growth goals, which according to Hickel (2015), cannot be achieved without sacrificing many of the environmental goals also enshrined in the SDGs, thus stating that the current neoliberal economic model cannot coexist with an environmentally sustainable system. Hickel therefore argues that the SDGs seek to reduce inequality through growth in the income of the top 40% of the world’s population but without touching or redistributing the income of the wealthiest 1% (ibid., 2015). The SDGs have not only received criticism, but among the positive aspects that various authors have highlighted is the elimination of the division between developed and developing countries, thus recognising the universality of poverty and, therefore, the processes that create it. According to Liverman (2018), setting the goal of reducing global inequalities with alternative practices and projects in mind is a big step forward. Dead and Gabay, on the same point, see similarities with the radical Latin American concept of (‘buen vivir’ i.e. ‘living well’), which draws on indigenous worldviews to emphasise harmony, community, environment, and culture (Carbone, 2018; Dead & Gabay, 2015). In comparison, other authors emphasise the importance of introducing gender issues and equity into the SDGs (Bidegain Ponte & Enríquez, 2016). Of all the SDGs, the one that interests me most for this thesis is goal number 11, which is entirely dedicated to ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ (United Nations, 2015). This goal has been embraced as an acknowledgement of what urban planning scholars have systematically argued and documented, namely that global social and environmental problems cannot be addressed without addressing urbanisation processes in contemporary cities (Kaika, 2017). In other words, all the issues that have been at the centre of urban research for several decades (from housing, urban transport, sanitation, air quality monitoring and waste management to urban cultural and natural heritage) have finally been mentioned in one way or another in the broader SDGs goal 11 to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (United Nations, 2015). In their work, Barnett and Parnell (2017) elucidate that achieving SDG number 11 necessitates thorough theoretical research and diligent monitoring and evaluation. They emphasise the importance of recognising cities’ diverse experiences and needs, along with the dynamic relationships and contingencies between different locations, global processes, and dispersed outcomes. This point about the recognisability of urban experiences not produced by the neoliberal hegemonic system but by free citizens is a central point in this thesis showing how sometimes urban order can be repressive and marginalising. As such, order for whom? It represents the operative question that can allow truly inclusive urbanism to engage with policies and practices developed from below. 18 Contemporary cities are containers of growing inequalities in the various population groups that inhabit them (Chant & McIlwaine, 2015; Rossi, 2017). So much so that the gap between rich and poor citizens in most countries is at its highest level in 30 years (UN Habitat, 2016), this data in the context of population growth within contemporary cities can only get worse, and following current urbanisation patterns, these inequalities will be visible at the margins of cities. This is because, many times, inequalities are accentuated by precisely those urbanisation processes that make the social inclusion of the poor classes within cities difficult (Secchi, 2013). In this sense, a concept is used extensively within the SDGs, namely inclusion, as well as being embedded within urban development issues, being used in some of the most critical public declarations of the 21st century, such as the 2030 agenda and the new urban agenda. This concept has become a key aspirational point in the development lexicon, which implies that given its massive and ‘inflated’ use, it is losing precision in its meaning, coming to be suitable by definition rather than implication (McGranahan, 2016). Only recently, the concept of inclusion was not widely discussed or emphasised in development discourse. In the Millennium Declaration (United Nations, 2015) there were merely two mentions of inclusion and exclusion and none in the titles of the MDGs. However, after fifteen years, the 2030 Agenda (which is approximately five times longer) includes 45 references to inclusion, with six of them even incorporated into the titles of the SDGs (United Nations, 2015). The World Bank defines inclusion as “a process aimed at improving the conditions under which individuals and groups participate in society” and as “enhancing the ability, opportunities and dignity of disadvantaged people based on their identity to participate in society” (World Bank, 2013). According to McGranahan (2016), inclusion is a concept that within the SDGs focuses on the role of urbanisation and the city in achieving urban social equity. In response, this thesis would like to adopt a definition of inclusion ranging from eliminating discrimination, strengthening voice in the structures of urban social movements, and guaranteeing people’s human rights. Furthermore, inclusion and exclusion evoke spatial metaphors, which is why they are particularly relevant concepts for this thesis in the urban contestation of territory, space, and place. Therefore, the United Nations (2015) definition of inclusion states that urban areas should be more inclusive towards marginalised groups, ensuring equality for citizens. In my opinion, this degree of equality also includes increasing the political participation of these marginalised groups, who must have the opportunity not only to use the urban space available to them to claim their rights but also to produce their own spaces and practices to meet needs that cannot be designed from above. Again, following the UN definition, the concept of inclusion is used for “facilitating universal access to social protection mechanisms, such as social transfers and health insurance; for greater urban accessibility; for greater local and national government accountability; for basic land ownership” (Ibid., 2015). 19 Defined in this technocratic way, it is unlikely that the concept of the inclusive city can achieve much meaning, not least because cities and inclusive urbanisation are nowadays defined only as places where people find opportunities and realise their human potential (McGranahan, 2016), thus disregarding the emancipatory potential that a bottom-up production of autonomous space can have for citizens. In these terms, this thesis intends to create a register of urban spatiality that recognises autonomous spatial practices as spaces with solid transformative power, both urban and social, and a socio-geographical register that permanently recognises within these bottom-up spatial practices that conflict and political claims are produced within those territories that are transformed directly by their inhabitants. In this way, they were following Lefebvre’s theory that recognises the built environment as a complex social production (Lefebvre, 1991), understanding the weight of these experiences with respect to both how the city itself develops and their weight of political negotiation concerning institutions (Gooptu, 2001). Both Agenda 2030 and the New Urban Agenda demonstrate a shared concern regarding the prevailing crisis of trust between citizens and institutions. This crisis, as noted by specific authors, is exacerbated by the current situation where even in supposedly stable countries, the urban structure primarily relies on the State’s imposition of “order and institution (of the city) as a legitimate locus of control, establishing clear boundaries between legal and non-legal” (Chatterji & Mehta, 2020: 129). Consequently, urban practices initiated by independent citizens often face repression and lack of support. By delineating these boundaries, the State establishes a distinction between ‘urban citizens’ (McGranahan, 2016), who are perceived as having legitimate rights for which the State bears responsibility, and the ‘population’ (Chatterjee, 2004), an indeterminate and diverse group without recognised entitlements to State provisions. In contrast to this last concept, the city is, by definition, a collective construction. It is where innovation, inclusion, exploitation and injustice develop and confront each other in a complex web of nodes and disjunctions inherent to the urban condition. How urban spaces and systems are structured and transformed has profound consequences on the coherence of urban regimes in every era, as well as on the powers and rights of each collection and the community as a whole. For this reason, institutions are certainly one of the main actors in the urban transformations of contemporary cities. However, in parallel to them, citizens uniting within urban social movements contribute to the development of urban space production and the claim for greater cohesion and socio-spatial justice within contemporary cities. 20 Neoliberal Urbanisation Before introducing the concept of neoliberal urbanisation, it is necessary to clarify how the model of the neoliberal system has been interpreted until now. This is described in structural criticism as a project that emerged in the late 1970s to restructure international capitalism and restore the conditions for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2003). In this context, states had to remodel themselves to allow for generalised economic competition, thus espousing this new economic model. The neoliberal project has been described as a model that is ultimately incompatible with democracy (Tulumello, 2016) but which must come to terms with it in order to unfold; this is especially evident concerning how the economic imperative and social adaptation to the market pushes for a whole range of policy areas such as monetary policies (but also urban development models) to be excluded from political debate. In the current collective political imagination, these described dynamics produce the illusion that the neoliberal model represents the only possible system today. Neoliberal policies also have spatial consequences (Sager, 2011). The most obvious is, on the one hand, land rent and real estate assets, which are crucial for financial speculation. On the other hand, urban policy is considered central to the broader implementation of neoliberal governments, as in the case of housing policy that facilitates capital accumulation through mortgages and financial levers (Tulumello, 2016: 119). Many scholars, therefore, agree that the current ways institutions produce space are functional to capital accumulation (Massey, 2004) as they are set within a neoliberal model. The assertion of this neoliberal model in urban politics has led many scholars since the 1990s to investigate the impacts of this system on the city’s social issues (Streeck, 2012). Led several of these studies to assert that urban neo-liberalisation poses a severe threat to urban democracy (Purcell, 2006), further acknowledging that contemporary cities under the neoliberal economic system are driven and designed by market-driven urbanism, i.e., where space is conceived and designed to follow the “logic of the market rather than the needs of its inhabitants” (Bayat, 2012: 111), i.e., prioritising economic growth takes precedence over safeguarding the social rights of citizenship. As Harvey points out, neo-liberalisation as an entrepreneurial model of social and economic development is closely linked to the urbanisation of cities, as it influences how urban governance is articulated, especially as a consequence of the recurring crises that began to affect capitalist economies from 1973 onwards (Harvey, 1989) and in particular in countries peripheral to the European context, i.e., southern European countries, where factors such as; real estate market-based economies, speculative foreign real estate investments, weaker institutional frameworks for regulating the sector have led to a more significant and more aggressive impact than in other countries (Tulumello, 2022a). 21 I can therefore argue that if urbanisation was one of the drivers of neoliberal economic development, this development was primarily achieved “through loans and debts that contributed to the speculative bubble in the real estate markets and the outbreak of the 2007/08 crisis, first in the United States, then in southern European cities” (Tulumello et al., 2020: 7). This has led many scholars to infer that the post-2007 global crisis, which I will explain in later chapters, was, in fact, a crisis of neoliberal urbanisation, born out of the investments in the production of space made by the cities of contemporary capitalism (Garcia, 2010; Harvey, 2012; Seixas et al., 2016; Tulumello et al., 2020). Cities and urbanisation, therefore, are in a very close relationship with neoliberal policies, being the main site of production and extraction of surplus in urban space. At the same time, their intertwining defines the urban spatial order (Harvey, 1989: 5). In particular, neoliberal urbanism consistently produces spatialised social inequalities (Harvey, 2003) practised through the replacement of urban commons in private property as one of the main modes of surplus generation (Mayer, 2013: 3). In recent decades, as already mentioned, one of the most relevant features of the evolution of contemporary societies has been the exponential increase in social inequality to which neoliberal policies have failed to provide an answer, sometimes aggravating them. In the words of the urban planner Secchi, town planning in this process has had a strong and precise responsibility in aggravating inequalities, stating further that the design of a truly more inclusive city must be one of the starting points of any policy that aims to eliminate or reduce them (Secchi, 2013). Thus, the strategies of neoliberal urbanism in recent decades have been linked to the rhetoric of economic growth and competitiveness based on private initiatives, local entrepreneurship, privatisation of public services, fiscal austerity measures and reduction of public spending, deregulated and more flexible planning instruments and public-private partnership interventions (Rossini, 2017: 62). In the wake of growth, therefore, the sectors that have benefited the most have been the interests of private elites, while at the same time generating mobilisations animated by citizens and social movements interested more in the production of space about its function of use rather than value. This thesis will discuss why contemporary cities’ housing crisis and urban speculation should be read as a crisis immanent to neoliberal urbanism and social reproduction (Grazioli, 2018: 23). Reassessment of the concept ‘Right to the City’ in the neoliberal context Henri Lefebvre (1968) developed the ‘right to the city’ notion based on the city’s pivotal role in the capitalist system and his perception of the city as an artistic creation. According to Lefebvre, the city is defined as an artistic work shaped by the everyday actions of its inhabitants. Therefore, the right to the city encompasses the freedom to inhabit, reclaim, and produce urban space according to one’s 22 terms without being alienated by the mechanisms and processes of urban life (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]). Consequently, the ‘right to the city’ entails the aspiration for expanded rights within the urban context, including the demands of various new urban movements (Fournier, 2002), who primarily seek greater social justice to liberate themselves from capitalist exploitation (Federici et al., 2012) within contemporary city territories. According to the literature on the right to the city, mobilisations within urban areas emerge as a reaction to ‘neoliberal urbanisation’ and utilise local organisations to initiate campaigns for a more equitable and improved city (Harvey, 2003; Marcuse, 2009; Mitchell, 2003; Nicholls & Beaumont, 2004; Purcell, 2006, 2008; Staeheli & Mitchell, 2016). It is argued that activists’ claims are rooted in cities because their political goals are urban. The central idea is that the right to the city can be used to create one’s community identity from the social and political remaking and construction of the city where one lives (Harvey, 2003; Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]). On the other hand, according to several authors, the ‘right to the city’ cannot be analysed as a human right; this is because, on the one hand, it may give less value to the subjective experiences of different city dwellers (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006); while on the other hand, since the ‘right to the city’ includes the collectivists as a founding principle of urban practices (Attoh, 2011), it would disembody the citizen from his subjective traits. Moreover, the revolutionary figure Lefebvre named to exercise the ‘right to the city’ was the working class of the 1960s, which was radically transformed during the transition to a post-Fordist mode of producing urban space (Biagi, 2019). Therefore, according to this critique, the conditions under which this concept was formulated by the author no longer exist today and therefore, the notion of the ‘right to the city’ needs to be reformulated as much as the main subject of the analysis has been transformed, namely the working class, which in addition to losing many numbers has assimilated new subjectivities in recent years, more female, more racialised, working more in services and care, this in order for it to become a useful analytical tool for analysing the contemporary space production of urban movements within cities. This concept has in itself a broad potential for emancipation as it can link various types of rights, which is why I argue that it has been chosen as a slogan of struggle by many grassroots movements in many European cities. The current revolutionary figure, therefore, could be composed of those groups of people and communities who found themselves in the situation of having to pool subjective precarity not recognised under the dogma of social class and came together with other popular movements to claim the ‘right to the city’ through the production of autonomous spaces in territories (Biagi, 2019). Furthermore, contemporary urban militants as city dwellers are no longer the working class described by Lefebvre. However, they are more those subjects who have earned the right to 23 transform urban space thanks mainly to their own experience and urban struggles, thus resembling the concept of the citizen Lefebvre expounded (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]). According to various authors, the spaces implementing autonomy can be seen as urban commons that counter the prevailing neoliberal trend (Lazzarato, 2012; Purcell, 2006). Therefore, this thesis defines the ‘right to the city’ as a collective politics of encounters unfolding within autonomous spaces outside the dominant model. These spaces generate autonomous spatial practices using everyday resources for urban social reproduction (Biagi, 2019; De Certeau, 1984; Merrifield, 2011; Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006; Purcell, 2006). David Harvey further qualifies the ‘right to the city’ as a demand of current urban movements and as a pivotal concept to acknowledge and comprehend the proliferation of these autonomous practices amidst the urban crisis (Harvey, 2008, 2012). Harvey underscores the significance of the ‘right to the city’ in highlighting the multitude of urban commons and the organisational capacities of the urban proletariat, which, as the successor to the Fordist working class, becomes the revolutionary subject capable of deepening the contradiction of capital. Harvey argues that “the right to the city in this guise can be a powerful tool to challenge the individualistic, proprietary, and competitive logic of neoliberalism, empowering urban dwellers to claim an autonomous and bottom-up production of space fundamentally and radically” (Harvey, 2012: 5). Consequently, Harvey aims to elevate the ‘right to the city’ as an inalienable and collective right of humanity. Expanding on this concept, Margherita Grazioli (2017) posits that the contemporary re-evaluation of the ‘right to the city’ represents an operational prefigurative politics functioning on three key levels. Firstly, it exposes the underlying logic behind the devastating impacts of global capitalism on the everyday materiality of many urban residents who were previously marginalised as indebted individuals. Secondly, it dismantles the assumption that neoliberalism is an inevitable, natural, and unchallenged force (Fournier, 2002). Lastly, it engages in spatial production to materialise utopian visions that are not a blueprint for a perfect society but seek to create spaces of possibility and establish the conditions for their development and sustainability (Grazioli, 2017). This last point includes, in my view, also those acts of re-appropriation and creation of space performed by HRMs, which help to materialise the ‘right to the city’ in the sense just described, i.e. “by taking these spaces away from neoliberal profit-making use and disrupting the central logic of capitalist thought of private ownership of capitalist urbanisation” (Mayer, 2013: 364). Therefore, the emergence of these autonomous spaces produces new possibilities for independent urban regeneration and new forms of citizenship. The regeneration of these autonomous spaces away from the model of extractive speculation, therefore, removes the neoliberal model of spaces from the logic of having to continue acquiring monetary value by returning them to communities for their use value 24 that prevails over exchange and market value, thus opposing the concept of ‘development’ imposed by neoliberal urbanism. THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE BY THE HOUSING-RIGHTS MOVEMENTS Housing-Rights Movement (HRM) As emphasised in the previous paragraphs, the neoliberal transformation of policies has increased the weight of capital accumulation dynamics in the housing market to such an extent that it has determined urban development and housing patterns. This market-driven privatised housing model thus provides optimal conditions to sustain capital accumulation (Harvey, 2012). Therefore, this excess of capitalist accumulation based on real estate has decisively destabilised the processes underpinning social reproduction and, thus, the production of space in contemporary cities. For these reasons, the recent urban transformations that have taken place in the two case study cities can only be analysed by analysing the housing policies enacted to foster these accumulation processes. I argue in this thesis that the antagonistic actor of this model based on the production of market space for speculative and accumulation purposes is represented by those citizens organised within the HRM. Our discussion thus understands HRM as politicised collective activities to redistribute social rights. In this sense, I can be helped by definition from Mitlin, that defines movement as an organisation that goes beyond the specific organisational form to refer to an ongoing process of mobilisation: “Movements go beyond formalised actors and include the more nebulous, uncoordinated and cyclical forms of collective action, popular protest and networks that serve to link organised and dispersed actors in processes of social mobilisation” (Mitlin, 2006: 17). These urban movements have been the subject of countless urban studies in recent years because the city is not only the stage where the struggle for their claims takes place but also the ultimate goal of their action (Castells, 1983). Even though these movements that I will analyse in this thesis claim the right to housing, i.e. a struggle to improve the conditions and access to housing for the many families to whom this right is excluded, through their recent evolution, they have elaborated their claims to the point of realising that fighting for housing means fighting for a whole other series of human rights, thus developing the concept of ‘right to housing’ (Armati, 2015; Grazioli, 2021), which does not only mean claiming the right to have four walls to live in but above all to have access to all the social services that can be found in an urban context. In other words, they claim the right to the city to be recognised as active citizens in producing knowledge and development within contemporary cities. 25 Social movement organisations claiming the right to housing have usually been considered as specific examples of urban social movements claiming the aforementioned ‘right to the city’. This is because, as I have explained in previous sections, it is a concept that fulfils many different tasks, encompassing various rights claimed by this movement, such as the right to public space, information and transparency in government and services (Marcuse, 2009). Castells was one of the first authors to define urban social movements, describing them as “movements that consider themselves linked to the city, based on locality and mobilised around three main objectives: collective consumption, cultural identity and political self-management” (Castells, 1983: 7). They are therefore movements that operate in city territories while having a broader and sometimes internationalist political analysis (Moyersoen, 2010). In the following chapters, I will analyse how the HRMs under study do not experience the city as a whole. However, the city is experienced in its urban and neighbourhood dimensions. The claims made by HRMs have thus been expressed on the territories through re-appropriation actions and bottom-up community-building processes, proactively counteracting the capitalist exclusivity of the commons. These reappropriated spaces become places to imagine, experiment and negotiate daily the sharing and re-appropriation of different aspects of social reproduction and the division of labour (Kokkinidis, 2015). Thus, not only housing but also health and decision-making consensus under conditions of plurality and so on. Considering the ‘right to the city’ within the context of HRMs action reveals insights into the expansion of the present-day neoliberal urban structure (Harvey, 2012), as well as the potential to introduce varied and contentious political approaches to address the inequalities resulting from social reproduction and neoliberal urban governance (Grazioli, 2017). This process necessitates re-evaluating the hierarchical spatial organisation inherent in the neoliberal notion of the city. Notably, any unoccupied urban space holds the potential to serve as a platform for autonomous HRM practices. The political point of view of these Movements in re-evaluating the notion of the ‘right to the city’ in the light of the ongoing housing crisis and social reproduction means, according to Margherita Grazioli (2018: 115): “assuming the symbolic death of the neoliberal city”. In this sense, in this thesis, I will analyse those movements that, as Harvey defends, “seek to overcome isolation and try to reshape the city into a social image different from that given by the powers of developers backed by finance, corporate capital and an increasingly entrepreneurial local State apparatus” (Harvey, 2008: 33). Housing is often the most challenging element in overcoming this isolation. Especially in recent years, the housing market has gained more and more political power to the extent that it has become the principal promoter of housing policies and, thus, in the city’s construction. The conditions of housing hardship in the two case studies I will analyse have increased due to spiralling costs and overcrowding. 32 (Groth & Corjin, 2005). These practices involve imagining and experimenting with alternative solutions to local problems through collective forms of ‘project-action’ (Cellamare, 2011) and ‘insurrectional urbanism’ (Holston, 2009), which refers to how marginalised groups can strategically utilise urban space to resist oppression and assert their agency. These practices, therefore, have as their primary objective to delegitimise the sovereignty of formal actors over the production of urban space in cities (Roy, 2007), thus demonstrating that “people can plan for themselves and to act cooperatively in the organisation of physical space” (Newman, 2011: 348). The city, therefore, has been the subject of countless studies that have defined it as the place where different classes of citizens coexist, albeit in competition, to produce an ordinary life and through a collective construction of space, thus producing, in one way or another, a collective cultural identity through the creation of so-called urban communities (Harvey, 2012). Today, again, according to Harvey (2012), however, there is a loss identity in these urban communities due precisely to the one-way narrative imposed by neoliberal urbanism that has tried (unsuccessfully) to deny the possibility of building new forms of relationships and production of new social spaces in an urban process dominated by class capitalist interests. In cases where organised citizens have broken this narrative just described, through processes not recognised as ‘legitimate’ by institutional forces, the conditions have been created for a (still ongoing) struggle to appropriate public spaces and public goods in the city for a common purpose (Harvey, 2012: 73). These new spaces, therefore, by the mere fact of being created within the territories, opposing the dominant logic, indirectly generate a conflict of political visions of development between the institutional forces and those of the movement. Although these autonomous spaces serve almost the same functions, they are in contrast to the classic public spaces, which are now homogenous and controlled. However, they are neglected and often relegated as urban voids in the maps of the neoliberal city (Shaw & Hudson, 2009). Public spaces have been defined by some authors as “all areas that are open and accessible to all members of the public in a society” (Orum & Neal, 2009: 1). However, the increasing privatisation of public spaces (Bonafede & Lo Piccolo, 2011), which are markedly more consumer-oriented, is leading to exclusivity of what have always been spaces available to the whole community, so much so that it has led various authors to speak of the ‘death of public space’ as they are increasingly privatised, commodified and sanitised (Biagi, 2019). The entire public space, therefore, becomes, even more the elected space for HRMs protests precisely to recover an urban common through an insurrectional practice (Bonafede & Lo Piccolo, 2011). Through these protest practices, HRM confronts the State in space, which, through different actors and means, tries to prevent the overthrow of the (neoliberal) commercial model of space production. This duel between the State and the movements is configured, according to Carlotta 33 Caciagli (2022), through two central protest dynamics: visibility and violence. Thus, in this context, both actors struggle in the urban arena for a monopoly on the use of violence and visibility, and controlling these two aspects of protest gives them control over the dominant paradigm or that of resistance. By reappropriating space, the movements’ primary objective is to change the structure of the urban space proposed by neoliberal urbanism, and for this very reason that this change of structure constantly suffers repression by institutional actors because it is not in line with the neoliberal urban project. Thus, in the context of the widespread erosion of public space (Brand & Gaffikin, 2007), citizens can replace the State as the sole producer of space through precisely the production of autonomous spaces. They were demonstrating a fundamental role in ongoing urban transformations and in the production and management of public spaces, where through these autonomous practices, they can provide local answers to global problems (Nigrelli, 2005). Therefore, through the production of these autonomous spaces, the dominant idea that a single, hegemonic interpretation is not imposed is also questioned, demonstrating that neoliberal urbanisation is not the only process for the production of space within contemporary cities. The social movements and conflicts that occur in urban spaces constitute one of the most influential factors in the social formation of the city (Harvey, 2012). This is the case today because, thanks to the ongoing neoliberal offensive in our cities, there has been a reduction in the role of the institutional left in promoting social rights programmes that are also reflected in the control of public space (Bauman, 2008). This is why, to date, the only alternative produced to the model of neoliberal urbanism is not encountered at any institutional level. The only forms of resistance to this come from organised citizens within urban social movements. These realities, however, always deal with the power of the market and the State in many ways. Although they are opposed to them, as analysed by Fraser (2017), the fact that some new movements currently seem to tend to take anti-State positions depends partly on the lack of genuine participatory democracy within urban planning decisions and partly on the lack of representativeness on the part of those citizens who, recognising themselves as left-wing, no longer find any party to which they can delegate their demands. For these reasons, in this thesis, I will analyse the development of these urban movements that show, contrary to institutional politics, a new phase of growth in the involvement and political participation of citizens, to which the institutional parties no longer seem able to respond. The production of autonomous spaces, therefore, represents one of the tools used by HRMs to exploit and confirm a particular power relationship and thus represents one of the main places where debate/conflict is generated between those who have produced them (the movements) and those whose space has been taken away from them by control (the institutions) (Fisker et al., 2019). Therefore, exploited people can organise themselves and realise alternative paradigms in the space produced by the capitalist model. Indeed, the dominant system constantly produces abandoned 34 spaces at certain times as discarded spaces, which can be helpful to be reappropriated by those citizens who want to shape new forms of spatial organisation from below (Caciagli, 2022). While many scholars, therefore, have focused in the past only and exclusively on what type of claims and what kind of conflict was generated between movement and institutions, I believe that it becomes essential to study how sectors of citizenship organise themselves, focusing on how the production of space by movements can be one of the alternatives of urban and social development and transformation in contemporary cities. This is also one of their most visible expressions precisely because they are physical spaces embedded in territories and not just a construction of ideological political claims. In the current situation of economic and social crisis, their existence and orientation may be preponderant in preventing the apparent reversible advance towards ever greater inequality and social precarity or the progression towards scenarios of greater equality and democracy. Thus, due to the urgent conditions subsidised by the crisis, as stated by Nel (2015), as inequalities increased, these autonomous spaces seemed to take on a more social character due to their ability to offer meeting spaces to the territorial communities where they are located. Among the central claims of these HRM-run spaces, therefore, is not only the right to housing but also a politicised restructuring of existing conventional relations of social reproduction (Federici, 2010; Fournier, 2002; Fraser, 2017). In direct opposition to neoliberal norms, they face the challenge of imagining and experimenting with new living forms. The main objective is to regain control of our everyday social experiences within cities and also to ensure the necessary conditions for these autonomous practices to remain alive as one of the post-capitalist possibilities imagined by organised citizens, despite and against the neoliberal model of society (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010; Fournier, 2002; Grazioli, 2017). Within these processes, then, mainly when analysed in so-called democratic States, urban social movements represent one of the few legitimate sources of power available to those “citizens who have few political resources and become politically effective only through collective action” (Moore, 2003: 273). The spatial conflict between the political practice of HRM and the repression of institutions Given the polarisation of these two opposing viewpoints, conflict seems inevitable in the city’s space, and this unavoidable conflict is made more complex and more complicated by liberal institutions as they leave no space for its expression (Mouffe, 2000). These autonomous spaces create different degrees of conflict within the urban arena (disputes arising between citizens and local authorities, conflicts between occupants and public or private owners, etc.), fuelled by the different hegemonic categories that describe the various urban experiences as legitimate or illegitimate, legal or illegal, thus preventing the exercise of the true ‘right to the city’, since, as Lefebvre points out, “the right to the 35 city emphasises the need to restructure the power relations that underlie the production of urban space, fundamentally shifting control from the capital and the State to the inhabitants of the city” (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 145). By conducting a historical examination of urban changes and the demands of these movements, I will demonstrate that intense class conflicts have marked the cities under investigation and struggles centred on the redistribution of power dynamics between the State and movements. This conflict has frequently compelled urban administrations to deliver essential public resources (such as affordable public housing, healthcare, education, paved roads, sanitation, water, etc.) to the urbanised working class (Harvey, 2012). Neoliberal urbanisation, however, has in recent years generated a series of side effects widely acknowledged by many authors where the current mode of space production has generated new urban problems such as the gentrification of cities; the severe shortage of affordable housing; the crisis of public spaces; the waste of public land and buildings; the severe shortage of services and spaces for social activities; and the intensification of urban fragmentation (Caciagli, 2022; Grazioli, 2021; Nicholls, 2009; Rossini, 2017; Tulumello, 2019). Therefore, the HRMs’ assertion of the concept of the right to the city also meant a desire to regain control over the production of space within the urban fabric. According to Harvey, this reappropriation occurs “only when there is an understanding that those who build and sustain urban life have a primary right to what they have produced” (Harvey, 2012: 12). Moreover, when this realisation occurs on the part of HRMs, it results in “an inevitable conflict between the forces of exploitation and dispossession and these movements” (Holston, 2009: 251). According to various authors, this conflict over purely spatial issues is also fuelled by an inability on the part of institutional actors to confront this conflictual dialectic imposed by movements (Friedmann, 1987; Holston, 2009). The concept of conflict has been extensively analysed in social science and urban social movement studies, defining it as a disruptive force that causes imbalances in a system of interrelated parts, but at the same time, has been described as a potentially positive force that can promote change, integration, and adaptability (Bonafede & Lo Piccolo, 2011; Friedmann, 1987; Holston, 2009). Urban movements have always used conflict as one of the main tools of action to make themselves heard. What is relatively new today is that the initiators of these conflicts are no longer just the urban poor (clearly they are too), but the current movements are also composed of citizens, mostly middle class, organised against State policies that are simultaneously perpetrating austerity programmes and luxury urban renewal that are linked to the sale (and thus privatisation) of the public city to local or transnational economic elites who hold power (Rossini, 2017: 78). The practices developed within these autonomous spaces thus address “a clearer and broader definition of the public that not only can access so-called public space but can also be empowered to create new common spaces for socialisation and political action” (Harvey, 2012: xvii). 36 Various authors have characterised these spaces in diverse ways due to their complex relationship with institutions. For instance, they have been referred to as ‘counter-power spaces’ (Membretti, 2007), as areas that enable ‘freedom of movement’ outside the pervasive control of urban public spaces, as ‘states of exception from below’ and sites of ‘exodus’ from institutional structures (Virno, 2017), as ‘autonomous geographies’ (Grazioli, 2021), and as the ‘multiplication of agonistic public spaces’ (Biagi, 2019). These spaces often expose what public power seeks to conceal, serving as sites where existing hegemony is dismantled, and new practices are established to create a more egalitarian model and a genuinely democratic configuration. Given what is at stake in rethinking spaces for new social reproduction, it is not surprising that activists are targets for the forces of repression (Martínez, 2014). Their heterogeneous social composition aims to experiment with repressive forms where the main objective is to prevent the reproducibility of these spaces and policies defined as socially dangerous because they question the current model of development of the neoliberal city. These repressive actions are most visible during protest events in public places. HRMs organisations are not the only actors shaping spaces during these events: the State, the police, and local institutions, compete to appropriate urban space (Caciagli, 2022). They are engaged in the spaces of protest as they try to stop it (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015: 37) or minimise its visibility as much as possible with “the aim of maintaining the established order on existing spatial dynamics” (Verloo, 2018: 147). The State does not only have the police at its disposal as an instrument of control over movements where police violence in demonstrations is only the final step in a broader disciplinary system of society (Foucault, 1975) whose main objective is to ‘normalise’ autonomous practices in urban space. The institutional approach with respect to the conflict generated, analysing different ([European Union]; hereafter [EU]) countries, to control autonomous/alternative practices in the urban agenda, concerning spatial practices were summarised by a study by Luisa Rossini (2017: 361): 1. ‘Selective negligence’: where the State is unable or uninterested in resolving the conflict situation; it implies ignoring the latent problem or conflict situation and confining it to a ‘behind-the-scenes’ position. 2. ‘Space control’ (within which the approaches are grouped): 2a) Repressive strategies: repression, stigmatisation, and criminalisation of these practices lead to waves of evictions, the intensification of coercive policies, and the creation of antiterrorist pools that treat these movements as a dangerous organised form of social deviance and subversive conspiracy. 37 2b) Containment strategies: These are linked to forms of legalisation, mostly temporary (‘selective integration’, temporal allocation, ‘temporary uses’), which concern the technical-disciplinary field. 3. ‘Integration/co-optation’: This approach involved the inclusion of bottom-up strategies in ‘city branding’ policies, such as ‘temporary uses’ or urban renewal strategies. These institutional approaches thus represent how these two actors dialogue and struggle for the production of space within cities. This occurs through varying degrees of direct conflict and has sometimes resulted in a co-option of these autonomous practices to be included within new institutional regulatory and normative instruments. Furthermore, this co-optation has been influenced by the growing scarcity of resources from public institutions (Pruijt, 2003), making them more receptive to embracing alternative practices proposed by citizens, even if they are nonconfrontational. This trend is particularly pronounced as capitalist cities have adopted the ‘creative city’ theory advocated by Florida (Colomb, 2012; Shaw, 2005). Consequently, co-optative approaches are favoured, and there is a recognition of the additional value generated by alternative cultural spaces originating from grassroots initiatives. In this thesis, I will analyse those spaces that maintain a hybrid approach with respect to what has been described above, as they represent spaces where radical activities and confrontation on both public policy and the production of autonomous spaces are practised, and likewise represent spaces of cultural and artistic resistance that enjoy greater freedom of action on the part of institutions favouring collaboration with the State (Mayer, 2009; Rossini, 2017). The State’s approaches can be distilled into two primary discursive frameworks regarding these spaces. On the one hand, they are initiatives that foster self-managed alternative solutions to urban issues. On the other hand, they can be categorised as instances of social deviance, illegal actions seen as urban security concerns that need to be suppressed or temporarily tolerated as a means of pacification and social control (Holston, 2009; Rossini, 2017). Through what has been analysed in this chapter, I can state that one of the central questions for the movements analysed in this thesis will be that of the recognition of these autonomous spaces born in urban territories, which is closely connected to one of the most commonly asked questions by these institutions, namely ‘to whom does the city belong? In the following chapters, I will analyse the strategies both these actors have used at the urban level to assert their model, what kind of city has been generated, and for whom. I will also analyse the degrees of conflict generated by these two dichotomous points of view and examine what specific points of contact have formed from this conflict. 38 39 CHAPTER 3. Methodological Plan INTRODUCTION TO ACTIVIST ETHNOGRAPHY METHODOLOGY The choice to elaborate on a doctoral thesis project analysing how both institutions and HRM contribute to the city’s development through the production of space within the urban fabric in the two chosen case studies was undoubtedly challenging. This difficulty is mainly because, in addition to analysing the practices of these movements as an academic researcher, I am simultaneously an activist within the movements themselves, both in Lisbon and Rome. In order to compare the direct and indirect interactions that exist between them and institutions, both local and State, I had to adopt a methodological choice that followed different approaches to the subject. As seen in the previous chapter, my research topic concerns precisely the understanding of how HRM and institutions can condition and interact with each other on the production of space, contributing, each through their practices, to the urban transformation of the case study cities examined. My view as a researcher, according to most of the methodological literature in qualitative research, should be as neutral as possible to the political positions manifested by movements (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Yin, 2009), but I cannot hide from myself and those who will read this thesis that I am an active participant in the actions and practices introduced by the movements I will describe in this text, and through this statement, I am taking a position on the issues analysed. “What exempts anthropology and anthropologists from the human responsibility to take an ethical (and even political) position on the elaboration of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (ScheperHughes, 1995: 411). Therefore, the methodology I decided to apply during my two years of fieldwork in Lisbon and Rome, which many anthropologists and ethnographers call ‘activist ethnography’, includes the fusion of social science, activism, and political engagement. I already realise that this methodology will be subject to criticism. However, on the other hand, this can be, in my opinion, a tool that can contribute to bringing the activist world even closer to the academic world, a collaboration that today is undoubtedly more porous than in the past and, therefore, more capable of accepting this new type of methodological approach. By applying this methodology, thus, the researcher/activist can generate knowledge by applying their position and using their body as the primary instrument of research and as the place where embodied emotions and feelings manifest themselves (Boni et al., 2020; Colectivo Situaciones, 2005; Grazioli, 2018; Juris, 2007; Martínez, 2014; Parr, 2001; Scheper-Hughes, 1995). Activist ethnography can be confused with participant observation; it differs from the latter in that although today, participant observation is moving away from the concept of impartiality, it does not provide the researcher with as broad a level of adherence as the researcher who decides to apply 40 activist ethnography. Moreover, this methodological approach can only and exclusively be applied in activist and movement contexts, which differs from participant observation, which can be applied in different contexts. The researcher/activist can assume various roles within a case study situation, which also means actively participating in the events under study. In urban neighbourhoods or squatting, for example, this method may involve having social interactions with various residents or even undertaking specific functional activities within these spaces (Yin, 2009). This method makes it possible to collect data unusually, but it also presents significant challenges. The researcher’s ability to access events otherwise inaccessible to scientific research is the most unprecedented opportunity (Fowler Jr, 1993). In other words, for some topics, especially in movement contexts, there may be only one way to gather evidence through activist ethnography. Active participation in the activities of the two movements was different in the two case study cities. In Lisbon, I am, From the beginning, an activist within the group (‘Stop Despejos’, i.e. ‘Stop Eviction’), which “is a collective fighting to end evictions, to defend the right to housing and to build our cities in a collective, inclusive and more equitable way” (Stop Despejos, 2017) and at the same time I am an activist within the coletividade Sirigaita case study of this thesis. While in Rome, despite having lived there for eight years for study purposes, from 2007 to 2015, and having participated actively within HRM during those years, I had been missing for more than five years. Many of the contacts I had within social movements were either no longer as active or had, like me, moved cities, so I had to start again to weave a network of contacts in a reality that had changed over the years, starting, however, this connection from the same space and the same neighbourhood that I had always passed through during my university period and where I still feel at home, namely the LOA Acrobax located in the Ostiense neighbourhood of Rome. The choice of this methodological approach, I believe, can bring critical reflections that can be useful for both the academic and militant worlds of urban social movements to which I belong; this concept for me was fundamental in order to feel comfortable throughout the research period; it was a founding compromise that allowed me to work actively within collectives without feeling like someone who is stealing knowledge from my comrades for professional purposes or entirely outside the activities of the movement (Apoifis, 2016; Colectivo Situaciones, 2003; Juris, 2007; Martínez, 2014; Russell, 2015). Therefore, the activist researcher should argue that any knowledge produced through research is inherently biased and propositional (Grazioli, 2018). Hence, the objective of my inquiry will not revolve around producing measurable knowledge and rigid principles. Instead, the research aims to foster the organic and context-specific evolution of the autonomous ways of living that I have explored (Colectivo Situaciones, 2003; Russell, 2015). 41 Based on these methodological premises, in this chapter, I will describe how I practised the activist ethnographic methodology within the collectives and spaces that make up the HRM in Lisbon and Rome and how this, for various reasons, was supplemented by additional methodological approaches due both to the fact that my research will be comparative research on two case studies and primarily due to the difficulties I encountered in applying this methodology in a historical period affected by a global Covid-19 pandemic that limited my possibilities to apply this methodology best. In addition, I will describe the practical approach of how I came into contact with the other critical actors (institutional and movement) in the research. MIXED METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH APPLIED TO FIELDWORK As briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, one of the methodologies chosen to approach this research path is activist ethnography, which involves the active (physical and emotional) interaction researchers within the collective processes analysed. Gillan and Pickerill (2012) point out that the main ethical challenges in activist research relate to the importance of knowledge generated by and for movements in which the researcher actively participates, as well as the imperative to amplify voices that deserve to be highlighted during the dissemination of results. As a result, I was confronted with the numerous ways in which HRM’s politics of representation and dissemination could be influenced by research (Gillan & Pickerill, 2012; Russell, 2015; Scheper-Hughes, 1995). For these reasons and having to maintain this bivalent approach as an activist researcher, throughout the research phase, from analysis to writing, I often asked myself what kind of impact I wanted to achieve and especially for whom, since one of my biggest problems was part of the movements was precisely that of not wanting to harm my comrades through what I could write. A recent work on militant ethnography by Boni et al. (2020) helps me in this regard, in which the author describes this method as a valuable tool for those researchers who are dissatisfied with having an exclusively contemplative and academic role within universities and therefore decide to use their ethnographic knowledge for political purposes through personal involvement, and thus aiming to contribute, at least in their initial intentions, to a practical and concrete transformation of the power dynamics observed (Boni et al., 2020), through and thanks to their academic research. Among the various ways in which this transformation can be understood, the one that best represents the work I have done is the desire to consolidate the collective subject studied concerning its conflicts or frictions with other entities (specifically, in the field of space production within the urban fabric). 48 choice applied in Rome and partially in Lisbon due to an unexpected event such as the Covid-19 pandemic). Because they encourage researchers to make hypotheses, verify them, and engage in deductive reasoning as the investigation progresses, these methods make the grounded theory more than just inductive. The open-ended nature of grounded theory strategies encourages the development of emergent conceptual analyses and makes the method explicit. According to Charmaz (2006), grounded theory strategies keep researchers engaged with their data and nascent analyses and encourage early analytical thinking. In short, this method helped me emphasise the data analysis process rather than focusing exclusively on the investigation results. The concept of emergence, one of the foundations of grounded theory, presupposes an epistemological understanding and a theory of time. Disputes and misunderstandings regarding the essence and nature of grounded theory often arise at these fundamental levels (Dey, 2004; Reichertz, 2004, 2007). Emergence, being inherently temporal, encompasses the past, the immediacy of the present, and implies a future (Charmaz, 2008). Consequently, emergence leads to novel phenomena with dynamic and non-static attributes. Due to this adaptability, this methodology has empowered me to investigate unforeseen events. This approach aligns effectively with an activist or ethnographic methodology, as constructivists contend that all aspects become integral to the research process and its outcomes. The constructivist stance views research as a product that emerges from specific temporal contexts, social circumstances, and interactive situations. It emphasises that researchers cannot foresee the events that will transpire in the immediate future (Charmaz, 2008; Clarke, 2006). Moreover, being embedded in the research process and being an active part of the movements I am going to study, I cannot detach my position from the empirical phenomena occurring in the field. Thus, constructivists deal with “the conditions and relations of the research, considering them part of the knowledge gained from the investigation” (Charmaz, 2008: 160). In the various readings I have done to approach research methodology, researchers who, like me, are approaching a qualitative approach for the first time are often advised to choose research topics that relate to their own lives. This, however, can lead inexperienced researchers (again like me) to import preconceived ideas into the study (Idem, 2008); however, I believe that engaging in reflexivity and invoking grounded theory strategies, as confirmed by many previous studies, can challenge my previously taken-for-granted assumptions during the research journey. Since grounded theory is based on emergence, I was able to remain open to what was happening in research environments. Although I am an active participant in the case studies analysed, the fact that I also add an academic connotation to my militant experience has changed the way I view the case and thus undoubtedly generated a new ‘familiarity’ with the context studied that has opened me up 49 to new reading possibilities by allowing me to identify emergent processes within the data collected in a way that allows me to pursue a specific research problem that addresses these processes (idem, 2008). This mixed methodology, therefore, applied to a context in which I was already embedded, stimulated direct reflection with the other activists involved in the case study process to the extent that it implied “a concern for action, reflection and empowerment (of self and others) in order to challenge oppressive power relations” (Routledge, 2013: 251). This methodology, however, is inherently tied to the rhythm that results from the intersection between the activities of activists in movements and the responses of government agencies and vice versa, furthermore as already described, by integrating this methodology with other methods related to the case study such as grounded theory and emergent theory practice, the stage of setting research questions provides a vital tool for channelling data collection and verification as events unfold. As per Russell (2015), activist ethnography is characterised by the progressive acknowledgement and concentration on a specific contradiction, inconsistency, or paradox that arises within the contextual complexities of a socially and politically autonomous environment. As the interweaving of collective theory and everyday practice, activist ethnography can be mastered once the ontological, epistemological, and political issue has been identified (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006). As can be seen given the many difficulties I had to contend with, I had to adopt a mixed methodological tool that could have the capacity to be flexible concerning the events that were happening and that could then be used by the grassroots urban movement activists themselves or by other academics engaged in the practice of building a theoretical bridge between the academy and the movement, promoting the production of knowledge elaborated by movements by emphasising the fact that this knowledge is not produced solely and exclusively by academic circles. However, the urban movement actively produces knowledge in contemporary societies. CASE STUDIES AND COMPARISON OF TWO SIMILAR CASES The comparison of the two case studies is part of the analytical strategy I have decided to follow. The case study is a methodology of enquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon (which is happening at that particular time) within the context in which a community or fact acts in its life context (Yin, 2009). Therefore, using this specific strategy helped me understand the contextual conditions that occurred in the past in the two case studies to better analyse what is happening right now. 50 Starting from the design of the research questions, I could also derive meaningful insights into the choice of the cases, again following the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ series—specifically, the how and why questions focus on what I am interested in answering. I also paid special attention to trying to define the case. I wanted to avoid falling into the error of defining the unit of analysis in one way only to find out later that the phenomenon I was studying had other connotations. According to Yin, one of the main objectives at this stage is to identify the theory that will be examined and to list rival hypotheses that could explain the data. The five reasons single-case designs are chosen are criticality, extermination, typicality, revealing power or longitudinal possibility. The reason for selecting a design in a multi-case study is its replicability, through which one can understand the factors that led to successful results in one case but less successful results in another (Yin, 2009). The selection of the case studies could have been more problematic and difficult for me due to the many variants analysed. The theoretical context of my research, as described in the previous chapter, is the production of space by the HRM (see Chapter 2), so I first identified in both cities all those collectives that identified themselves as part of the HRM and that actively participated in the activities that the movement proposed or was among the organisers of these activities, defining themselves as autonomous and adopting a strategy of conflict with respect to public policies and the resulting urban transformations proposed by the institutions. The doubts I had from the outset were justified by the fact that I did not know whether to maintain the case study approach on the urban macro-area and thus compare the two movements in the two cities by analysing their relations with the institutions, or whether to go into specifics and choose specific local case studies in certain neighbourhoods where these activities and collectives were more present. I have opted at this point for a multi-scalar approach (Robinson, 2016), which in the course of the work, attempts to broaden the scale of observation in order to obtain a complete picture of the issue addressed (Flyvbjerg, 2006); this is because the topic of the thesis involves several questions that need to be answered at different scales and methods. Therefore, the thesis is developed to a ‘macro’ context, mainly to identify, on the one hand, the public policies that the two countries have adopted over the last 50 years and what urban transformations have resulted in both case study cities while on the other hand analysing what responses HRM has given to these transformations. This macro-contextualisation was also valuable for me to identify the different characteristics of the political structure of these two southern European countries. Then, at a later stage, I shifted to a ‘meso’ scale of the specific case studies in an informationoriented selection, i.e., to maximise the usefulness of information from small samples and individual cases by selecting cases according to expectations about their information content (Flyvbjerg, 2006). The choice of comparing two cities, such as Rome and Lisbon, was dictated by wanting to compare two southern European capitals that are peripheral to European development policies (Tulumello, 51 2022a), thus contributing to the scarcity of studies available today on southern European housing policies. Instead, the specific cases chosen for this thesis focused on two autonomous spatial experiences developed within two neighbourhoods (the Ostiense neighbourhood in Rome and the Arroios neighbourhood in Lisbon) that, due to their centrality, are not detached from the broader urban trends with respect to the urban transformations that have taken place in recent years in the two cities analysed. In both chosen neighbourhoods, there is an activist ecosystem of spaces and collectives that recognise themselves as an active part of the HRM and spatial experiences closely related to the movement. Therefore, these two neighbourhoods constitute an exciting vantage point for exploring how housing struggle collectives have emerged and developed in Lisbon and Rome, especially for analysing what spatial practices they have elaborated. For these reasons, the choice of the specific case studies fell, as far as Lisbon is concerned, on an associative space located in the heart of the Arroios neighbourhood called Sirigaita, which hosts the two greatest housing struggle collectives in Lisbon (Stop Despejos and Habita), while for the Roman case study the choice fell on a squat housing managed by CCLC called Porto Fluviale, also in the heart of the Ostiense neighbourhood, which in addition to housing 50 families of squatters now represents an open social space for the neighbourhood. Through the different scales that will be analysed in this thesis, therefore, I wanted to carry out “a reflexive and interpretative approach” (Neuman, 2003: 103) with an analytical methodology that will therefore be divided into two parts. The first ‘macro’ phase will analyse the housing policies and urban transformations that the two case study cities have undergone and the related activist responses and trajectories that movements have practised from the 1970s to the present. This phase will be characterised by the analytical method of collecting and analysing documentary data. The second ‘mesophase, on a local scale, will be characterised by using the methodology of activist ethnography and supplemented by interviews and documentary analysis, consisting of the descriptive analysis of the two case studies. International comparative analysis studies are of considerable importance in various social sciences. On the one hand, a comparative approach can lead to a deeper understanding of what is different and what is similar between the countries examined in terms of both public policy (Alves, 2016) and movement response; on the other hand, as this research will not be reduced to listing the similarities and differences, as it will want to contribute to generating a more profound analysis with respect to future urban challenges, in order to apply the knowledge gained in the two case studies examined (Allegra, 2020). Moreover, while arriving at comparative reflections on public and housing policies, urban transformations and activist trajectories in the two countries, the thesis does not intend to develop a 52 conventional comparative analysis, neither on a ‘macro’ (national - countries) nor on a ‘meso’ (local - neighbourhoods/spaces) scale. On the one hand, the macro-scale comparison served to understand two scenarios that are similar and different at the same time. On the other hand, the comparative view applied to the ‘meso’ scale of two neighbourhoods is to look at two realities to draw lessons from how alternative spatial experiences have developed from a similar ‘macro’ context. One of the main objectives of this comparison, therefore, will not simply be to classify different types of policies and the related responses of urban movements but to understand in depth why inevitable conflicts have occurred in the present day and what consequences they have brought concerning the transformation of the urban fabric. This process will be possible by trying to analyse the recent history of the two countries under study over the last 50 years, comparing housing policies and the various urban transformations that have occurred in the two countries, which will lead us to understand how urban movements have in turn reacted to these policies through the development of new spatial practices. When moving from one case to two, one is offered the opportunity to enter the realm of a comparative study that generates hypotheses, also allowing one to examine how common mechanisms are influenced by the particular characteristics of each case (Becker, 1968). In this thesis, therefore, there will be a more flexible approach, which will engage two different cases in a dialogue encompassing dynamics at various scales, thus facilitating a broader conceptualisation (Robinson, 2016). This approach will stimulate new questions about how urban space is produced in the two cities under study and by whom: - Identifying similarities and differences in the strategies, tactics and outcomes of grassroots movements in different contexts. This can help me understand the underlying factors that contribute to the success or failure of these movements and develop more effective strategies for social and political change. - By examining the experiences of HRMs in different contexts, I can generate new ideas and insights that can be applied in other contexts. For example, strategies that were successful in Rome can be adapted and applied in Lisbon, or vice versa. - Comparative research can also help build transnational solidarity between grassroots movements by highlighting everyday struggles and challenges. By recognising the typical struggles of different social movements, more robust networks of solidarity and support can be built. - Finally, comparative research can inform policy and practice by providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers and practitioners. For example, research on the production of space for grassroots movements can inform urban planning and development policies or community-based approaches to housing and land use. 53 Comparative research on grassroots movement space production can help us better understand social and political change dynamics and develop more effective strategies for building more just and equitable societies. DATA COLLECTION The methodology of data collection for the analysis of the case studies included bibliographic analysis (documentary, archival and digital), as well as militant ethnography at the meetings of the collectives in both Lisbon and Rome, active participation in the actions of the collectives and spaces studied, and especially about the specific case studies, the primary tool on which I based my analyses were recorded interviews with institutional and militant political actors. During the process prior to data collection, even though I had already decided on a methodology of action for the emerging theory, I still tried to collect the data trying to imagine how I would then analyse it in the following steps and what I could use it for, Yin explains ‘How and what to compose, case studies’. He recommends that researchers start with the end in mind, beginning to outline the final report before the case study begins (Yin, 2009). The analysis involved an exploration of the theoretical propositions that guided me in selecting my case studies. I assessed the underlying propositions that shaped each case study’s original objectives and design. These propositions, in turn, encompassed research questions, literature reviews, and novel hypotheses or propositions. Before proceeding with the interviews, I analysed various forms of documentation, both scholarly, to find out about existing research on the case and informal, to obtain as much information on the two case studies through the analysis of the documents produced by the collectives and the spaces identified. I began with the production of a chronology of the last two years in both the Lisbon case and the Roman case, making use of the social Facebook platform where I identified, within Stop Despejos, Habita, Sirigiaita, RdA, Zona Franca and Disgraça page for the Lisbon case, all the events and actions produced in the last two years, drawing up a detailed chronology of events, articles and public demonstrations. As for the Roman case, I did the same by analysing the Facebook pages of CCLC, BPM and Porto Fluviale. Starting from this chronological database, I identified the actions and events that seemed most interesting to me by searching for various documents related to these issues. The primary sources for this exercise were found within the websites managed by the collectives I was approaching to study, namely the websites of Habita and Stop Despejos collectives in Lisbon and CCLC and BPM in Rome. 54 These documents helped me to formulate the recent history of these collectives along with the interviews, and I was able to access these specific documents: - Letters, memos and other communiqués; - Agendas, announcements and minutes of meetings and other written reports or events; - Video documentaries of HRMs actions or practices in both Lisbon and Rome; - Articles in alternative newspapers close to the movements or activist community newsletters. On the other hand, I started looking for more formal documentation both through the analysis of institutional documents on research topics as well as a collection of data for the various scholarly productions on the topic that I decided to study through a search on academic search engines such as google scholar or the academia.edu website where I encountered several documents close to my case studies: - Bibliographic and archival data, documents of the institutions involved; - Press collection: newspapers, bulletins and magazines; - Scientific articles and doctoral theses produced by other researchers; Document analysis was crucial in elaborating the historical trajectory of the housing policies and related urban transformations of the two case study cities and the activist trajectories of HRM from the 1970s to the present. For the case studies, on the other hand, again following Yin’s (2009) instructions, the most crucial use of the documents was to corroborate and augment the evidence from the case studies to provide further case-specific details, as it is possible according to the author to conclude the documents. By studying these documents, I also drew up a more detailed interview guide with respect to the topics I considered most important. Having chosen to use activist ethnography in fieldwork, according to Boni et al. (2020), the use of interviews is privileged rather than observation because the researcher, in this case, tends to organise a narrative path on which he/she intervenes little, mainly because he/she politically shares the trajectories of the research actors and where therefore the critical gaze is almost exclusively directed at the institutional counterpart of the movement. With respect to institutional analysis, there are discordant positions with respect to this methodology. On the one hand, some argue that the ethnographer must maintain his partisan viewpoint on the case studies. In contrast, others believe that the relationship with the counterpart of the movement is a significant potential point of observation. In my case, I decided to interview both actors, especially in the Roman case, where a convergence of interests led to the final result of Porto Fluviale project. Therefore, both actors had considerable weight in the development of the project. 55 Interviews, as mentioned above concerning my methodology of action, are the sources of information to which I gave the most importance; I conducted 29 interviews in Lisbon and then actually used only 24 in this thesis (see respondents’ list table 1) while in Rome, I conducted 21 interviews and then actually used 15 (see respondents’ list table 2), interviewing HRM activists, political actors on housing issues and academics actively interested in the topic following the saturation strategy of grounded theory (Glaser et al., 1968). As the figures to be interviewed can be summarised in these three categories, I decided to set different guidelines for each of them; as far as the guideline for militants is concerned, I set up a first draft that I rehearsed with the first interviewees who have known me for a long time and together with them I refined the questions to ask the other interviewees, still maintaining a more informal approach always trying to ask a few broad questions to give freedom of response but still keeping the focus on the theme of HRM, the right to the city and the importance of space for movements. During the interview process, I followed my line of enquiry but asked my questions unbiasedly to give the interviewees as much freedom of response as possible. As for the interviews with political actors and academics, however, I decided to do them at a later stage, when I had already collected sufficient data both through my study on the subject and through the interviews with the militants involved to set a more formal and specific guideline on topics that I considered more congruent for the advancement of my research. Half of the Lisbon case interviews were conducted by me and Marco Allegra (2023) for writing the article ‘Housing Activism and urban space during the Covid-19 pandemic. Research notes on the Bairro of Arroios’ responded directly to the same interests and questions that I posed for the elaboration of this research thesis. However, these interviews did not lead to theoretical saturation in my case. To answer all the questions in this thesis, I had to integrate new interviews done only by me. For the interviews I did with activists in Rome, I realised early on during my first period of fieldwork that as I had not been in those environments for a long time, it would not have been appropriate to start with the interviews straight away and I decided to allow some time to pass so that I could integrate better during the first few months. During the first seven months I spent in Rome (July 2020 - January 2021), during the Covid-19 pandemic, I mainly tried to re-establish social and political relations between myself and the other activists and then asked them to be interviewed later. After talking with my supervisors on this issue, I resolved that my kindred activists should have been more acquainted with me in their day-to-day communications before being consulted. In addition, I devised some additional safeguards that might help them feel more at ease in front of the recorder even when I approached the majority of the people I planned to interview (the first interviews were only conducted during the second Roman study period, which ran from July 2021 to January 2022). Right off the bat, I planned the meeting seven days ahead. Second, I would inform them in advance of the general subject of the questions—for instance, the HRM, the relationship with institutions, and the 56 relationship between the movement and spaces—so that they could begin considering the topic that was suggested and not have to ask complicated questions on the spot. I would walk them through the entire procedure and go over the purpose of the informed consent form in detail when it came time for the interview. Once I had explained everything, the first question was whether they had a question for me concerning the project I intended to develop. I felt that the use of the tape recorder could be problematic for the interviewed activists, although I guaranteed anonymity and the fact that I would be the only one with access to the interview contents; yet, the familiarity undertaken over the following months put the interviewees at ease, and they never asked me to remove the tape recorder or not to use certain parts of the interview (which I promptly suggested before I started recording). If they felt it appropriate, I would be prepared not to use certain parts of the interviews that might jeopardise their subjective figure or the movement. The interviews from the Roman case are more present in this thesis than those from the Lisbon case; this is because, as described above, given the Covid emergency, I could not insert myself as I would have liked in the Roman context. In this way, the Roman interviews were fundamental for the analysis of those processes that I was not able to follow and therefore had more significant weight and importance than those in Lisbon, where being an active participant and, thanks to the organisation of specific events I was able to collect notes both of events and meetings and informal conversations with other activists, so in the case of Lisbon the interviews were still fundamental but only used when I needed to confirm my descriptive hypotheses about the case I was recounting. The demeanour I adopted as an activist ethnographer during data collection exemplifies the challenges involved in a methodology such as this, which is relational and situated. Using this methodology involves employing emotional intelligence and sensitivity to respect and ensure the wellbeing and subjectivity of the participants with whom I also shared my daily life (Grazioli, 2018: 61). Emotional sensitivity that I not only had to have during fieldwork or interviews but also had to maintain during the data analysis and writing phase. DATA ANALYSIS The choice of an activist ethnographic methodology also influenced my data analysis, a process I decided to complement with other methodological approaches such as grounded theory and comparative case study data analysis. The relational reflexivity I adopted as an activist ethnographer in the data collection phase had to be translated into the writing phase of the thesis. Given that the data and their qualitative implications were intimately connected to the contextual relationships in which they were collected, the analysis and fieldwork moments were inherently intertwined. This 57 aligns with the epistemological perspective of my research project, which emphasises the involvement and everyday experiences within the development of social movements (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006). Furthermore, my extensive engagement in activism over several years has made me particularly attuned and sensitive to these dynamics. The systematisation of the data took place firstly through the organisation of a provisional index with macro-themes. Once the provisional index was subdivided, I started to fill each chapter with specific bibliographical references on that theme. At a later stage, after transcribing the interviews, I placed the interview parts that referred to that specific theme in the appropriate chapters. Then, I integrated my specific reflexive analyses from my field notes with respect to what I had experienced as an activist ethnographer and based on my experience in the field of activism before starting this research, thus integrating what I had empirically observed in the bibliographic references and interviews. To proceed with this process of ethnographic writing, I, therefore, had to create a connection between temporal, political and spatial scales to make sense of the picture I was trying to compose (Grazioli, 2018: 62). In order to be able to place the collected data temporally, I wrote down a chronology of events from the very beginning, the actions carried out by the movements, newspaper articles and legislative or electoral interventions by political authorities that dealt with the topics of study in both cases. At the beginning of the collection, I drew up a chronology of the recent past, which I then constantly supplemented during my research period to include all those events that took place at the same time as my fieldwork. Thanks to this chronology, I was able, at the data analysis stage, to quickly find the date, the title and small notes describing the events and facts I had witnessed. I then developed their internal narrative within the macro-themes defined in the index, combining theoretical considerations and policy reflections from my field notes (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006; Russell, 2015). However, once I dealt with the ‘spurious’ nature of my data, I realised that to incorporate the interviews into my ethnographic writing deeply, I needed to develop my own individualised method of analysis and transcription. In grounded theory, the data coding and analysis process encompasses at least two distinct stages: initial coding and focused coding. The data is thoroughly examined and explored during the initial or open coding phase (Charmaz, 2008). This pivotal coding stage entails a shift in focus from the research field to data analysis, as it involves simultaneous data collection and analysis. Coding is performed under the evolving theory during the data collection (Ibid., 2008). About the interviews conducted in Lisbon, I was able, thanks to being integrated within the ([HOusing PErspectives and Struggles]; hereafter [HOPES]) research project, to access funds for the transcription of various interviews conducted both within the project and my doctoral research, considering the intricate and interpretative nature of the discursive layers within the interviews 64 the actions. An estimated 1,500 public housing units were squatted during this period (Antunes, 2017: 242). Soon after this series of squatting, a grassroots organisation among these communities that had undertaken this struggle for better housing conditions became necessary. Thus, ‘squatting committees’, ‘autonomous committees’ and ‘autonomous revolutionary committees of residents and squatters’ (Pinto, 2015) were quickly organised and formed to discuss common problems that might arise within the new squatting in a more organised and standard form. Parallel to these committees, commissions sprang up within the many informal neighbourhoods in Lisbon. These committees immediately began a practical process of self-construction and improvement of the primary conditions of the infrastructure in their neighbourhoods, demonstrating, on the one hand, a substantial endowment for self-organisation and, on the other hand, a strong identity linked to their neighbourhoods (Santos, 2015). This affiliation with informal neighbourhoods was demonstrated by the fact that these committees refused to be relocated within Social Housing, confusing the institutions that had already begun a process of housing relocation for these families. What they demanded was an improvement in the infrastructure and conditions within the neighbourhood without being relocated to other parts of the city. The extreme left that had just arrived in parliament, in a context of complete bureaucratic disorganisation, failed to propose government programmes to solve the housing problem, so much so that the issue was completely absent in the electoral proposals; only the Marxist party ([Popular Democratic Union]; hereafter [UDP]) declared in its electoral programme ‘house yes shacks no’ (Santos, 2015). The parties in power had not yet sensed the severe housing crisis that the people were enduring and were, therefore, unprepared for the chaos and anarchy resulting from the large squatting movements and the committees organised within the informal neighbourhoods. “There was a general climate of subversion, which supported a powerful movement for the right to housing,” says Helena Rosetta, an architect and former Councillor for housing in the [Lisbon City Council] ([Câmara Municipal de Lisboa]; hereafter [CML]) in an interview (Público, 2010). This climate has favoured sporadic episodes of violence in a new national political and social tension scenario, but mainly due to the recent weak institutions in power. “The relationship of the citizen with the authority was completely different from what it is today,” explains Manuel Salgado, architect, former town planning Councillor of the CML and former member of a residents’ committee (ibid., 2010). Therefore, the State in the post-April 25 era needed to be prepared and inoperative due to a complete lack of structure and personnel for government and administrative positions (Santos, 2015). This situation certainly gave more freedom of action to the self-organised grassroots popular movements, which were able to organise, grow and carry out hundreds of squatting in two years without resorting to significant repressions by the police and even supported by them. 65 The first response of the provisional institutions to this phenomenon came only a year after 25 April with Decree-Law 198-A/75 of 14 April, which legalised squats carried out on the condition that the squatted dwellings were empty before being occupied, i.e., without people already living there. This was the justification of the legislator: “Hundreds of thousands of families are in the country without housing or living in subhuman conditions. Furthermore, it is clear that despite the measures already taken or under consideration, there will be no possibility, not even in the medium term, of solving the serious problem of adequate housing for these families through new construction. (...) it is necessary to solve the problems raised by the squatting of vacant dwellings that have occurred. (...) it must be acknowledged that, although they were built illegally - which cannot be tolerated in the future - they were built to meet the urgent needs of extremely disadvantaged strata of the population” (Introduction Decree-Law 198-A75). These statements by the legislator hint well at the climate of social and class change that prevailed at the time of the PREC, where despite the illegality of the act, the legitimacy of the disadvantaged classes to satisfy their own needs is recognised. On the other hand, this decree was thought to be enacted because the now-growing movement could have affected private property considered ‘sacred’. The legislator also declared that such a decree was of ‘elementary social justice’ and that “as long as there are people without houses, it will not be permissible for there to be houses without people” (Introduction Decree-Law 198-A75). Words that, already following the promulgation of the Portuguese Constitution just a year later, would have been difficult to pronounce because of the constitutional consecration of the property right, which I will analyse below. Even though the decree legalised most of the squats, it did not convince the squatting committees, as several communities that were part of the committees were evicted from that moment on, so much so that several demonstrations were organised demanding (‘Fim dos despejos pelo direito à habitação!’, i.e. ‘Stop evictions for the right to housing!’), the (‘legalização imediata das casas ocupadas!’, i.e. ‘‘immediate legalisation of squatted houses!’) and the revocation of Decree-Law 198A/75 (Antunes, 2017: 245). Another of the points harshly criticised by the committees was the punishment of two years in prison for anyone who squats since the promulgation of the law, i.e., they were trying for the first time to curb this conflict that exploded in Portuguese cities. Until the end of 1974, the committees consisted almost exclusively of residents of organised neighbourhoods who had not yet been involved in the left-wing parties being formed in those years. However, with the intensification of the revolutionary crisis since August 1975, the parties became increasingly present in the meetings and demonstrations organised by the committees (Santos, 2015). These parties called themselves parties of the proletariat, having as their primary objective the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. For these parties, there was no proletariat in the neighbourhood committees but under-proletariat, i.e., without any revolutionary consciousness and 66 therefore vulnerable to reformist influences in a conservative populist democratic State. Nevertheless, despite the various conflicts, the committees represented a pool of activists for the parties to enlist in their as-yet unfilled lists, as well as an interest in being able to control the grassroots movement closely. A revolutionary climate was thus formed that seemed unstoppable, and this situation undoubtedly favoured the increasingly radical assertion of party movements. The ([Portuguese Communist Party]; hereafter [PCP]) and other radical parties had more and more power over the movement to the extent that they were able to control various actions as the recruitment of various activists began, leading to an undoubted weakening of the inhabitants’ committees (Cerezales, 2003). It was probably from this weakening that a new confused military coup of a counter-revolutionary nature was triggered on 25 November 1975. This forced the People’s Movement to rethink its entire structure completely, i.e., stop attacking with new squatting playfully and concentrate on defending its undeniable conquests collected up to that point, thus beginning to have a more passive and conservative strategy of the goals already achieved. The political scenario changed substantially in 1976 after the new State coup of 25 November. The constitutional governments decided that the solution to the housing problem was up to the free market and that local authorities should preferably provide direct promotion (Pinto, 2015). Inhabitants’ associations and committees were downsized and forced to order; 25 November arose as a ‘necessity’ for democracy to be established through the classical, non-revolutionary process that was taking place. In this way, the inhabitant associations that were active between ‘74 and ‘76 appeared in the eyes of both left and right-wing parties more as grassroots organisations, which were frightening (Santos, 2015), as they were seen as uncontrolled and anarchic groups that had to be controlled either through the institutionalisation of movements or through repression. According to Santos (2015), the struggle for housing in those years was also the only area in which victory could be claimed, albeit partial in many cases. The agrarian reform failed; enterprises returned to their owner’s hands, and social life was normalised. However, the squatted houses continued to belong to the people. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was precisely in the housing sector that the most spontaneous and autonomous initiatives took place, outside the dynamics of party, organisation and struggle, and the genesis of residents’ committees; therefore, organised citizens contributed much to this victory over the right to housing. 67 Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL) As described above, the PREC saw the emergence of multiple community organisations, through which new social, political, and especially housing practices were being experimented with since it was precisely the issue of decent housing that was one of the main demands immediately after 25 April that certainly influenced the generation of political consciousness within those communities that the PCP defined as ‘under-proletariat’ without therefore a class consciousness and vulnerable to populist manipulation. In this prolific context of active participation and demands for fundamental rights, the [Local Ambulatory Support Service] ([Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local]; hereafter [SAAL]) was promulgated on 6 August 1974 with the following objective: “to support, through the City Councils, the initiatives of the poorly housed populations to collaborate in the transformation of their neighbourhoods, investing their latent and possibly monetary resources” (DG, I series, 6 August 1974, 182: 873). At the time, 90,000 people were living in 18,500 shacks in Lisbon, which indeed constituted a threat to the provisional government that had been set up, which, although it condemned the squatting movement that had been generated, understood it by initiating a legalisation process. The SAAL was formed by a specialised technical body to support, through the municipal chambers, the initiatives of populations in the housing crisis, directly transforming the neighbourhoods in which people lived through investment in material goods or monetary funds (Santos, 2015) thus directly responding to the claims of the commissions that were formed within the informal neighbourhoods. They were targeting these investments primarily at the inhabitants of the informal neighbourhoods through punctual interventions to solve what was called a ‘national shame’ at the time. SAAL represented what can be called the first social policy on housing created after the Revolution. Thus, the first programme was conceived and written from a collective protest around the fundamental right to housing. It was therefore born to support the population in their right to housing while at the same time safeguarding the right to place (Ibid. 2015). In other words, to ensure that communities could remain within the neighbourhoods where they had always lived and towards which they nurtured a strong feeling of emotional, social and spatial belonging in direct response to the needs that the inhabitants themselves had expressed. Another important aspect was that this support should occur through the active participation of the population interested in the project. Based on this principle, one of the first steps was to bring communities together and propose the project to the neighbourhood brigades, who would analyse the case and determine what kind of support to provide to the community (Antunes, 2017). Thus, the SAAL process was based on a bottom-up approach, which was undoubtedly a methodology of action that gave rise to the experimentation of autonomous practices and self-construction, finally giving a 68 voice to the urban population in need. This option allowed the creation of strong bonds between residents, putting them at the centre of discussion, action and initiative with respect to how they wanted to build their homes and neighbourhoods. It is interesting to note that in the dialogue/conflictual relationship that existed between the commissions and the new provisional State, in one of the critical points of the SAAL - the incentive for self-building and financial investment by residents - there were various disagreements, i.e. it was not always well accepted by all commissions as well as by the more radical political groups, receiving various criticisms (Santos, 2015). The whole movement frowned upon Self-building as they wanted to include the concept of housing within the (still proposed) Constitution as a right and therefore demanded that the State built the houses, not its inhabitants. In this regard, the committee of the slum dwellers of Lisbon considered this principle double capitalist exploitation, indicating: “self-building (...) is nothing but a form of double exploitation. After a full day’s work to line the pockets of the capitalists, we had to stay late into the night to work on building houses” (CNS, 1976: 119). To reinforce these positions, demonstrations were organised in Lisbon, under the claim of ‘houses yes shack no’ with more than ten thousand people composed of the inhabitants of 50 different neighbourhoods. These demonstrations were called by various committees of Lisbon inhabitants, with around 20,000 demonstrators (Santos, 2015). Among the criticisms levelled at this project, several authors considered that the consolidation of representative democracy (of the State) taking the place of direct democracy (of the SAAL) led to a decrease in the popular mobilisation capacity of residents’ committees (Cerezales, 2003; Pinto, 2015). At the same time, it is undeniable that the SAAL, and therefore the institutions that promulgated it, were strongly influenced and pressurised to present this programme by the popular movement, this being a priority intervention subordinated to the concretisation of the right to housing of the right to the city under the control of the organised inhabitants. This was expressed through seven fundamental principles: Control over the location of housing units, control over technical support work, management of the work, control of the financial process and social management of houses and neighbourhoods (Santos, 2015). Thus, the SAAL represented a controversial programme that only sometimes enjoyed the support of some of the more representative committees since it represented the first social and political programme that envisaged the active participation of the community. However, the threat felt by the movement at the same time was that through the institutionalisation of popular practices, the committees and, thus, the popular movement would lose power (Bandeirinha, 2007). In other words, a dichotomous environment was created where some accused SAAL of being an extreme measure by implementing a methodology based on direct democracy and in popular plenary meetings. In contrast, 69 others claimed it was a reactionary measure whose objectives were to demobilise the squatting movements of vacant houses and exploit workers by forcing them to finance and construct their own houses. According to the inventory made in the ‘SAAL White Paper’ up to October 1976, of the 246 requests for intervention registered throughout the country, 170 operations were initiated and concluded, covering a universe of 41,665 families (CNS, 1976). In Lisbon, mainly collective buildings were constructed - by the express will of the residents - although a few dozen single-family houses were built. The SAAL process, according to Helena Rosetta, took the wind out of the sails of the squats. Suddenly, people were finding a vehicle to improve their lives without the moral burden of property encroachment through support for improvements and self-building. “It was vital. The energy was channelled in another direction, and squatting was no longer the immediate goal of those seeking better housing conditions,” summarises Helena Roseta (Público, 2010). FROM THE DEMOCRATIC NORMALISATION OF 1976 TO THE EARLY 1990s (1976 – 1993) After two years of intense activist efforts on the part of the grassroots movements fighting for the right to decent housing that resulted in revolutionary political programmes for the era dictated by the end of the fascist regime in Portugal, a process of democratic normalisation began in 1976 with several main stages, such as; the entry into force of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic (25 April), the first presidential elections (27 June), the inauguration of the first constitutional government (23 July) and the first local elections (12 December) (Antunes, 2017: 264), these events, punctuated by the popular vote, they inevitably introduced a political moderation in the country, firmly consolidating the Portuguese left-wing parties, mainly the PCP and the UDP, which respectively assumed power in parliament through holding the majority of seats in what would become Portugal’s first constitutional government. The big losers in these first elections, as they failed to gain any parliamentary representation through the vote, were the more radical left-wing parties, which was also due to their significant fragmentation during the election campaign. Regarding housing, the promulgation of the long-awaited Portuguese Constitution on 25 April 1976 established two fundamental rights: the ‘right to private property’ and the ‘right to housing’. ARTICLE 62. (Right to private property) 1. Every person is guaranteed the right to private property and its transmission during life or death, according to the terms of the Constitution. 70 2. Outside the cases provided for in the Constitution, expropriation for public use may be carried out only upon payment of fair compensation. ARTICLE 65 (Housing) 1. Everyone has the right, for himself and his family, to a dwelling of sufficient size, in hygienic and comfortable conditions, which preserves personal intimacy and family privacy. 2. To ensure the right to housing, the State is responsible for: a) Planning and implementing a housing policy that is included in the general reorganisation plans of the territory and supported by urbanisation plans that guarantee the existence of an adequate network of transport and social facilities; b) Encourage and support initiatives by local communities and the population to solve their housing problems and encourage self-building and the creation of housing cooperatives; c) Encourage private construction subordinate to the general interest. 3. The State adopts a policy that tends to establish a rent system compatible with family income and access to home ownership. 4. The State and local authorities exercise effective control over real estate, proceed to the necessary nationalisation or municipalisation of urban land and define the respective right of use. (Constituição da República Portuguesa, 1976). An important point to explain with respect to these two constitutional rights is how the courts interpret them, i.e., that the property right is a right that can be defended in court. Property cannot be taken from the citizen except in exceptional but remunerated cases. While the right to housing is programmatic (Tulumello & Silva, 2019; Violante, 2023), i.e., one cannot appeal to the court for the ‘mere’ fact of being evicted. One can only do so if the rules of eviction are not enforced. Generating a dichotomy in the case since housing, as opposed to property, can be taken away from the citizen despite the constitutional right. Within the various constitutional points dealing with the right to housing and the property right, regulations were introduced that support the “initiatives of local communities and the people to solve their housing problems”, as well as the “encouragement of self-building” and the “creation of housing cooperatives” (Constituição da República Portuguesa, 1976). The popular self-organisation processes undoubtedly influenced the introduction of these instruments experimented with in the two years of the PREC following the model of the housing policies proposed by SAAL. Interest in housing cooperatives arose as early as 1974, when the government, aware of the potential shown by the cooperative movement in other Western countries, promoted the creation of housing cooperatives and removed obstacles that limited their development (Antunes, 2017). 71 Moreover, during the PREC, the cooperative movement enjoyed great prestige for the years of struggle against the dictatorial regime as it was one of the significant political infiltrators. This situation intensified in the following years with the movement’s partisanship (Leite, 2011). Inhabitants’ commissions immediately after the coup continued to exist. However, they were not included in the constitutional text. They were only institutionally accepted if they were linked and bound to local authorities (Santos, 2015), i.e., the ruling parties adopted a unique control of the commissions to strip them of all the autonomous power they had enjoyed in previous years. The Constitution, to have been written in 1976, certainly had the advantage of including in its articles fundamental rights that other constitutions do not have, as in the case of Italy, for example, another case study of this research enshrined more than 30 years earlier. Including the right to housing as one of the fundamental rights was undoubtedly a crucial step for the struggles and housing policies that followed. However, the protection of inhabitants and homes is not fully guaranteed since Article 65 is interpreted politically and legally as a programmatic right, leaving the State and the judiciary free to interpret and, therefore, to act with respect to the movements’ claims for the right to housing. From 1976 onwards, the squatting movement also came to a standstill thanks to removing the residents’ committees from the political scene. In those years, there was also a strong wave of evictions towards those who had already squatted or were in an irregular situation in the face of the new laws of the first constitutional government. Residents’ committees under the slogan (‘Ninguém deixa os ocupantes sozinhos’, i.e. ‘No one leaves the squatters alone’) organised themselves through associations against evictions to give legal support to the evicted families. Strong solidarity movements with the evicted families were also created, bringing food and clothing and constant concentration on the planned day of eviction (Cerezales, 2003). From this moment on, the repression against the squatters increased considerably through various court rulings of evictions, and as a response to this repression, the resistance of the committees increased, and they became organised again. In 1977, to stop this resistance, the government issued a decree-law that punished all who would resist eviction after a court ruling with up to two years in prison. Moreover, many of the technical lords in charge of the commissions during the revolutionary period lost legitimacy due to the poor electoral results obtained by the radical left parties, and several individuals were replaced in the late 1970s by moderate politicians from the so-called ‘arc of power’ (Ferreira, 1987). On this situation, Ferreira points out, “of a marked ideological nature and turbulent manifestations, in 1974/75 sectarianism gradually evolved into clientelism and party nepotism” (Ferreira, 1987: 15). This also translated into a moderation of the political dialectic of the parties that stopped inciting and instigating the active participation of citizens in practices of self-organisation 72 except in the cases of the constitution of cooperatives that were supposed to act according to wellstructured and therefore institutionalised rules. There was then a strong growth in Portugal of communities grouping in cooperatives to solve the housing problem, following the evolution from only 40 cooperatives that existed in 1974 to 258 in 1979 after the promulgation of the Constitution (Santos, 2015), with more emphasis in the large urban centres. Another fundamental point that will be part of housing policies in Portugal is undoubtedly the right to property, which will see governments from 1976 onwards focus on private home ownership as one of the central housing policies. Although Article 62 does not openly foresee a programmatic dimension of ownership, which is the case in Italy, successive governments, since the promulgation of the Constitution, have nevertheless favoured it through various programmes. These include, for example, the subsidised credit programme, which sought to reduce the obstacles created by high interest and inflation rates; this system was in great demand as early as 1976, with 26,896 credit applications reaching 64,793 in 1981 (Antunes, 2017: 282). One of the most frequent criticisms of the subsidised credit policy was based on the claim that the loans were mainly aimed at the middle class, leaving out a large segment of the population (Ministério do Equipamento Social, 1983). As for Lisbon, since the 1974 revolution, it has continued to build Social Housing for occasional and local purposes. It should be remembered that municipal re-housing interventions for permanent rental housing began in the mid-1960s and were reinforced in 1970 with the ‘slum eradication plan’ (Ibid., 2017). Between 1974 and 1985, approximately 10,000 homes were built for re-housing and similar situations. From the 1980s onwards, Portugal underwent substantial changes that saw, in addition to the consolidation of the democratic system, the full adoption of the market economy, the opening of customs barriers, the liberalisation of banking competition and the progressive reduction of inflation and interest rates (Noronha, 2022). These structural changes were indeed strongly influenced when Portugal applied to join the ([European Economic Community]; hereafter [EEC]), an application that materialised on 1 January 1986. Compared to other European States, Portugal was socially and economically lagging, which resulted in the arrival of critical structural funds to combat the country’s exogenous and endogenous inequalities. The real estate market during this period enjoyed considerable bank concessions, mainly accessed by the Portuguese middle class through the reduction of interest rates, and the spread allowed many families to become homeowners (Serra, 2002). All this happened in the same historical period in which, between 1981 and 1991, the city of Lisbon saw a sharp decline in the number of residents of around 18% (INE, 1991). 73 Buoyed by its new-found economic stability, the new centre-right government increased public spending in the 1980s, but the situation quickly degenerated, forcing the country into a painful recession between ‘83-’84 and having to urgently request a new financial aid package from the International Monetary Fund, which meant a heavy strain once again on the shoulders of Portuguese families (Noronha, 2022). From the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, Portugal, led by the centre-right coalition, experienced significant economic growth (albeit primarily induced by the inflow of EEC/EU funds). During this period, an ambitious neoliberal-oriented reform programme was implemented in the country (ibid., 2022). One of the most significant reforms in this regard is the 1989 reform that repealed the constitutional provision on the irreversibility of the nationalisation of private enterprises, initiating a liberalisation process that included privatisation as an effective strategy of action (more than 100 State-owned enterprises were put on the market between 1989 and 1995, and the public sector was reduced from 20% of ([Gross Domestic Product]; hereafter [GDP]) to 10%) (Frain, 1995). However, Portugal’s entry into the EEC/EU certainly benefited the country’s internal GDP, as being among the poorest member states, it was also one of the primary beneficiaries of European structural funds (Silva, 1997). Thus, in the second half of the 1980s, while the middle class could access bank credit funds to become homeowners, the poorer classes saw their housing conditions worsen considerably, finding themselves forced to solve their housing problems on their own, often illegally. This resulted in an enlargement of the informal neighbourhoods that existed in the suburbs of the prominent Portuguese cities, which was, therefore, in everyone’s eyes, one of the main problems in Lisbon. This scenario affected a substantial part of the population and was visible in several places, even in the centre. According to various scholars on the topic in the early 1990s, the situation in Lisbon had no parallel in any European city, let alone among capital cities (Cabral & Rato, 2001: 5). In 1990 (according to CML data), 10% of the population lived in 20,000 temporary dwellings in poor neighbourhoods (Allegra et al., 2017). The poverty, exclusion, segregation and stigmatisation of these neighbourhoods were evident, as were the severe hygienic and sanitary deficiencies. These ‘neighbourhoods’ were mainly built on steep slopes or in hard-to-reach places in the shadow of the city, where thousands of individuals resided, who were forced into illegal self-building choices to improve their conditions, driven above all by an absence of plans to integrate the poorer classes into access to a decent home. Thus, in the city of Lisbon, there were about 200 informal neighbourhoods scattered throughout the city. There were about 25,000 precarious dwellings to be demolished in a universe of about 80.000, or around 11.5% of Lisbon’s population (Antunes, 2017: 240), representing the reality of the rural exodus that had taken place in previous years as well as the concentration of immigrants from 80 which only indirectly included citizenship, i.e. through rehousing and the prospect of giving them a home. In this same period, however, associations were born on the subject of housing, mainly linked to claims with respect to informal neighbourhoods, which, however, laid the foundations for the subject of housing to become central again within the political claims of civil society, somehow favouring the birth of HRM in the following decades. This is also because, according to various authors, with the completion of the PER and the abolition of interest subsidies, public investment in housing fundamentally ends, to the extent defined as “housing draught” (Allegra et al., 2017). It is also important to note that Lisbon’s population decreased in those years, from 691,063 residents in 1991 to 564,657 in 2001 (INE, 2001). As for the city’s urban expansion, despite the decrease in population in the centre, new areas for housing continued to be built. Notably, the Parque da Nações (after EXPO’98) and the Alto do Lumiar. Thus, with the beginning of the 21st century, a new phase of housing policies began, characterised by the need to carry out urban regeneration interventions in several disqualified places in the city, mainly due to the demographic decline and the abandonment of the Portuguese capital’s centre, which saw most of the buildings in the centre abandoned and left to decay. In 2007, in the immediate pre-crisis period, the ruling PS government launched a [National Strategic Plan for Housing] ([Plano Estratégico de Habitação 2008/2013]; hereafter [PEH]), endowed with a pioneering and integrative vision that envisaged direct state investments in the rehabilitation of the housing stock and the revitalisation of the rental market, also giving a central role to local authorities (Mendes, 2020b). However, the execution of this law was clearly interrupted by the crisis and the subsequent period of austerity (2011-2015), and as I will describe in the next chapter (see Chapter 5), the various governments had to rebalance spending on all social policies, including housing, at a time when the economic and social living conditions of Portuguese households were radically deteriorating. 81 4b) The Italian case INTRODUCTION TO THE ROMAN CASE The Roman case study, with respect to the years taken into consideration, develops in a very different context from the Portuguese one, i.e., in the 1970s, Portugal was coming out of a dictatorial regime while in Italy, this process took place almost 30 years earlier. For this reason, to compare the two cases in the same historical period, it is necessary to introduce some of the trajectories of the HRM as well as some of the housing policies in the previous years that occurred in Rome. The Roman case on this issue also differs strongly from other large Italian cities regarding the forms of resistance to the large number of people affected by the housing crisis. Resistance in the struggle for housing in Rome is, as in Portugal, an issue that has developed, at least over the last 60 years. The fascist dictatorship, headed by statesman Benito Mussolini in Italy, ended on 25 April 1945. It did not oppose land speculation during the twenty years in power, thanks to which so-called (‘Borgate’, i.e. ‘informal neighbourhoods’) and various shantytowns built by immigrants and displaced persons from the city centre developed in different areas of Rome (Insolera, 2011). The end of the regime coincided with the end of the Second World War, where funds from the Marshall Plan (a US-funded initiative launched in 1948) were released to help the economic recovery and reconstruction of Western Europe after the war. Rome, in particular, had suffered significant damage, with many historic buildings and monuments damaged or destroyed by bombing, then restored or rebuilt thanks to this fund. During the 1950s and 1960s, the struggle for the right to housing in Rome had different practices compared to the years I will discuss in this chapter, as the main demands came from the population of the ‘Borgate’ to demand better housing and hygienic conditions, also using public demonstrations against the political authorities to demand access to essential services such as electricity or even running water and sewage (Mudu, 2014a). Many of these public demonstrations were directly supported by the ([Italian Communist Party]; hereafter [PCI]) when it was still in political opposition in the [Rome City Council] ([Comune di Roma]; hereafter [CdR]) before it stabilised in power in 1976 and replaced the ([Christian Democrats Party]; hereafter [DC]) for the first time after the end of the regime. The decade of the 1960s was the period in which the [General Urban Regulatory Plan] ([Piano Regolatore Generale]; hereafter [PRG]) was approved for the first time in Rome, but in addition to this event, it is decisive to report that during this period a strong process of depopulation affected Rome’s historic centre. In the 20 years between 1951 and 1971, Rome’s historic centre saw its original population halved (Insolera, 2011). 82 At the same time, there was a reduction in the still numerous shantytowns (where 62,351 people lived in 16,506 households in 1968), achieved through the increased construction of Social Housing districts (Ibid., 2011). This was mainly due to the enactment of various national policies that aimed to increase the availability of affordable housing and encourage the construction of Social Housing, in particular with the National Housing Plan (Law 167/1962), which aimed to address the country’s housing shortage and improve the quality of existing housing. Within the plan, there is the law on: [Social Housing] ([Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica]; hereafter [ERP]), which provided for the construction of new Social Housing units by public authorities that were State-owned, with special attention to the housing needs of low-income families. The law also provided for the rehabilitation of existing buildings for Social Housing. Another extremely violent urban planning process that arose in those years in the city of Rome was the phenomenon of (‘abusivismo edilizio’, hereafter ‘unlawful flats, building or neighbourhoods), i.e., the construction of dozens and dozens of entire housing districts without building approval by the public administration, which was unparalleled anywhere else in Italy. In the early 1960s, an average of 15,500 unlawful flats were built annually until the surreal annual average number of no less than 54,000 unlawful flats was reached in the early 1970s (Ibid., 2011). For many Roman citizens, from the post-war period until the early 1970s, housing, therefore, took on extremely precarious forms, both through an informality that arose from below, through the selfconstruction of the ‘Borgate’, and through an informality that arose from above, as in the construction without planning approvals of entire unlawful neighbourhoods (Pizzo & Altavilla, 2017). And it was from these communities that the organised grassroots movements of housing struggle were born, as I will analyse in this chapter, which gave rise to the squatting processes in the city of Rome. These processes first saw individual families or individuals practising squatting by necessity without being organised into a movement during the early 1960s and then transformed and evolved into an authentic organised grassroots movement at the end of the same decade with the creation, for example, of the [Borgata Agitation Committee] ([Comitato di Agitazione Borgata]; hereafter [CAB]), an organisation made up of slum dwellers, women, young people, students, PCI grassroots militants and left-wing Catholics (Marchini, 2018). From a historical point of view, the housing struggles in the city of Rome were characterised from the beginning by a strong political valence. During this first phase, the claims of the committees concerned, on the one hand, the elimination of the ‘Borgate’ themselves and, on the other, the allocation to the inhabitants of housing in State-built ERP. The squatting of empty buildings thus became a standard form of protest (Mudu, 2014a; Tozzetti, 1989), sustained by the constant flow of migrants in a city hit by a severe housing crisis to which the public administrations were unable to find a solution and supported publicly and politically, especially in the initial phase, by the then PCI. 83 FROM UNLAWFUL BUILDING TO THE ‘BORGATE’ MOVEMENT (1970 – 1980) In the Rome of the 1970s, therefore, the construction of unlawful buildings, fuelled by families of (‘palazzinari’ i.e. ‘building speculators’), was no longer an exception but a veritable model on which the new city of Rome was built, and the thing that stands out most is that this model was established precisely when the city’s demographic growth seemed to come to a standstill. The population that lurks in these flats and for which entire unlawful neighbourhoods have been built is certainly that of the inhabitants of the ‘Borgate’ and the last immigrants to arrive in the city. However, it also includes that segment of the middle class that still needs to be able to access bank credit (Insolera, 2011). The intertwining of these needs, to which the public institutions were unable to provide an answer, created a veritable parallel building market, which was not able to be marginalised, also thanks to the very scarce production of public housing proposed by the administration in those years. For this reason, the only solution proposed to those looking for a house as part of a lower social class was to expose themselves to the proposals of the ‘palazzinari’ who illegally began to lay the foundations to dominate the property market in the following years in Rome. The legislative and bureaucratic confusion that did not delineate the administrative responsibilities at the three levels present, i.e., State, region and municipality, meant that ‘palazzinari’ played within these legislative faults to the point of making unlawful construction almost a permanent legal status (D’albergo, Moini, & Pizzo, 2015). Thus began a process of urban ‘recovery’ of 84 unlawful areas classified as ‘O’ zones by the subsequent municipal variant in 1978. In the same period and thus in parallel with these processes of real estate speculation, an organised HRM began to form, mainly formed by citizens and small associations that, starting in the second half of the 1970s, decided to use the squatting of abandoned buildings, both public and private, to give a physical place to their political and social activities, becoming one of the primary practices of the radical and youth movements of the extra-parliamentary left that sought abandoned spaces available to create autonomous spaces where they could experiment with new practices of selfconstruction and self-organisation. Thus, in the 1970s, not only in Rome, new forms of doing and thinking about squatting were born, giving rise to the so-called [Self-managed Squatted Social Centres] ([Centri Sociali Occupati Autogestiti]; hereafter [CSOAs]), with the aim of representing and making themselves recognisable through the physical occupation of space to reproduce political models of those groups and collectives and to develop new cultural practices. This process first took place in Milan (Cecchi et al., 1978), and then following the decline of the radical movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new cycle of struggles began. 84 Public and gathering spaces within Italian cities began to shrink more and more, and what were public spaces disappeared or access became increasingly limited (Mudu & Rossini, 2018). In the 1970s, some Italian cities started to privatise public spaces, often by selling or renting publicly owned land to private developers. For example, in the Parioli District in Rome, the city government sold a large portion of public land in the neighbourhood to private developers, who built a high-end residential complex that included gated communities and private parks. The development restricted public access to what was once a public space and limited the use of its facilities to those who could afford to live in the new complex. As a response to this repression of space, solidarity networks, mainly rooted in the spheres of labour and education, began to form new spaces of sociability and political nodes within these CSOAs. This new form of squatting had already had punctual experiences in the 1960s (Tozzetti, 1989). Still, it was not until the 1970s that this practice became one of the main instruments of political claiming not only by the HRM but also by all those collectives that recognised themselves within non-pyramidal structures and outside party logic, even if these first spaces could not normally last more than a few months. These actions also enjoyed the political and logistical support of the PCI, which continued to openly support squatting and CSOAs, especially public property, until its victory in the 1976 municipal elections. During its years in opposition, the PCI oriented much of its political action towards housing problems, with the party’s neighbourhood offices also playing a pivotal role in organising the old burghers to favour and access as many flats as possible (Mudu, 2014a). During the early years of the decade of the 1970s, the practice of squatting was not only a prerogative of the movement. There were many individuals not linked to any party or movement who regularly squatted empty buildings or flats, an action linked more to an essential need of not having access to decent housing than to a more general struggle against (the ‘carovita 4 ‘, i.e. ‘cost of living’) (Daolio, 1974). It was for these reasons, and again thanks to the intervention of the PCI, that a great movement began throughout the country in those years that sought to organise the working class, which took to the streets and squatted many factories in protest at the oil crisis of 1973, which later led to a financial crisis. The so-called Autonomia Operaia, organised a strong movement of struggle dictated by the need to protect their wages as well as to ensure adequate access to essential goods and services such as food, shelter, services and transport (Ramirez, 1975). Among the various demands was included that access to housing, and it was precisely on this issue that the first political disagreements arose between the PCI and the movement. Various organisations close to the PCI (such as the Unione Nazionale Inquilini Assegnatari or Alleanza Nazionale Inquilini) 4 That intolerable inflationary pressure that hindered the life of the working class in those years. 85 continued to promote squatting, but only of public housing, seeing it only as a strategy of negotiation with public institutions, while neighbourhood collectives belonging to an autonomous movement began to target private housing as well, arguing that rents should not take up more than 10% of workers’ wages (Mudu, 2014a: 100). At the urban planning level, one of the most important structural events that took place in this decade was the subdivision of Rome into 155 urban zones within 20 (‘Municipi’ hereafter ‘Districts’). This resulted in the decentralisation of power through that subdivision (Insolera, 2011). One of the criticisms was that this subdivision needed to include an in-depth study that justified the established boundaries. This decentralisation of both the State into regions and the municipalities into Districts was associated with the democratisation of political processes, i.e. to ensure greater participation, representativeness and decision-making responsibility, which, however, instead of strengthening public power, made it bureaucratically heavier. Moreover, it was in this climate that both the weight of the new HRM and the grassroots communities, especially those belonging to the ‘Borgate’, increased. Interestingly, many of these ‘Borgate’ communities were headed by neighbourhood pastors who ministered within the informal neighbourhoods. One of the most important in this regard was that of San Paolo fuori le mura led by Abbot Giovanni Franzoni, who, with his pastoral letter ‘The Land is God’s’, introduced a new political interpretation of land and house ownership. The letter of the Abbot of San Paolo deals directly with the central issue of the difficulties of city government and the enormous injustices in the field of property ownership: “The index that serves to mark the classical structure of the city of the capital, to give it now a certain objective justification, is the price of land. It is precisely from the differing value of the land on the market that inequality in the use of the city is codified; in turn, the existence of a land market requires, for its implementation, legal owners. The private ownership of land is therefore not the direct cause of speculation, the exploitation of the land, or the capitalist use of the city; and if, however, a necessary condition for all this to take place under the guarantee of the legality and justice of capitalist society, based precisely on proprietary individualism” (Franzoni, 1973). In addition to the experience of San Paolo, other communities began to struggle with the same dynamics. For instance, at the Acquedotto Felice, another priest, Fr Roberto Sardelli, conducts intense social work in the large ‘Borgata’. In Prato Rotondo, another large ‘Borgata’ in the north of Rome, Fr Gerardo Lutte led a systematic denunciation of the city administration’s delays and called for interventions in favour people experiencing homelessness. So much so that in February 1972, 13 priests published a letter to the Christians of Rome in which they denounced urban injustice. The grassroots communities are so numerous that city coordination was necessary to make the topics of reflection and initiatives homogeneous (Insolera, 2011). And it was also thanks to this very strong 86 climate of cultural renewal pushing from below that at the 1976 municipal elections, the PCI, which had already conquered most of the prominent Italian cities at that time, also established itself in Rome with the election of mayor Giulio Carlo Argan as head of the capital’s government, who stated that the sectors he would favour were culture and urban planning, stating that at the time of the elections, Rome’s only primary industry was construction. In those years in Rome, the issue of housing and, above all, the issue of urban planning, of how to build the city, was one of the main topics for the movement and the public administrations. The task weighing on the newly elected PCI, especially in town planning due to the legacy left by the administrations and the many unlawful constructions that had taken place in previous years, was enormous. In no city in the Western world had it been estimated that so many unlawful neighbourhoods had ever had to be reckoned with in a status that was, among other things, booming (Ibid., 2011). Paradoxically, having to reclaim and rehabilitate the Roman suburbs in those years meant accepting and legitimising the unlawful practice, even going so far as to negotiate plans with the very perpetrators of constructing entire unlawful neighbourhoods in the Roman suburbs (Pizzo & Altavilla, 2017). In a nutshell, the city’s future had to be discussed at the table with those who were gutting it, where the economic interests of the families who owned Rome’s housing companies were far ahead of the social interests of a city amid a housing crisis. In such a context of power destabilisation and with primary capitalist interests linked to the housing issue, a significant shift in the balance of power took place. These included the emergence of various criminal organisations that took advantage of this instability to enter the flourishing property market. Among these was the Magliana gang, a criminal organisation that originated in the Roman neighbourhood of the same name and assumed hegemony in the Roman mafia. By intertwining these interests, complicity was established between this criminal organisation and the institutions in power. Various investigations now confirm that the Magliana gang, as well as other criminal organisations, had direct business relations in those years, even with Vatican finance as well as with the various municipal councils that succeeded one another over the years (Ibid., 2011). The movement, the institutions and the entry of this third actor represented by the organised underworld and the construction unlaw in those years seem to be travelling on parallel tracks, each with its proposals carrying out projects, the former linked to social policies and the latter driven by economic interests, in the middle a public administration that legally is the only one that would have the executive power of action to deal with the problem was caught between two fires, mostly grasping repression towards the movements and making agreements with the builders of the unlawful neighbourhoods. 87 One of the practices that began to flourish the HRM in those years was the practice of selfconstruction and the organisation of the thousands of squatting flats in Rome as a social and political response to the price increases of essential services (Balestrini & Moroni, 1997). In Italy, between 1969 and 1975, 20,000 flats (between public and private) were squatted. While in Rome in the mid-1970s, an estimated 4,000 flats were squatted by the movement (Comitati autonomi operai di Roma, 1976). After this long decade of struggles, conflicts and claims, one of the responses at the legislative level from the government and thus of indirect interaction between movement and institutions came in 1978, through the promulgation of the ‘Equo Canone’ law (law no. 392/1978) in which the rental market was finally regularised at a national level, this law set a ceiling on rents in the city at affordable prices for low and medium-income tenants, with automatic renewals of contracts, but it must be added that very few property owners respected this law, producing among other things a declared boycott of the same (Mudu, 2014a: 100). At the end of the 1970s, the housing situation of Romans was as follows: 600,000 people lived in the consolidated city. One million in the expansion areas came up around the time of the 1962 plan, and 350,000 people lived in public housing, mainly in the eastern area. On the other hand, the unlawful city housed an impressive number of 800,000 inhabitants (Marchini, 2018). The unlawful neighbourhoods, therefore, managed to provide people with housing but driven by purely economic interests, they transformed entire territories into dormitory districts, completely depriving those who went to live there of many essential services, both connecting and sanitary, sometimes even depriving them of water for months at a time (Pizzo & Altavilla, 2017). In 1979, in new elections, the PCI was reconfirmed, and Luigi Petroselli was elected mayor (19791981). With the election of the new mayor, the electoral promises and the political commitment of the last 20 years that the PCI had demonstrated on the issue of housing were fulfilled, through a constant territorial presence in the suburbs, so much so that as soon as he was elected he immediately implemented a massive public housing plan, through which he demolished all the known ‘Borgate’ in Rome (which is not to say that he demolished all the precarious informal buildings in Rome). Most families were rehoused in the neighbourhoods built under Law 167 of 1962. The aim was to provide the public body with concrete tools to plan interventions in the housing sector and to influence, through these, the layout of the urban territory, combating land speculation and directing building development with the area plans to be built on expropriated areas. Therefore, a strong public investment programme was fomented not only to demolish the extreme precariousness of the ‘Borgate’, but also to relaunch the issue of subsidised Social Housing and restart building production (Ibid., 2018). This plan was also necessary to cope with the crisis in the building sector in those years and try to counter the rampant unlawful construction, which had a considerable economic and employment weight in the city of Rome. 88 As in the case of Lisbon for the PER, this was the last realisation of an actual public housing programme in Rome. There was a gigantic move in those years. Thousands of families from the suburbs loaded all their belongings onto trucks provided by the municipality to reach the new ERP neighbourhoods built. On the day of the abandonment, the ‘Borgate’ were demolished to avoid further occupation. Therefore, the emergence of HRM in Rome saw an initial phase from the 1950s to the 1970s, mainly led by the PCI, which organised communities to demand better quality housing, supporting the squatting of public buildings only (Mudu, 2014a). In the 1970s, the emergence of organisations of the extra-parliamentary left, organised within squatted spaces and workers’ autonomous movements, changed the characteristics of the trajectories of resistance, consecrating the squatting practised by the HRM as a practice of political negotiation as well as a practice of producing autonomous space within the Roman urban fabric where forms of living and resistance in conflict with institutional development practices could be practised with the formation of the first CSOAs. So much so that the PCI was no longer the only actor of conflict on the housing issue (Balestrini & Moroni, 1997) as the movement born in those years acquired its political discourse and established itself as an important voice in the public debate on the housing problem in Rome. FROM THE ADVENT OF NEOLIBERAL POLICIES TO THE RISE OF HRM (1980 – 1990) The 1980s opened in Italy with one of the legislative policies that would most influence city government in the following years throughout the country, namely Constitutional Court ruling No. 5 of 25 January 1980. The Court declared the rule on expropriations for public utility unconstitutional, which had substantial repercussions, especially on the expropriation of houses (Insolera, 2011). This ruling will severely limit the possibility of implementing public governance of the city from now on, as it also questions the amount of economic compensation for the expropriation of land for the construction of services and public spaces. The 1980s, therefore, in Rome, as in the rest of the country, represented a period of profound structural change of power, with the beginning of the loss of power of the public administrations in the cities, through the increasingly evident handover of the administration of services from the public to the private sector. As a result, all public measures issued from that point on also lost their enforceability, and public prerogatives in the territory gradually hollowed out. In 1981, as already briefly mentioned, Petroselli’s plan to eliminate all the ‘Borgate’ from the capital was finally concluded, the last ‘Borgata’ on the Prenestina was destroyed, and in its place, a green park was built for the community (Marchini, 2018). To rehouse the thousands of families living 89 in the suburbs, dozens of popular neighbourhoods were built: Tor Bella Monaca, Corviale, Laurentino 38, Vigne Nuove, and Serpentara. The results, however, are far less than expected. The risk is that of having moved families from a ghetto of shacks to a ghetto of concrete (Clementi & Perego, 1983), many essential services such as collective spaces, which were one of the features that gave the suburbs their most recognisable character, are missing, and very little attention is paid to building quality. Those neighbourhoods, which were supposed to be self-sufficient buildings surrounded by greenery to give new dignity to families arriving from the suburbs, turned into nothing more than ‘dormitory’ neighbourhoods poorly connected to the city but dependent on it. While the areas between these constructions continued to increase in value, once again continuing the game of private owners, the underworld and the expansion of the unlawful city. Among the main swindles carried out in the city of Rome by private individuals against the public in the construction field are those carried out with the regulatory plans. With the law mentioned above 167 of 1962, private individuals immediately realised that this was a golden opportunity to make profits, as companies would obtain land concessions and public funding to build houses, which they could sell or rent. In this scam, builders and politicians colluded to allocate housing units to people who did not meet the eligibility criteria, such as middle-class families or those who already owned property. In some cases, builders created fictitious households to receive subsidised housing units. This fraudulent allocation of housing units resulted in a shortage of affordable housing for low-income families who needed it. In addition, it perpetuated social inequality, as those who were already welloff could access housing for the most precarious families. In the city of Rome alone, more than 100 subsidised housing districts were built between 1969 and 1989 (Marchini, 2018). An intervention born to help the many families with a low income and, in the case of subsidised housing, with an average income insufficient to find housing solutions at market prices, has thus turned into a business only for building speculators, often linked to the organised underworld. All this was carried out in complete contrast to the community’s actual needs. The new 1981 census confirms, as did the previous ones, that Rome was no longer growing demographically despite the fact that the urban expansion project remained one of the cornerstones of Roman left-wing politics. And above all, one of the most impactful events, as happened throughout Europe in Italy as well, the 1980s represent the years in which neoliberal ideals took hold and stabilised with greater intensity, precisely at a time when, as discussed, public governance of the city entered a crisis, leaving the dominant market groups to lay the foundations for supremacy of private governance for the following decades. The PCI gradually lost its political ability to mobilise the classes living in suburban areas during those years in Rome, probably because of the premature death of Mayor Petroselli (Coppola, 2008). This was primarily due to the PCI’s general inability to comprehend the new social trends of migration 96 unusual collaboration that the 1998 regional law on the ‘self-recovery’ of real estate was approved (regional law no. 36/1998). This law was promulgated mainly to recognise housing squatting as an alternative instrument to deal with the housing problem. For the movement, the promulgation of this law was a huge victory, the bill was practically written only by the movement and approved in the region, and it is the first time such a result has been achieved (Interview R3). The buildings owned by the CdR and previously squatted are renovated at the municipality’s expense as far as the building’s exterior is concerned. In contrast, the interiors are renovated by the cooperative formed by the squatters, who become legitimate tenants for between 150 and 300 euros a month to repay the loan they asked the banks for the renovation. The house remains the property of the public body, which can be assigned to others after a generation. Soon afterwards, the first two squatting self-recovery experiences were born in Rome in Via Isidoro del Lungo and Via Rigola. Despite this first positive practice-sharing experience between institutions and the movement, the only one in Italy, it still needs to solve the slow Italian bureaucratic machine. Like other laws in the past, the self-recovery law could have been more effective when implementing projects. This was also because it represented just a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous housing problem in Rome, which in those years was becoming increasingly stratified and distant, not only territorially but above all socially. This law was applied in very few cases, failing at all to respond to the enormous demand and need for Social Housing on the part of civil society. In Rome alone, thousands of people were on the list to apply for access to Social Housing. The second half of the 1990s saw new developments on the issue of housing, neoliberal policies, and the politicisation of home ownership as the main instrument to allocate housing to the population introduced debt as the main instrument to control people’s lives, the middle class in particular. In contrast, the poor classes were excluded from any housing access programme enacted in those years. In Rome, it is interesting that the centre-left coalition that governed the city between 1993 and 2008 supported and implemented neoliberal policies. However, on the other hand, strong resistance also arose in extra-parliamentary and autonomous contexts (Mudu, 2014a). The discussion of housing in those years was part of the political discourse on the part of both institutions and movements, being one of the central themes among the claims of grassroots collectives. So much so that in 1999 the extreme pressure of the movements and especially of CCLC, which had already started a fight for the recognition of the ‘state of emergency’ years before, led to the first ratification of the (‘Protocollo sull’emergenza abitativa’ i.e. ‘Housing Emergency Protocol’), which provided for 170 billion old lire (about 85 million euro) for the purchase of new Social Housing, as well as the financing of six other self-recovery projects and other interventions in some Roman suburbs (CCLC, 2014). However, this, as well as other resolutions in the past proposed and approved thanks to 97 HRM pressure, was never implemented due to the slowness of the administrative, bureaucratic machine, making it clear on the part of the HRM that conflict leads to a dialogue with institutions and sometimes to resolutions favourable to the movement’s demands but, given the systemic legislative and executive slowness it cannot be the only form of action, so they continued with a dual strategy of action, carrying on dialogue when necessary but at the same time continuing with their housing squatting projects as the only way to allocate houses to those who needed them, and squatting new CSOAs to assert spatial and political practices within the territories of the city of Rome. In the meantime, the ‘unlawful housing’ spread so much that it was almost the only way to make and build the city. In 1997, with resolution number 92, the city council identified another 355 residential unlawful buildings sanctioned or in the process of being sanctioned under Law 662/1996: where more than 30,000 inhabitants lived. Three years later, with resolution number 176 of 2001, another 41 unlawful buildings were identified. These, too, were sanctioned and not perimeter-marked, leaving it up to those responsible for the abuse themselves to resolve as they saw fit to draw up the perimeters (Insolera, 2011). The culture of unlawful building now endemic in the city of Rome, in addition to the damage done by the abuses themselves, has also generated a series of laws for amnesties dedicated to burying a problem that was not known or not wanted to be governed, genuinely leaving the future of the city of Rome in the hands of speculators and offenders. The 1990s, on a national level, thus represented an apparent change of direction in housing policies, which adapted to global neo-liberal policies and completely transformed. Regarding the rental market, for instance, from 1992 onwards, it was deregulated entirely following the boycott by landlords of those mentioned above national ‘equo canone’ law on rent control of 1978, deregulation completed by the moderate centre-left governing coalition in 1998 with the approval of Law 431 (Mudu & Rossini, 2018). Moreover, in the 1990s, Social Housing suffered greatly, as it was hardly built by the public administration, leaving the middle and lower classes without any protection from rising rents, aggravating an already delicate situation. This generated strong resistance in a city like Rome where the movement, attentive to the housing issue, had a solid support base representing a real countervailing power. Social debate on the issue was also created by the fact that these privatisation policies directly attacked the middle class, and the housing problem in these years was no longer just a problem of the poor class. The 2000s opened once again with a great event, the Jubilee, which again saw a new season of urban planning with extraordinary interventions, despite the great scandals of ‘Tangentopoli’ 7 and the 1990 World Cup the Roman building bosses continued to act with the same dynamics. The Jubilee, also led by the charismatic figure of Karol Wojtyla, who organised the historic meeting in Rome of a million 7 A nationwide judicial investigation into political corruption in Italy. 98 young people from all over the world, concentrated the spotlight of the global network and the tremendous international tourism circuit on Rome in far greater numbers than in previous years. In 2000, therefore, Rome officially entered the era of globalisation, playing a significant role in international tourism. This new visibility brought to Rome investors already present and well-known in the market and international investors such as the world’s biggest hotel names. The number of hotel beds in Rome had reached around 94,000 by 2002. Of the entire offer, that in the historic centre was about 41,500, or 44.1% of the total (Insolera, 2011). The flow of visitors was concentrated in the centre, of course, far exceeding the number of residents daily, transforming the centre into a place of widespread tourist consumption that generated income but slowly erased its face. Meanwhile, ISTAT certifies that between 1991 and 2001, some 180,000 Romans left the city to move to neighbouring municipalities, a number equal to Italy’s twelfth largest city by population size (Ibid., 2011). In the Roman suburbs, another city model has been built, involving the construction of enormous shopping centres with entire dormitory neighbourhoods built in the immediate vicinity. Space has been increasingly destroyed as a social construct to be transformed into pure interest and consumerism. In those years, 36 mega shopping centres were built, now present in every Roman neighbourhood. With these interventions, therefore, the city is no longer designed to meet the social needs of citizens but is merely a response to land interests to feed the significant investment funds and the globalised economy. The HRM continues with squatting, and other autonomous spaces are established in the neighbourhoods. New forms of coexistence, culture and politics are practised from these forts, and other autonomous social centres such as ‘Strike’ and ‘Bencivenga’ were born between 1996 and 2001. Between 1990 and 2001, 49 CSOAs were active in Rome (Mudu & Rossini, 2018). The organisation of the HRM, and with them those who practice squatting as a political claim, has changed and evolved compared to the first experiences of the 1980s (Senzamedia, 1996). For example, there is no longer a strong detachment between CSOAs and housing squatting as various spaces include the two practices in the same space, even if often only militants or those from the social centre itself or the HRM are included in the housing CSOAs. This means that the HRM has understood that one cannot only fight for housing but producing autonomous spaces and inserting them within territories where social policies are constantly undermined means fighting for a more just and inclusive city. The movement will take up this theme in the following decades and will become central to tracing new political trajectories. Secondly, the CSOAs have gained more political weight to the extent that, over the years, they have been able to have a say in some structural decisions on the issue and thus come to support and collaborate with public institutions. As discussed, they do for the regional law on self-rehabilitation and emergency housing. 99 In January 2001, before the dissolution of the Rutelli Consiliatura, which will go down in the oral history of Rome’s bars as ‘the friend of the priests and the palazzinari’, i.e. the one who privatised Rome, the HRM once again occupies the City Council Chamber. The next day, the ‘Housing Emergency Protocol’ discussed in ‘99 was approved. That same evening, the HRM occupied the Lazio Region’s Public Works Department, and the measure was finally ratified (CCLC, 2014). In the meantime, a new mayor was voted for in Rome. Once again, one from the centre-left coalition, Walter Veltroni (2001-2008), was elected, but the evictions continued during his term. The resolution on the housing emergency, approved shortly before, was also applied to evictees from squatting managed by HRM, as in the case of the eviction of 35 families from the CSOA Angelo Mai. This regulation was a tool to respond to the growing housing crisis. HRM also applied it to the squatters, marking a historic victory because, at last, there was no longer any need to use existing public assets. However, essential funds were allocated for new acquisitions of assets and the start of self-recovery projects, even though it was applied very few times. With Walter Veltroni as mayor, the housing crisis explodes, the city fills up with temporary tents of homeless people, and shacks reappear in various parts of the city, especially on the banks of the Tiber and Aniene rivers, made up mainly of new migrants arriving in the city—hundreds of cases of families who, losing their homes, find themselves sleeping in their cars. The figures speak of 20,000 homeless, to which one must add the precarious children of market liberalisation, who are unable or have never been able to pay rent by staying in their parent’s homes. Thousands more people joined CCLC in those years, so much so that other groups were born that dealt specifically with the struggle for housing in the city, with different strategies such as the case of ‘Action’, which was born in 2002 from the transformation of the association ‘Diritto alla casa’ created in 1999. Action was born with the need to approach the housing issue with a more flexible approach to politics and thus to institutions, including within its claims precisely active participation in institutional politics (Franchetto & Action, 2004). While a few years later, in 2007, the third group in the city of the movement called ‘Blocchi Precari Metropolitani’ (BPM) was born, which practised squatting and managed ten self-managed spaces in Rome for several years. In 2002, therefore, the situation became untenable, and the movement, strengthened by the new adhesions and the lack of response from the public administration, set its sights on a new round of squatting. Squatting is practised on empty buildings in Via Bruno Pellizzi. Various schools left abandoned, like the one in Casalbertone, an ex-cinema, the Impero, in Torpignattara, and even an excynodrome that was abandoned after greyhound racing became illegal in Italy in 2001, in Viale Marconi, now home to the metropolitan precariat’s LOA Acrobax Project (CCLC, 2014). In the Ostiense District, home to many military factories due to its proximity to the Tiber River, once a preferential transport route for heavy vehicles in those years, there are many abandoned 100 former factories and barracks in a very central District yet left to urban decay. CCLC and the newlyestablished neighbour LOA Acrobax, which maintains a more autonomous approach and is not solely focused on the housing struggle movement, decided to collaborate. On 2 June 2003, they jointly practised squatting in the former barracks of Porto Fluviale via Ostiense, where 150 families immediately settled. These families included not only Italians but also a significant percentage of Maghrebi and South American families. This series of squatting, which I will discuss in the following chapters in more detail, led to the re-appropriation of a fundamental right by hundreds and hundreds of people, including students, families, precarious workers and migrants. In 2004, housing allocation under the emergency housing protocol was resolved after three years, the timescale was very long, and the emergency increased. It was impossible to wait that long for the many families affected by such an urgent problem as housing, the centre of Rome continued to empty, and precariousness increased. Add to this the urgent eviction requests from the Prefecture, which weigh like boulders on people’s lives under executive eviction, squatting and HRM. What stands out about the Roman HRM is that no attempt at repression succeeded in those years to stop the thousands of people from self-organising around the primary need for housing. The movement remains standing through its territorialised structure throughout the city and continues to produce new spaces of resistance. In February 2005, a UN delegation was in Italy to verify the Italian government’s respect for the right to housing, enshrined in Article 11 of the ‘International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, signed by our country in 1966 and ratified by law 881 of 25 October 1977. For four days, this international delegation met with local administrators, tenants’ associations, migrant and political refugee committees, and the various actors, and also met with HRM (CCLC, 2014). The delegation aimed to understand how evictions, rising rents and the sale of public property were managed. Among the various institutional meetings it attended, it also visited some of the squats in the city run by the groups that formed the HRM. A communiqué from the CCLC reads, “We recalled that, in recent years, it was our struggles, from anti-evictions pickets to squatting, that concretely ‘safeguarded’ a right recognised by international treaties, but violated by individual governments” (ibid., 2014). Moreover, finally, in 2005, after years of struggle and pressure from the movement, the CdR ratified resolution 110/05 ‘Programmatic resolution on housing policies and the housing emergency in the Rome municipal area’, which succeeded in releasing funds for a public housing plan, another glaring example of the direct relationship between the movement and the institutions, albeit carried out through conflict. This law was introduced by Action and, after Regional Law No. 55 of 1998 (‘selfrecovery’), is one of the most relevant instruments to combat housing difficulties with the direct participation of the social actors in the struggle for housing. Thanks to the approval and implementation of this instrument, for the first time, the institutions recognised the growing housing 101 hardship in Rome as an emergency issue requiring their attention (Caciagli, 2022). In addition, the resolution guaranteed the existence of an ‘eviction house’ in each neighbourhood to respond to cases of emergency post-eviction. It is interesting to note at this point how the HRM in Rome has evolved and shrunk from the local and market policies in force in the various decades. The housing struggle movement in the 1960s and 1970s, together with the PCI, managed to improve housing conditions for the lower social classes, where the main demands were for more Social Housing and better housing conditions. These pressures also led to a rent control law later boycotted by landlords. Commencing in the 1980s, the movement began to detach itself from political parties, embracing an autonomous policy and extending its squatting practices beyond public areas to target private spaces. This shift led to a strong critique of the building speculation carried out by the most influential families in Rome. In the 1990s, a significant systemic change occurred through applying neoliberal policies. These policies increasingly favoured the inclusion of private funds in public housing, resulting in an imbalance of power that amplified the social and political influence of wealthy families compared to the lower middle class. Consequently, rents escalated, leading many families into a housing crisis. As a result, they sought assistance from the HRM and resorted to illegally squatting entire abandoned buildings. This not only served as a means of negotiating with authorities but also fulfilled their basic need for housing. Already in the 1990s, the HRM grew thanks to the inclusion of new actors, such as the student movement and many migrant families who had arrived in the city; this process led the new millennium to a new phase corresponding to the moment after the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa in 2001, with the creation of social forums and an articulated anti-globalisation movement that led to the consolidation of new forms of squat in the city of Rome through the creation of numerous CSOAs that represented real strongholds of the movement where to host countercultural events and experiment with new forms of coexistence within the city and that would represent in the years following the 2007/08 crisis the spaces where to practice new forms of coexistence and daily life in opposition to the neoliberal development model that continued to be the only possible model. 102 103 CHAPTER 5. Housing Policies and urban transformation from post-crisis 2007/08 to the present After analysing the urban transformations and housing policies implemented by various governments and municipalities, as well as the activist trajectories developed by social movements on the housing issue during the late 20th century, I will now shift my focus to the two case study cities. I will begin by examining the global financial crisis that unfolded in 2007/2008, as it represents a significant turning point regarding housing policies, subsequent urban transformations, and the organisational and political demands of urban social movements regarding housing. However, the next chapter will present a comprehensive analysis of these movements (see Chapter 6). In this section, I will briefly introduce the 2007/08 crisis and then understand its effects on the two case study cities with respect to the social policies enacted. This crisis was triggered by the financehousing nexus, i.e. by the bursting of a housing bubble in the economy of the United States of America derived from subprime mortgages. This crisis highlighted the problem that real estate assets were generally overvalued and that several households were exposed to subprime mortgages on a global scale (Garcia, 2010; Schwartz, 2012). In a nutshell, the front model imposed by institutions and centred on home ownership (see Chapter 4) ended up imploding, causing an economic crisis that then rapidly spread to all other sectors of the economy, exacerbating social and, thus, housing inequalities in the two case study countries, as well as in the rest of the world. This crisis thus showed the fragility of the system of home ownership financed through bank credit, as it frontally attacked all those households that in the decades before the crisis had decided to buy a house through this option, fostered through specific programmes by both case studies governments. Therefore, “in recent decades, many households, supported by facilitated access to cheap credit in parallel with the development of a model of urban expansion based on the mass production of new construction, especially in the suburbs of metropolitan areas” (Mendes, 2018a: 4), have gone into debt to buy a property fragilizing their economic position in relation to this crisis. Compared to what has been analysed so far, housing has taken on different functions in our current society, both in the market and in the social sphere: it has assumed a primary role in the inscription of the logic of financialization in contemporary economies and in the trend of household indebtedness, a logic that is central to neoliberal policies (Rolnik, 2013), which generated the conditions for the explosion of the housing bubble; it is a component of the transformation of urban economies and consequently of the production of social living spaces in metropolitan territories; it is an increasingly perceptible dimension of the worsening forms of social inequality between those who have access to it and those who do not; and for all these reasons, therefore, it is not surprising that housing emerges, especially in the post-crisis period, as one of the central social claims of the new and 104 old urban social movements that base their struggle on the concept of housing and then expand their claims on the right to the city from this. In the European case, the countries that have suffered most from the effects of the crisis are undoubtedly the countries of southern Europe, and precisely due to the austerity policies that were subsequently produced have particularly affected the inhabitants of large cities (Tulumello & DagkouliKyriakoglou, 2021). Southern European cities, therefore, present relevant cases for studying the effects of the financial crash on housing markets (Lestegás, 2019) and, thus, on what effect this crash had on urban transformations. For this reason, and starting from the two European case study capitals, I will analyse in this chapter what policies were developed by institutions to cope with the crisis and what urban transformations in space followed in the period from the 2007/08 global economic crisis to the new Covid-19 global pandemic crisis. 105 5a) The case of Lisbon FROM THE IMMEDIATE POST-CRISIS PERIOD TO THE TROIKA AGREEMENT (2007 - 2012) During the pre-crisis years in Portugal, a strategy was initiated to sell off public assets, favouring private companies. Between 1995 and 2011, the CML sold almost 8,000 housing units it owned. Contrastingly, during the period between 2008 and 2010, a notable shift occurred as 20 entire Municipal Districts, comprising over 4,800 housing units, were made available for sale, including properties owned by the municipality (CML/DMHDS, 2011: 33). As written in previous chapters, successive governments since the 1980s have facilitated access to credit for buying one’s own home, effectively increasing the number of homeowners (see Chapter 4). However, this generated the so-called sovereign debt crisis, which produced, among other consequences, that Portuguese households of those years were among the most indebted in Europe in the post-crisis period of 2007/08. Loans for house purchases were responsible for almost 45% of bank loans and accounted for almost 100% of households’ disposable income (Banco de Portugal, 2008). Moreover, all this has been generated in a context where job vacancies have been increasingly shrinking due to the bankruptcy closures of numerous companies and factories. Between 2006 and 2013, the Portuguese unemployment rate doubled from 8.9% to 16.4% (Eurostat, 2018). It is understandable how housing has become one of the main economic and social problems burdening Portuguese households’ expenses. Furthermore, another datum to be analysed to the urban composition of Lisbon that is not directly related to the economic crisis but to its deindustrialisation is the suburbanisation of the city, which specifically saw an actual abandonment of the historic core: between 1991 and 2011, Lisbon’s historic core lost 33.4% of its population, in 2011 25.7% of its total housing stock was vacant (INE, 2012), this led to an abandonment also structural and maintenance of the historic core, as well as devaluation of both market and rents in various central areas of the city during those years given the low demand. In 2011, Portugal’s economic situation was disastrous, so much so that it came under intense external pressure from the EU. That year, The Portuguese PS government was forced to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Troika institutions (International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission) that defined the economic and financial adjustment to be applied in the country in the coming years. In March 2011, the government presented the parliament with a new set of austerity measures, which included cuts in public sector wages and pensions and increases in taxes and social security contributions. Opposition parties rejected these measures, and 112 2018). This rebalancing of public cash inflow, made possible as mentioned above mainly thanks to tourism and the successful attraction of large foreign investors, did not, however, translate into more investment in the social sector, which is still under the restrictive regulations imposed by the 2011 austerity period (Seixas et al., 2019). One of the legacies of this new economic structure was that it caused the social structures of the neighbourhoods in the centre of Lisbon to change definitively. This happened thanks to a vital process of gentrification that attacked the resident population, forcing poor, immigrant and elderly populations to leave the neighbourhoods and houses where they lived. This process happened quickly and violently, replacing these communities with higher-income groups (Mendes, 2018b). Thanks to this process, the urban areas of the central neighbourhoods also underwent a rapid rehabilitation of the housing stock, thus removing the burden from local institutions of having to worry about the urban decay that was attacking Lisbon’s historic centre. However, this urban rehabilitation asserts itself as a market strategy that raises real estate prices as well as rental prices, as well as the prices of all goods within the areas under consideration, thus serving only the interests of the capitalist class in the neoliberal city (Ibid., 2018b). This process has fostered the setting of neoliberal urbanism, where private individuals have more and more decision-making power even on how to manage the city’s public and social spaces, thus also reinforcing the belief that the gentrification process also driven by the tourist project is a necessary and effective process for the urban regeneration of the city of Lisbon (Mendes, 2018a). This has led to an increasingly pronounced privatisation of public spaces. Thus the design of spaces of sociality and social reproduction fundamental to the daily life of the inhabitants of the city centre has been replaced by a production of consumption spaces to favour accumulation projects directed at a non-stable population (such as tourists or digital nomads), with more purchasing power and with other needs, corroding the urban identity of the places subject to these new urban investments and transformations. 113 FROM THE RETURN OF HOUSING TO THE CENTRE OF PUBLIC AND POLITICAL DEBATE TO A NEW GENERATION OF HOUSING POLICIES (2015 - 2020) The new legislative elections that took place in September 2015, therefore, came with a history of profound urban impacts dictated by the austerity policies of previous years that weakened support for the incumbent centre-right government, leaving room for a strange coalition created to gain a majority in a parliament composed of the centre-left PS, and the two left-wing parties respectively the PCP and the ([Left Bloc Party]; hereafter [BE]) to support a socialist government and thus secure a majority in parliament. The main concept that united them and that they brought as their central theme in the election campaign was that they had to reverse at all costs the austerity policies that had tightened an unacceptable grip on the Portuguese population. At the same time, as discussed for tourism, soon after the legislative elections, a new light began to shine on the Portuguese capital that led it to be described by CNN as the ‘coolest capital city in Europe’ (CNN, 2017), with articles in international magazines and newspapers the arrival of tourists and international students was not long in coming. With these new revenues in the Portuguese coffers, Portugal’s reputation as a political economy vis-à-vis the other States of the EU also began to change, going from being described as a peripheral capital to gaining positive comments from various progressive commentators around the world, who saw the new government as proof that an ‘alternative to austerity’ could exist (The New York Times, 2018). While the Portuguese economy began a recovery that positively surprised everyone, on the other side of the coin, the domestic real estate market suffered the most. Portugal is a particular case in this respect compared to the other countries of the EU since it recorded a fall in prices from the Troika agreement until 2014. However, from 2015 onwards, the real estate market exploded, representing the country with the most tremendous increase in housing prices in the EU. In only four years, from 2015 to 2019, the Housing Price Index had a valuation of 41.6% (Drago, 2021: 20). These price rises from 2015 onwards fostered the urgency of opening up the debate on housing and the housing crisis once again becoming central to the public and political discussion in Portugal. This was also favoured by the fact that this new crisis frontally attacked the urban middle classes, and the new generations, who no longer could access a house of their own, were identified as the primary victims of this housing crisis (Drago, 2021). This crisis thus underlined how this new city model, which relied almost solely on the search for external financiers to repay the public debt, weighed heavily on the Portuguese population living in large cities. Reporting some numbers will give a better understanding of the scope of what has been analysed so far. The average value of traded properties had contracted by 33% from 2007 to 2011 during the crisis years and doubled between 2011 and 2017, i.e. from 214,683 euro to 436,176 euro in just six 114 years (Lestegas, 2019: 715). In terms of the average rental market, on the other hand, the rent for an 80 square metre house in the centre rose from 276 euros in 2011 (INE, 2013) to 850 euros in 2017 (INE, 2018a), more than tripling therefore, while the Portuguese minimum wage in the same years increased by only 0.9% (INE, 2018b). With these numbers, almost the entire Portuguese population has been excluded from the real estate market, especially from the central areas of the city, which has become a privileged place of investment and speculation for foreign players in just a few years. In this context, even the Portuguese National Bank, given the alarming numbers, warned of the risk of a new real estate bubble and its possible bursting in the following years (Banco de Portugal, 2018). In the ten years following the 2008 crisis, the debate and strategies adopted by local and governmental institutions on the housing issue underwent significant changes as the context itself changed rapidly. Older inner-city residents began to feel strong pressure, and the media began to tell stories of evictions, making the housing crisis a public issue. From 2016 onwards, more and more people started to talk about the issue and the housing difficulties the country was going through, so much so that the government was faced with a new challenge, giving rise to the need to launch a socalled [New Generation of Housing Policies] ([Nova Geração de Políticas de Habitação]; hereafter [NGPH]) (Drago, 2021; Mendes, 2020b; NGPH, 2017), with the primary objective of guaranteeing access to adequate housing for all, understood in the broad sense of habitat and people-oriented, as well as creating the conditions for urban regeneration to go ‘from exception to rule’ and become the predominant form of territorial regeneration (Mendes, 2020b: 20). Also, that same year, in the 2017 Lisbon municipal elections, the electoral campaign focused heavily on the housing crisis. The housing issue thus returned to be a central theme in Portugal from 2016 onwards, both in the political agenda of the parties and the central claim by the HRM, which was beginning to take its first steps at this time. Furthermore, in 2017, one of the events that greatly impacted public opinion on the housing issue, in addition to the significant social pressure, was the publication of the United Nations’ Report on the Right to Adequate Housing (Fahra, 2017). This report strongly admonished the Portuguese government for its inadequate housing policies and its failure to protect the population from the housing crisis (Di Giovanni, 2017; Seixas et al., 2019). During this period, the government was compelled to finally take housing as a ‘political priority’ (Público, 2017). So much so that it led PS council president António Costa to explicitly mention the risks of exclusion and non-access to housing for the younger generations, primarily dependent on an exploding rental market (Tiago, 2017). The segment of the population, the government, wanted to target with this NGPH were the middle classes and, above all, the younger generation. In response to this new policy need, a new secretary of State was created in 2017 that was completely dedicated to the topic of housing. In October of the 115 same year, a document was presented for public discussion to guide the entire new legislative approach to housing policies (NGPH, 2017). At the municipal level and returning to Lisbon, the CML notably recognised the need to retain residents. Consequently, the CML launched an ambitious affordable housing programme that again envisaged a solid public-private partnership for the construction of mixed-use complexes, in which 7,000 affordable housing units were to be built on 15 plots by the year 2021 (Seixas et al., 2019: 239). Three years after the launch of this programme, only 700 flats have been allocated (Público, 2020a), i.e. barely 10% of the planned total. The text of the NGPH (2017) starts by criticising all housing policies of previous decades that focused their economic efforts more on facilitating the purchase of own homes, putting households into debt and causing the most significant economic burden in the post-crisis 2008 in which about ¾ of public spending in the sector from 1987 to 2011 was spent, setting two main objectives: - Increasing the public housing stock with a target of 5% of the total housing stock against the current 2% meant adding about 180,000 new Social Housing units. - Affordable rent programmes facilitate access to housing for the young and middle classes. In 2018 the NGPH was finally approved (Council of Ministers Resolution No. 50-A/2018, 2 May). Where there are multiple tools to achieve the goals that the guidelines had outlined, such as: To respond to families living in a situation of severe housing deprivation; To guarantee access to housing to all those who have no response through the market; To create the conditions for rehabilitation to be the main form of intervention at the level of the built environment and urban development; To promote social and territorial inclusion and housing choice opportunities. These objectives were to be achieved through the programmes: (‘First Right’, hereafter ‘Primeiro Direito) - support programme for access to housing; Porta de Entrada - Urgent housing support programme; (Affordable rent programme’, hereafter ‘Programa Renda Acessível’);Porta 65 Jovem - Financial support system for renting by young people; [National Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Built Environment] ([Fundo Nacional para a Reabilitação do Edificado]; hereafter [FNRE]); Rehabilitate to rent; IFRRU 2020 - Financial instrument for urban renewal and revitalisation. To respond to the first point, that of eliminating severe housing deprivation, the new secretary of State, Ana Pinho, first commissioned the [Institute for Housing and Urban Rehabilitation] ([Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana]; hereafter [IHRU]) to identify families living in severe housing deprivation, arriving at a count of more than 26,000 (IHRU, 2018). The primary stated goal was to eliminate all housing deprivation in the country by 2024, proposing two main programmes to address this need: 116 - The ‘Primeiro Direito’ programme gave many of powers to municipalities in order to avoid onesize-fits-all legislation in Portugal and thus be able to better define their needs and response tools through local housing strategies, with funding from the central state. - The Gateway programme is aimed at those families who need temporary housing for some specific reason and in a purely emergency context. Of these, the ‘Primeiro Direito’ programme was undoubtedly the most ambitious, as it set itself larger-scale and longer-term objectives, while the second focused on solving one-off emergency problems. This programme, which was finally launched in 2019, immediately showed strong participation by many municipalities even though more funding has yet to be allocated to date, as seen from the first report on its implementation in November 2020 (IHRU, 2020). This first report indicates models for rehabilitation, the purchase of new buildings and the construction of new buildings to combat the severe housing shortage. In Lisbon, the available dwellings resulting from this programme to date are only 144 (Ibid, 2020). Thus are still very few concerning the enormous fragility of the families attacked by the housing crisis. In short, the NGPH is based on a vision of urban policy that favouring the existing built environment through intervention strategies that increase the quality of life of the resident populations. Furthermore, in this vision, of course, housing assumes a central role as a social factor that is fundamental for maintaining the quality of life and human well-being, but which has become a factor of profit and speculation to the point of annihilating the social value of housing within successive housing policies (Mendes, 2020b). Although the discourse contained in the NGPH document strongly criticises previous housing policies, as they did not consider the social value of housing, this has not translated into a commitment by the government to allocate to the housing sector the budget allocation that would allow a real improvement in access and housing conditions in Portugal, continuing to prefer a State-private arrangement. This rhetoric perpetuates the notion that the State cannot leverage the capital needed to create real affordable rent. This leaves public housing policy, once again, susceptible to speculative market logic (Mendes, 2020b), with the ultimate goal of injecting investment in housing to generate profit and reproduction of real estate capital and not having the production of affordable housing as a primary concern. This is also evident in the plan’s internal Programa Renda Acessível (Decree-Law No. 68/2019, of 22 May), which says: “It will be based on tax incentives for public and private entities, collective and singular, that put their urban buildings or fractions on permanent housing lease with the rent value limit defined by the programme” (NGPH, 2017: 17). This programme has not been very successful despite the incentives for landlords. However, this fact was reversed with the arrival of the pandemic, 117 where thanks to the cancellation of tourism in the country, landlords investing in short-term accommodation for tourists were forced to put their flats on the rental market, thus joining this programme. The promotion of affordable rent was thus the only policy created to ease the burden of housing credits for the Portuguese middle class. The government, in this regard, proposed various instruments, such as a framework for the provision of social or affordable rental housing that was financialised by creating the FNRE, which was endowed with the ownership of State-owned real estate (Tulumello & Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, 2021: 45). Within this framework, the NGPH posits that the sole responsibility of the State is to uphold an institutional framework conducive to market operations (Mendes, 2020b). Consequently, this approach perpetuates the interests of financialised capitalism and the influence of global actors within the financial real estate complex, often at the detriment of the social dimensions of housing (Brandão et al., 2018). FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE PANDEMIC TO THE NATIONAL RECOVERY AND RESILIENCE PLAN (2020 - 2023) This NGPH had been proposed and activated before the pandemic, which introduced new emergencies and deeply underlined the Portuguese middle class’s housing shortages. These programmes have also been criticised as they still need to solve the problem of rising prices being linked to the market price (and not to household credit) without attempting to counter it. They, therefore, have yet to generate a concrete proposal against the housing boom that broke out with the crisis. The state of emergency due to the expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic was issued by the Portuguese government on 18 March 2020 through Presidential Decree-Law No. 14-A/2020, leading the community to comply with measures such as mandatory social isolation, restrictions on freedom of movement, resistance and economic activities (Mendes, 2020a: 318). These restrictions led the country and all other EU member States to severely restrict international travel. For Portugal, this meant giving up one of the major revenues on which most of the post-crisis 2007/08 economic recovery was based. By altogether cancelling tourist inputs, Portugal immensely impacted the country’s economy (Drago, 2021). 118 A few days later, also thanks to the pressure imposed by two documents issued by the HRM together with an [Housing Studies Network] ([Rede de Estudos sobre Habitação]; hereafter [Rede H 8 ]) which reached thousands of people in just a few days, “the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic accepted with approval and a sense of urgency some of the proposals made, and the plenary’s consensus led the President of the Republic to promulgate Law 1-A/2020 on 19 March ‘Exceptional and temporary measures in response to the epidemiological situation caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and Covid-19 disease’” (Mendes, 2020a: 325), which established the immediate suspension of evictions, the suspension for those in precarious conditions of the payment of home mortgage instalments, and the relocation of families or individuals in difficulty within Airbnb or hotels that were exceptionally empty during a state of emergency, thus imposing, albeit in an exceptional case, the right to housing over the right to property. Moreover, in July 2020, Fernando Medina, the former mayor of Lisbon, presented an interview in The Guardian announcing that the postpandemic city would not follow the purely tourist model that had been developing previously, announcing the launch of a programme aimed precisely at reconverting the stock of short-term tourist accommodation into stable traditional rents at affordable prices (Drago, 2021: 55), to balance with this social quota the price that the city and in particular the poorer classes had to bear for this tourist invasion. Immediately after the publication of this article, the ‘Secure Rent Programme’ 9 was launched. Various critics described this as a purely pre-electoral operation because of the following year’s elections since the described tourist invasion had been facilitated in previous years by the same Socialist party in power. Considering that in the centre of Lisbon at the end of 2019, there were more than 19,000 housing units dedicated to short-term tourist rentals and that this programme at the end of 2020 had registered only 249 dwellings (among others still under negotiation) (idem, 2021: 56), it can be confirmed that the values achieved are certainly shallow to achieve the conversion Medina alluded to. Given the intense pressures that all States of the EU had to face given the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the European Council created the ‘Next Generation EU’, a tool to mitigate the economic and social impact of the crisis, helping to ensure long-term sustainable growth and address the challenges of dual climate and digital transition. This instrument contains the ([Recovery and Resilience Plan]; hereafter [RRP]), an investment plan for all Portuguese based on three structuring dimensions: Resilience, Climate Transition, and Digital Transition. 8 A network of housing studies that came into being with the proposal to promote precisely action-research on the topic of housing. The network consists of around 60 people including academics, activists and other members of civil society. 9 Municipal programme to increase the supply of affordable housing. 119 This programme envisaged a EUR 16 billion loan for Portugal “with an implementation period until 2026, which will implement a series of reforms and investments aimed at restoring sustained economic growth after the pandemic, reinforcing the goal of convergence with Europe over the next decade” (AGE, 2022). Housing within the Portuguese RRP has assumed a central role considering that more than 10% of the total investment (around 2 billion euros) will be allocated to it, seeking to respond to the worsening socio-territorial inequalities produced over decades on this issue. The RRP, therefore, also recognises within its text that “it has become clearer that housing conditions are an important factor in social inequality, vulnerability and territorial segregation” (RRP, 2020: 45) and also acknowledges that housing is a fundamental social factor for every human being, without which other fundamental rights may also be put at risk. Indeed, with the pandemic, housing has assumed such a fundamental role in the fight against the global health crisis that it even became a slogan claimed by HRM in Lisbon: ‘How can I quarantine without housing?’. Three programmes directly affect the house within the RRP: 1. Programme to support access to housing (EUR 1251 million, renovation of Social Housing stock). This programme picks up the line of action launched by the 2018 ‘Primeiro Direito’ programme to’ support 26,000 families with decent housing. This figure resumes the analysis made in 2018. Therefore, it does not analyse the new cases that entered the housing emergency after the pandemic (Rede H, 2021). 2. National stock of emergency and temporary accommodation (EUR 186 million). This programme provides housing designed to be temporary to support those in emergency need, such as immigrants, refugees, nomadic families, and victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. 3. Energy efficiency in buildings (EUR 600 million). Programme to combat energy poverty in the residential sector and boost the economy in this sector for private companies. Despite, therefore, the substantial investment in the housing sector, especially when compared with the Italian case, the State-private axis seems to continue to be the preferred modus operandi of the Portuguese government, which does not seem to be seeking new forms of financing that favour the non-profit social and solidarity economy sectors as promoters and executors, to the detriment of the corporate and real estate sectors (Rede H, 2021). Thus, despite the two major crises so close together, the forms of neoliberal governance that have marked the housing and social policies of Europe and Portugal in recent decades, as well as the transformations of the urban fabric and the 120 production of space in the city of Lisbon that are strongly linked to these policies just described, do not seem to have changed, at least at the institutional level. 121 5b) The case of Rome FROM THE 2007/08 CRISIS THROUGH A NEW PRG FOR ROME AND THE BERLUSCONI PIANO CASA (2007 - 2013) The 2007/08 crisis, as discussed in Portugal and even more aggressively in other countries such as Spain and Greece, led to numerous mortgage evictions, as many households could not bear the sharp increase in bank loans. In Italy, the same crisis did not have the same effects, as the mortgage market held up better thanks to the introduction of some debt subsidy measures (Magri & Pico, 2012). However, despite this, there was an increase in bank non-performing loans in the fragile economies of many Italian households. In the years preceding the crisis, the Roman case had specifically seen a substantial increase in GDP, sometimes even bucking the national trend. This occurred mainly thanks to (the ‘Roma Model’, hereafter ‘Modello Roma’). During the period from 1993 to 2008, the centre-left juntas led by Rutelli and Veltroni implemented a transformative process focused on structural change, driven by the knowledge economy and oriented towards sectors such as new technologies, mass tourism, finance, advanced services, audiovisual, culture, and research (De Muro, Monni & Tridico, 2011). This model was applied to tackle the public administration crisis and produced economic growth, at least until the outbreak of the global economic crisis (Tomassi, 2013). Speaking of GDP, it is crucial to understand what was the actual weight of the [Roman Metropolitan Area] ([Area Metropolitana di Roma]; hereafter [AMR]), in the years of the outbreak of the crisis, compared to the national reality, and a study by Sampaolo (2018) helps us in this regard. The GDP of Lazio is comparable to that of Ireland and higher than that of Greece. In contrast, the GDP of the AMR, second in Italy only to that of the Milanese Metropolitan Area, is equivalent to that of the whole of Romania. At the regional level, the AMR is home to 73.7% of the regional population and produces 82% of the regional GDP. This figure indeed represents a strong imbalance at the regional level. However, if applied at the national level, it can be seen that the GDP produced by the AMR is relatively low compared to other European capitals at only around 9% of the national GDP, compared to much higher percentages in other European capitals, e.g. Paris (30%), Vienna (26%), Copenhagen (39%) and London (22%) (Sociali, 2008). In our comparative analysis, it is also worth noting that the GDP produced by the AML in relation to the national GDP is around 37%, i.e., four times higher than that of Rome. This figure will be helpful for future analyses to understand the actual weight that the two capitals have with respect to the legislative attention of national governments. With the arrival of the crisis, therefore, this growth process suffered an abrupt halt, mainly due to the bursting of the real estate bubble that in the early 2000s in Rome had made it impossible for many 128 So, in 2013, in addition to the national policies on the ‘urgent measures to relaunch the economy’ to reduce the public debt, the same time, funds were allocated to the lower middle class that anticipated the policies of the 2014 Piano Casa, such as a fund for defaulting tenants established by Decree-Law 102 of 2013 and the national fund to support access to rented housing of Law 431 of 1998 is refinanced with an endowment of 200 million euro for the years 2014 and 2015. The approach of the 2009 Piano Casa, based on a dual track, the traditional ERP one, moreover increasingly residual, and the ERS one through the integrated system of real estate funds promoted by the Ministry of Economics, is reconfirmed in 2014 by the new Piano Casa of Minister Lupi by the government led by Matteo Renzi in a coalition between centre-left and centre-right and outlined in Decree-Law no. 47 of 28 March 2014. The Piano Casa aims to address the numerous profiles related to housing policies and rental support tools, taking into account the prolonged underfunding of the sector, which has led to a substantial number of vacant dwellings against 650,000 applications nationwide to access ERP. On the one hand, this Piano Casa introduced temporary financial aid for ‘not guilty’ (blameless) tenants and those in private tenancies. On the other hand, it introduced a more advantageous tax regime for landlords in all large cities and major provincial towns, i.e. the so-called (‘cedolare secca’ i.e. ‘flat tax for landlords’) lowered to 10% (Di Feliciantonio & O’Callaghan, 2020: 19). In order to enhance the availability of Social Housing nationwide, the Lupi-Renzi Decree (Art. 10 bis) introduced a provision that authorised the sale or allocation of ERP dwellings to real estate funds, sometimes exempting them from relevant financing regulations (Ibid., 2020). Consequently, even ERP units originally subject to time constraints on sales can now be sold to third parties (Borghetti, 2015). Moreover, the plan emphasised the divestment of Social Housing (Art. 3) by establishing a form of ‘right to buy’ for ERP tenants. Under the new legislation, new tenants of ERP houses are granted the option to purchase their units after a period of seven years (Di Feliciantonio & O’Callaghan, 2020). While the bill acknowledges the challenges associated with housing access, it simultaneously accelerates the privatisation of the ERP stock, presenting a dual discourse on the matter. In short, ERP dwellings within this Piano Casa are considered to be the fruit of an old system of community intervention, and all are thought to be managed from above and burden the institutional administrative sphere. According to Paolo Berdini, the paradox of this system lies in the fact that in Italy, only one in ten of the families on the ranking list for an ERP house actually access it, and many of those who have such a low income that they are by suitable eligible for Council Housing do not even apply for it. With the introduction of ERS, a tremendous ideological change was made, an ideology that has become established in the last two decades in the discourse of Social Housing (Berdini, 2014). So much so that, according to various authors, the financialization of ERS in Italy was only promoted as a tool to 129 stimulate economic growth (by relaunching the real estate and construction industry) rather than to improve the housing system (Borghetti, 2015: 48). An essential aspect of the Lupi Piano Casa is the inclusion of measures aimed at addressing property squatting. Housing policies, therefore, acquire a security dimension as Decree 47 specifies that individuals who unlawfully squat on a property without legal ownership are ineligible to apply for residency or access public services. Article 5 of the 2014 Piano Casa is the main instrument for pursuing the ‘fight against squatting’ without resorting to criminal law enforcement. In fact, the article intervenes on what is expected at administrative levels, as it prohibits by default the legitimacy of registering someone’s residence in a building or public housing unit that has been squatted (Article 5 of Law No. 80 of 23 May 2014). Denying residency means denying the right to vote as well as denying fundamental civil rights such as access to social services (including healthcare and education for children). In addition to making life difficult for those already squatting, this article aims to discourage future squatting since squatters are banned from participating in the procedures for the allocation of ERP housing for five years after the date of ascertainment of squatting. Since its application in 2014, Article 5 has proven to be a very effective way to crack down on a massive number of squatters without having to search for illegal situations one by one, as this is also used as a tool to clear squatting without directly resorting to the police (Caciagli, 2022: 143). By allowing so-called ‘white eviction’, i.e. without the intervention of the police, electricity and water services are disconnected from squatting dwellings, making life impossible for the inhabitants. In 2015, one year following the approval of the most recent Piano Casa, the Department of Projects and Development of the CdR, identified housing as the most pressing economic and social challenge for present and future urban governance. During the same year, over 40,000 households were officially recognised as being in a state of a housing emergency, constituting 66% of the overall housing demand (Department of Development Projects and European Funding, 2015). The prevalence of eviction procedures provides further insight. In 2014, a total of 8,264 households underwent eviction, equivalent to one eviction for every 240 households, compared to a national average of 1 eviction for every 334 households (Grazioli & Caciagli, 2018: 53). Although house prices did not change much in Italy and Rome during those years, indeed, there was a slight fall in prices. The increase in poverty and inequality meant many families could no longer guarantee credit or rent payments (Tulumello & Caruso, 2021). This indicates how the policy instruments applied to combat the economic crisis in those years still proved ineffective for many Italian households. In addition to poor economic support legislation for these households, there has also been a change at the theoretical level. As discussed in the two Piano Casa of recent years, the concept of ‘Council Housing’ has been replaced by the concept of Social Housing (Berdini, 2014). This 130 conceptual change finds an immediate application in abandoning a system based on the construction and recovery of public housing and in the assumption of a model based on supporting the entry of families into the free market through ERS (Caciagli, 2022: 100). Between 2015 and 2018, new special regional funds were introduced to support housing expenses aimed explicitly at indebted households. In particular, a fund for temporarily suspending rent payments and evictions was introduced (Laws No 124/2013 and 80/2014) and a dedicated fund to support families undergoing eviction for default (Laws No 102/2013). Regarding public property management, Rome manages only a part of the public housing on its territory (the Region manages many), about 80,000 flats and may have about 1,500 available for new tenants every year (Mudu, 2014a: 103). Moreover, according to the 2008 PRG, the CdR cannot build new public housing directly. It must rely on a private initiative by identifying new areas for subsidised housing (Area Plans 167) or purchasing existing properties. Therefore, the Region must provide the economic resources, which have meagre resources, especially for constructing new ERP houses. In order to have a national overview to understand the reduction of Social Housing in Italy, the ERP housing stock has reduced from 1 million homes in 1991 to 900,000 in 2001, then becoming about 800,000 in 2007 (Cittalia, 2010) and just over 740,000 in 2015, this reduction is mainly due to the processes as mentioned earlier of selling off the stock and securitisation. These operations are ultimately enabled by deliberately weak public intervention, opaque policymaking and unclear deliberative processes, which reproduce systemic corruption as an integral part of the urban regime alongside legal practices and actors (Chiodelli & Gentili, 2021). This pattern was partly highlighted by the Mafia Capitale 13 trial, which concerned widespread corruption in subcontracting essential municipal facilities, including welfare services and Social Housing (Berdini & Nalbone, 2011). The Mafia Capitale investigation and subsequent anti-corruption measures have revealed the pervasiveness of service outsourcing schemes (Coppola & Punziano, 2018). In other words, while the crisis in urban services exposes the administration's incapacity, corruption highlights the involvement of certain private actors in fostering this incapacity, as well as that of intermediary actors who support the broader outsourcing of services. In the last few years analysed in this text, Rome’s growth has been concentrated more on sectors such as tourism and public services with little propulsive capacity. Tourism in Rome, as discussed, had already exploded thanks to the internationalisation of the city after significant events such as the Jubilee of 2000 (see Chapter 4), thus before the Portuguese case. In such administrative confusion 13 Also called Operation Mondo di Mezzo, is a journalistic term used to define the collusion between public administration officials and various companies and firms linked to large Roman builders such as Massimo Carminati and Salvatore Buzzi. 131 linked to the various scandals that emerged, the only sector that seemed to be holding its own in those years, and indeed growing, was tourism. According to the ‘Osservatorio Ente Bilaterale Turismo del Lazio’, in 2015, there were 17 million arrivals and over 40 million presences at the provincial level, almost 60% related to foreigners. Since 2005, arrivals have grown by almost 68% and presences by 56%. It is mainly the international component that has grown, with an increase of 76% in arrivals and 65% in presences (Osservatorio EBTL, 2016). However, the phenomenon has also seen a radical change in the figures offering accommodation and beds in particular, with the advent of new tools such as Airbnb, with over 24,000 listings in Rome alone and mainly in the city's central areas. Thus, Rome’s tourism boom is also fuelled by the thousands of beds offered to tourists that do not appear as traditional economic activities (Sampaolo, 2018). Officially, there are about 167,000 beds in Rome’s accommodation establishments, of which slightly less than two-thirds (61.5%) are those of the hotel offer, while the remaining 38.5% concern non-hotel structures such as bed & breakfasts and holiday homes (Censis, 2016). Since 2000, the year of the Jubilee, the official offer has thus increased by 67%, with a 41% increase in hotel beds and a real boom (+164%) in non-hotel structures (Ibid., 2016). This undoubtedly represents a great source of income for hundreds of Roman families who have given value to their real estate assets. However, according to some authors, it also represents an evolution, realised thanks to the new digital tools, of the mere logic of rent that has sustained the city's economy and from which it seems complicated to break away in order to propose new models, at least at the institutional level, of both social and economic growth. Moreover, an economy based on rents represents the main factor of the strong economic and social inequalities present in the city of Rome (Pizzo, 2023) since if an economy favours the accumulation of (private) wealth while producing little (collective) value, it is not surprising that those who are rich become even richer, as the opposite is also true. In 2016, new municipal elections saw the election of Mayor Virginia Raggi, who saw a new party ([Movimento 5 stelle]; hereafter [M5S]) in power in Rome for the first time. This new administration could have raised hopes for a more productive dialogue approach between the public administration and the various organisations and collectives involved in the housing issue. However, according to various collectives interviewed, this relationship has become tense and unproductive, demonstrating two different visions of what is meant by the development of the city and the role of housing in urban space (Interviews R3, R4, R13). “Absurdly, I must admit that with the right-wing, not to say the fascist, government of Alemanno, who is somehow used to dealing with social issues, at least we could talk, we could confront each other. Whereas with the M5S we faced a wall. We could not talk because we could not find a common starting point” (Interview R3). 132 This is also evident from the fact that although housing was one of the main points of the electoral campaign (Raggi, 2016), housing policies have continued to play a marginal role in the set of government actions. Even the delegation of the Housing Councillor in the CdR was only assigned many months after the election, leaving a vacuum in the institutional reference on the housing issue for a long time (Caciagli, 2018). In recent years, the issue of precarious housing experienced in the city of Rome seems to be back in the spotlight, mainly thanks to August 2017, where on 10 August, the Rome Police Headquarters proceeded to the eviction of the building in Via Quintavalle (former headquarters of the INPS offices) squatted since 2013 by over 100 Italian and foreign families organised by CCLC in the Cinecittà District. On 24 August, the other hand, the building was evicted in Via Curtatone, located near the central Piazza Indipendenza, with most Eritrean families (Caciagli, 2018). This eviction attracted a lot of media attention due to the centrality of squatting and the clashes between police and squatters that took place in Piazza Indipendenza. The CdR immediately failed in both situations to respond to the eviction situations generated, as these families had been evicted without an alternative solution. Only in November, and thanks to strong media pressure on the case, did Mayor Raggi provide a procedure for temporary housing located in the suburbs with very high costs (RomaToday, 2017), demonstrating how even this city council has continued to treat the housing issue as a public order problem instead of a central issue of social policies. Even at the national level, following the wave of a neoliberal economy and the two previous Piano Casa, policies seem to have stopped investing in ERP programmes, only elaborating tools to help families enter the market and thus not tackling the main crux of the problem. While at the local level, housing policies, also due to an absence of funds from above (Puccini, 2016), have increasingly played a marginal role, responding only sporadically to emergencies that, for some reason, had been mediatised more than they should have been, as seen in the case of summer 2017. For some time in Rome, therefore, the housing crisis has been experienced as an emergency even though the data show the structural nature of the problem in the economic, social and territorial system (D’Aniello, 2021). With the impoverishment of the middle class in recent years, together with the difficulties in accessing credit for housing and the precariousness of employment, the number of those who can no longer access housing has expanded (Puccini, 2016), strongly intertwining the housing issue with the social issue, despite this, however, the issue does not seem to be part of the institutional priorities, falling within those issues that the Roman administration has long classified as ‘emergency regimes’ such as: ‘Roma emergency’, ‘housing emergency’, ‘waste emergency’, ‘migrant emergency’, or even ‘pothole emergency’, ‘fallen trees emergency’ and ‘wild boar emergency’ (Coppola & Punziano, 2018). 133 Thus, the post-crisis housing policies of 2007/08 seem to have accentuated the social and economic division of the city, creating a strong divide between a Rome that is advancing in development and a Rome that remains anchored to the crisis, between the Rome that is highly developed in terms of tourism and tertiary activities and the Rome that, conversely, is characterised by a concentration of profiles indicating conditions of subalternity and marginality (Coppola & Punziano, 2018). Since the beginning of the crisis, the [Association of Building Constructors of Rome and Province] ([Associazione Nazionale dei Costruttori Edili]; hereafter [ACER]) estimated that 57,000 families were living in inadequate or segregated housing in Rome, with 37,500 vacant or unsold homes. The everincreasing number of tenant evictions and foreclosures exacerbated these figures. 73% of the 6,113 eviction injunctions issued in Rome in 2018 involved economically non-compliant tenants, and an additional 7,778 eviction requests were filed by individual landlords, real estate companies, or banks that foreclosed on properties (Grazioli, 2021: 65). On the other hand, there has been an increase in applications for ERP and/or ‘emergency housing’ facilities. Although the number of ERP applications will exceed 13,500 in 2020, only a few flats will be allocated annually from 2017 to 2020 (57 in 2018 and 300 in 2019) due to poor maintenance or a lack of staff to process applications quickly (ibid., 2021: 66). In the case of evictees and squatters, the system is structured around temporary housing assistance centres run by private companies contracted by the CdR. Finally, approximately 16,000 homeless persons are institutionalised within the shelter network (Grazioli, 2019). In this context it is unsurprising that many people with housing needs have chosen to squat in ERP flats or, even more frequently, private homes. At the end of 2019, two events occurred that are worth analysing to understand better the case study of Porto Fluviale in this thesis (see Chapter 7). The first is the case of the unused funds of the [Workers’ Housing Management] ([GEStione CAse per i Lavoratori]; hereafter [GESCAL]) for the purpose of building new ERPs, which 20 years after the quantification and allocation of resources to the regions in the implementation of Legislative Decree 112/1998 were still unused at a national level, of which approximately 207 million euro were unspent by the Lazio region despite the already narrated housing crisis experienced in Rome. Later on, thanks to the law of 27 December 2019 (GU Serie Generale n.304), with an initial endowment of 853 million euros (of which a part of the ex-GESCAL funds are still unused and available in the Ministry) and with a somewhat different approach from that of the previous redevelopment programmes, the [Innovative Programme for the Quality of Inhabiting] ([Programma Innovativo Nazionale per la Qualità dell’Abitare]; hereafter [PINQuA]) is activated, which I will analyse in more detail in the following chapters (see Chapter 7), aimed at intensifying the peripheral areas by increasing 134 ERP and support services. The objective is, therefore, to improve without consuming new land accessibility safety, social cohesion and housing quality with a view to environmental sustainability in coherence with the most recent EU guidelines on sustainable infrastructures. The call for proposals provides for two types of proposals; the first can be financed up to the amount of EUR 15 million, and the second is called High-Performance Pilot Projects and offers the possibility of accessing up to EUR 100 million in funding. In July 2021, the commission concluded its work. It relied on the 2.8 billion received, subsequently assimilated into the RRP fund, declaring 271 out of 290 proposals eligible, or 92%, of which only three were in Rome, which I will analyse in the following chapters (see Chapter 7). FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE PANDEMIC TO THE NATIONAL RECOVERY AND RESILIENCE PLAN (2020 - 2023) Italy was the first country in the European community to be affected by the coronavirus when, on 30 January 2020, two tourists from China tested positive for Covid-19. The institutional response was immediate, so much so that on 1 February 2020, through a resolution of the Council of Ministers, a state of national emergency was declared (OJ General Series no. 26 of 01-02-2020), thus one and a half months before Portugal. The city of Rome, in particular, being a city with an economy based on rent as analysed above, has suffered particularly badly from the effects of the pandemic to the extent of severely affecting certain sectors that characterise its economy, such as tourism, the cultural and entertainment services industry, commerce, catering and real estate (Roma Ricerca Roma, 2021), in addition to the indirect effects generated by it such as the contraction of consumption, unemployment, increased inequality and the destruction of human capital. These effects produced by the State of emergency thus caused further economic precariousness for many families, adding to the wave of the great financial recession of 2007-08, which, as discussed in the Italian case compared to the Portuguese one, seemed not yet to have fully recovered from the previous crisis. The unleashed international motto of ‘stay at home’ was impractical for many people or would have been even more so in the following months through the prospect of eviction or foreclosure due to the precarious employment situation experienced by many Italian families. The pandemic, therefore, confirmed those prepandemic structural weaknesses in social policies with respect to those households and persons in a situation of severe marginality (Natili et al., 2020). These shortcomings were also clearly highlighted concerning housing policies, so much so as to push “the government and the regions to launch emergency initiatives aimed at temporarily addressing the economic difficulties of poor tenants” (Ibid., 2020: 35), thus avoiding the risk of evictions. I will analyse 135 here some of the main features of the ‘emergency’ measures introduced in 2020 in this area reported in the same study by (Natili et al., 2020): - Moratorium on evictions the ‘Decreto Cura Italia’ suspended the enforcement of eviction orders for both residential and non-residential buildings initially from 17 March to 30 June 2020. The term of the suspension was then postponed, by subsequent legislative interventions, to 30 June 2021. - Solidarity Fund for mortgages for the purchase of the first home. The ‘Decreto Cura Italia’ increased the funds and extended the interventions of the ʹNational Solidarity Fundʹ (Ibid., 2020), introduced by Law 244 of 24 December 2007. - National Fund for supporting access to rented housing. Law No. 77, enacted on 17 July 2020, increased the resources of the National Fund for Supporting Access to Rented Housing (Laws No. 431/1998, 124/2013 and 80/2014), thus enabling local authorities to grant subsidies to low-income households to lower the incidence of rent on household income. - In August 2020, the Constitutional Court, which had already expressed its opinion on the right to housing many times, although the right to housing is not included in any article of the Italian Constitution, being however enunciated among the requirements characterising sociality in which the democratic State desired by the Constitution is realised (D’Aniello, 2021), the Court states: “At the national level, housing needs, the subject of housing policies, are not endowed with express constitutional protection on a par with other rights such as the right to health (art. 32) or the right to work (art. 35), although constitutional jurisprudence has recognised their value as a social right pertaining to the dignity and life of every person. Like the other social rights, the right to housing is also, however, ‘conditioned’ financially and has not obtained, as happened instead for the right to health, a parameterisation in terms of essential levels of services to be guaranteed throughout the national territory” (Resolution No 9/2020/G of 3 August 2020). - At the end of the year, through Law No. 176 of 18 December 2020, a non-repayable subsidy is introduced for owners of residential property units who decide to reduce the rent for contracts in force on 29 October 2020, to address the economic difficulties of tenants and, consequently, reducing the risk of evictions. As seen, apart from the moratorium on evictions, all the other policies adopted were a mere increase in the funds of policies already used in the past, i.e. the government considered that the most strategic tools for combating housing hardship were once again rent subsidies, and did not once again produce proposals for new public housing through a strategic plan to definitively give an answer to the thousands of families on the Social Housing list. 136 2020 ends with a new extension of evictions, to which Confiedilizia 14 responds that the measure is ‘bringing millions of families to their knees’, receiving a significant quantity of criticism from the HRM in Rome, which in return mentions the thousands of families in difficulty at a time of housing emergency to whom the rent bonus has not yet arrived, which in Rome, for example, in January had only been granted to 30% of the 50,000 requests (Portelli, 2022). In February 2021, the Draghi government voted to maintain the eviction freeze until June, while dozens of evictions were carried out in major Italian cities in squatting cases, for which the freeze was not guaranteed. The year 2021 is the year of the National RRP, i.e. the document that the Italian government has prepared to illustrate how it intends to manage the Next Generation Eu funds envisaged for all EU member States. Unlike the Portuguese one, the Italian plan does not foresee a massive allocation of funds for public housing. There are fewer funds for public buildings than in other European countries, and they are even reduced compared to the previous Conte government’s draft (D’Aniello, 2021). 7.3 billion out of a total of more than 220 billion are dedicated to urban regeneration and the strengthening of so-called Social Housing. Of these, only 500 million (0.5%) are reserved for increasing the availability of public ERP housing in the strict sense. The RRP seems to have regenerated above all the financialreal estate complex (Portelli, 2022). The PINQuA project, previously financed through unused GESCAL funds, is also incorporated into the RRP. As discussed, the city of Rome has only obtained three projects’ thanks, among other things, to the intervention of Roma Tre. The projects are as follows: - The demolition and reconstruction of the former Don Calabria school in Via Cardinal Capranica, Primavalle, where 70 new ERP dwellings will be built. - The redevelopment of the central part of the R5 subdivision in Tor Bella Monaca, in Via dell’Archeologia, where 436 existing ERP cores will be redeveloped, and the area allocated to services will be more than doubled. - The project of the Former Commissariat Warehouses in Via del Porto Fluviale, Ostiense, is the case study of this thesis (see Chapter 7), to which 11 million euros are dedicated. In the PINQuA projects, therefore, the reference to ERP returns, which, although it represents a drop in the ocean, proposes innovative projects, but always in conjunction with Social Housing, without any further indication of these two very different forms of housing conception, production and distribution (Festa & Celata, 2022). RRP interventions on inclusion and cohesion will also be able to draw on the third sector's contribution. However, as far as regeneration and housing are concerned, this option is only explicitly 14 Confederazione italiana proprietà edilizia (Italian Confederation of Building Owners), is the organisation of the owners' associations operating in all Italian provinces at the service of owners and condominiums. 137 foreseen for Integrated Plans (Ibid., 2022). The tool is 'co-design', the purpose of which is a more penetrating reading of hardships and needs to meet new marginalities and provide more innovative services in a mutual exchange of skills and experiences. While the discourse on the city and urban policies, therefore, continues to chase after private and market logics, local public action (municipalities and regions) seems instead to increasingly seek inspiration in that archive of knowledge and multiform practices of producing alternative spaces that are now widespread practices in the city of Rome, most often informal and/or defined as illegal, in order to develop innovative co-design effectively. In the summer of 2021, Rome’s new prefect Matteo Piantedosi (currently Italy’s interior minister in Giorgia Meloni’s extreme right-wing government), announced an acceleration of evictions because ‘private property is sacred’, and indeed in July, they started up again while the Constitutional Court declares the eviction freeze just ended legitimate without the administrations offering anything to those thrown out onto the streets, even causing them to lose the few subsidies available (Portelli, 2022). Rome in those months is during an election campaign to elect a new city council, and the issue of housing poverty and evictions is not even mentioned despite the fact that executions started again on 1 July. In October, the new mayor Roberto Gualtieri of the centre-left coalition was elected. It is clear from this chapter that even before the emergence of the Covid-19 crisis, housing deprivation was widespread in Rome. During the first months of the pandemic, the problem was only buffered by the suspension of evictions (Chiaro, 2020), later extended until 31 December 2021. However, structural measures still needed to be taken, even though experts had stressed the need to invest more resources in Piano Casa to overcome the limited availability of public housing (Natili et al., 2020: 35). One of the main factors that have generated this situation is since housing policies, as discussed, are no longer the exclusive competence of the State. This has reduced the rights linked to citizenship, which have progressively shifted from an expression of status to a form of contract between the State and citizens (Sampaolo, 2018). In so doing, the public actor’s capacity for economic and social redistribution has been considerably reduced, where citizens have to take it upon themselves individually by activating themselves on the market to meet their rights, which are inevitably increasingly being relegated to needs. Therefore, citizens' status loses more and more value in a context where the right to housing and the right to the city is not guaranteed by a public actor but left in the hands of market speculation even during the succession of various economic crises in less than 20 years. 240 façade, where a large speculators’ ship with big yellow cranes ready for action seems to be heading straight for the conquest of the neighbourhood. Still, present and fierce small boats of pirates on the assault, representing the MRH, surround it, trying to prepare a blow, preventing the speculators’ advance. THE INTERNAL ORGANISATION OF PORTO FLUVIALE SQUAT AND THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NEIGHBOURHOOD From the squat practised by CCLC to the first spatial and political organisation of Porto Fluviale Among the various self-managed squats in District VIII, I will analyse the specific case of Porto Fluviale, which is located right in the centre of the dense residential fabric of Ostiense in a street perpendicular to the main axis of Via Ostiense, which makes it easily accessible to all and particularly exposed as it is in a bustling area. What used to be the former barracks of the Air Force, abandoned for years, was squatted in June 2003, a squat carried out by CCLC with the active collaboration of the LOA Acrobax, born shortly before. “After the first six months of LOA Acrobax, we contributed to squat the former barracks of Porto Fluviale; this experience was the first confrontation in this neighbourhood with a large mass of people, mainly migrants, who took back an entire building and went to live there” (Interview R4). In fact, this building was squatted by 160 families in a great housing emergency, mostly migrants and precarious workers who immediately began a process of cleaning and reusing the building. Porto Fluviale, according to the militants, was squatted with a clear objective. “These are places in the city that would be subject to speculation, and we took them away from what they are and the interests of speculators. Moreover, we said: here there is a military property that is abandoned; in Rome, there are barracks, entire buildings where ten soldiers live; they do not want to give up the property; that area then attracted enormous speculative interests given the new centrality acquired by the neighbourhood” (interview R3). The various squatters interviewed told me that in the first months, they lived in tents, and only the ground floor and the sewerage system were cleaned; there was still no stability due to the solid pressure for evacuation that would allow the inhabitants to invest in work and time on the building. When it was squatted, the building had almost nothing that could be salvaged, so the only chance for people to stay inside was to transform this space radically. So it was only in the second phase, after a year of squatting, that work began on the upper floors. The bathrooms were stretched communally at least until 2007, when the squatters managed to obtain residency and recognition as a state of 241 emergency housing. Following this recognition, they began to invest resources in building their own homes by constructing several housing units with independent toilets and often a mezzanine floor to increase their floor space (Interviews R1, R5, R6, R7). This first phase was tough for the squatters, many of whom exited the squat either by personal choice, as they could not cope with so much housing precarity and the possibility of violent eviction, others by a selection of the movement such example, for violence or drug dealing “when I entered in 2008 after having been registered on the list and done several preliminary assemblies, there were many empty spaces to be filled. Moreover, I entered together with a large group of people with a clear objective, since the space, despite being squatted for four years, was still in a state of abandonment, a simple dormitory” (Interview R6). Once the squatters met in a less precarious situation of stability, CCLC began to think about creating a collective of Porto Fluviale that could become a fortress of the movement and the right to housing in Rome. All decisions regarding both Porto Fluviale squat and the organisation of CCLC take place through a horizontal assembly process to create internal ‘horizontal democracy’ through vertical forms of organisation (Armati, 2015). This objective provides the basis for making an infrastructure that allows them to guide and coordinate the collective. Many times, it happens that new squatters are at their first political experience of this kind and, therefore, may not be able to sustain, due to lack of political experience, the large number of weekly assemblies that are organised within CCLC network. CCLC decision-making process is therefore divided into five main types of assemblies: Squat Assembly (where squat-specific problems are discussed); Territorial Assembly (to plan concerted territorial activities); Inter-Committee Assembly (where specific problems of internal coexistence that are not dealt with in the squat assembly are discussed); CCLC Assembly (represents the core political organisation of CCLC through complex political analyses and the organisation of actions); MRH Assembly (where different members of each collective meet and the political struggles shared by the different organisations are discussed and proposed) (Interview R1). In addition to the purely organisational aspect of events or resolving practical issues, all these assemblies aim to familiarise new people who have approached the MRH with the struggle. The assembly is the space in which the foundations of a social movement are formed (Caciagli, 2022). This is also because, in all movement structures, there are three main rules, which are: i) The prohibition of discrimination; ii) The prohibition of oppression and violence; iii) The active participation of squatters in movement activities (Davoli, 2018: 9). Thus, especially with regard to this last principle, political formation by squatters is a key point in keeping the MRH alive. This is also because the movement does not want to become a social shock absorber, something that should be up to the state, therefore, to simply give a home to those who do not have one, but the goal is to have within the MRH 242 conscious people who are able to mobilise for their rights as enunciated by one of the slogans used many times by the MRH (‘La lotta non si delega’, i.e. ‘The struggle is not delegated’). Production of autonomous and public space from below and the relationship with the neighbourhood The initial number of households in these almost 20 years of squatting has decreased, and currently, about 55 families or about 150 people of 13 different nationalities live in the building, with a large majority of children born and raised in the building. Despite the conditions of illegality and social conflict, over the years, Porto Fluviale has taken on the connotations of an exemplary experience of an intercultural condominium, capable of dealing with differences of responding to the housing emergency with the self-construction of domestic spaces for private use (Careri, 2023), and above all with the opening up of services and public spaces to the city. Over time, therefore, increasing stability within the building allowed the squatters to experiment, in addition to new forms of intercultural coexistence, new practices to open up to the neighbourhood where they lived thanks to projects of laboratory activities of artistic, architectural and civic experimentation (Ibid., 2021). These experiences also arose from the need to defend the space that “until 2008 was closed in on itself, showing itself only as a housing squat that clearly participated within the micro-economy of the neighbourhood (doing the food shopping, for example)” (Interview R7), but was no longer sufficient, also in view of the transformations that the neighbourhood was undergoing as discussed in the previous paragraph. “In 2011, we started to think about how we could share this experience with the city and the neighbourhood, and Porto Fluviale collective came up with the idea of hosting a two-day festival called the ‘skill share’” (Interview R5), this experience stemmed from the collective’s perception of bringing together the different skills (certified and not) that the squatters had demonstrated over the years of living together, thus an internal call first and foremost, which then translated into a call for the neighbourhood community when Porto Fluviale opened its doors to the city in this two-day festival for the first time. Based on the success of this event, it was decided to create a new space within squatting, namely the (‘Sala da tè’, i.e. ‘Tea Room’). The first configuration of social strategies to make Porto Fluviale a space for social and political elaboration consisted in the organisation of workshops and courses (Caciagli, 2022). This aspect has made this squat similar to a CSOA and of all the spaces managed by CCLC, Porto Fluviale is undoubtedly the most frequented, even by citizens who are not close to the MRH, thus opening up the possibility of active participation within a space even to those who do not feel part of the movement and thus to an interchange of experiences that has fostered mutual 243 acquaintance of these neighbours who until then were separated by preconceived social constructions. Sala da tè is a space therefore that was created inside the squatting designed to be a cultural place and a bar self-managed by activists and squatters living in Porto Fluviale, as well as former squatters who have now obtained a home. “Sala da tè was a process very much linked to the women of Porto Fluviale it represented a tool through which to attract young comrades and comrades and tie them to the movement and managed to create a nice group of people who are now very active in the MRH” (Interview R1). Many activities are organised here: social events, open discussions and film screenings. All these elements are brought together in an attempt to provide a space where different forms of counter-power find a channel for expression. This space, however, as well as the entire squat, is part of a neighbourhood that is increasingly oriented towards consumption, and this often leads tourists or non regular visitors to Ostiense to think that they are entering another of the cool places of the District (Caciagli, 2022). This has led the squatters to try to make it clear through the use of slogans inside the space and constant communication with the users that the place is part of the ‘Squat House of Porto Fluviale’ logo always present in all the posters publicising events, workshops or courses that take place inside the Sala da tè. In addition to the Sala da tè, the ground floor of Porto Fluviale now houses a cycle workshop, a circus workshop, children’s workshops, and craft activities such as goldsmithing, leather goods and tailoring workshops. The courtyard also hosts events such as intercultural lunches, circus cabarets and film screenings open to the neighbourhood (Interview R6). So, while the housing condition of the families remains precarious and unstable, the new forms of coexistence expressed, as well as the organisation of social events for the neighbourhood, have grown over time, so much so that neighbours have become interested in frequently passing through this space. In 2013, to celebrate ten years of squatting and solve the problem of the grey and unfriendly façade, the idea of painting the façade of Porto Fluviale was initiated. And it was on that occasion that the well-known street artist BLU, who has always been close to the movement, decided to paint the enormous façade of Porto Fluviale on both sides exposed towards the street, the windows at that point transformed under the artist’s brush into enormous eyes directed towards the city and the neighbourhood. “Before painting, we discussed a lot in the assembly, and this is our own project without any help from institutions, which started from the bottom. This mural contains many colourful faces and symbolises two things: on the one hand, it represents the multicultural and multiethnic composition of the squatters living in Porto Fluviale and, on the other hand, it wants to give art back to the 244 neighbourhood for free and thus act as a link between the squatters and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood” (Interview R5). This opening up of the space towards the outside also meant having to restructure the physical composition of the space. One of the first painful choices (as it generated heated debates in the assembly over who was in favour and who was not) was to stop using the spacious inner courtyard of Porto Fluviale as a car park, transforming it first of all into a large shared indoor space for squatters and at the same time as a place where various Sala da tè activities could be carried out, thus a space available for the city community. “When we opened the door of Porto Fluviale, we realised that it was not very inviting and welcoming with that big grey façade, so much so that there were various legends in the neighbourhood about what was in here; therefore, we decided to open Sala da tè with the small door directly onto the street to allow people to get to know this space better” (Interview R6). First, those people close to the movement's network responded to this new opening to get to know the new space that had been opened. They then gradually began to see people from the neighbourhood who had never been inside Porto Fluviale or a squat. Thanks to the sharing of knowledge, the idea was born to create numerous workshops and laboratories open to all, such as “crochet classes, cooking classes, learning to make Arab bread, learning the goldsmith’s trade, or learning to repair bicycles, or coming to train or become a circus performer” (Interview R7). All these series of activities born within this squat have created new forms of sociability that were strongly felt to be lacking in a neighbourhood Ostiense, where there is a great lack of social gathering spaces, as it was conceived solely as an industrial district. This experience also allowed the squatters of Porto Fluviale to make themselves known to the neighbourhood inhabitants who nourished them, especially in the early years, not a few preconceptions. “Indeed, this place lends itself perfectly on a spatial level where we can imagine the neighbourhood square. The fact that it becomes a welcoming place for the community makes our concept of re-appropriation even more vindicated and reinforced. That is, we give a roof over the heads of those who practised squatting, but thanks to their new experience of living, today, this place is offered once again to the neighbourhood and to other people who do not know the movement and who may have preconceptions towards those who practise squatting and above all towards those who fight for living in this city, thus giving back a space not only to those who squat but to the whole community” (Interview R5). Porto Fluviale, therefore, has become a place that anyone can pass through without necessarily having to consume anything, as is the case with neighbouring venues that respond to the rules of commerce and capital. This point was mentioned several times during the interviews with Porto’s inhabitants to clarify that what is offered within this space is also different, as the goals are different. “Porto Fluviale is part of a project of conscious living, and we always try to communicate to those who 245 cross this space what we are, so we don’t just offer a service through our workshops, but we also do a lot of communication, and for us, this is a very strong political act” (Interview R1). To squat in a disused building is already a protest in itself, highlighting the jarring presence of empty buildings next to homeless people, but in the case of Porto Fluviale, they have not stopped at this and have therefore reconverted an abandoned place into an active model of citizenship. It is interesting to note how the initial decision to squat in this space did not initially foresee this social function, which demonstrates the capacity for political and social analysis that is the result of the constant assemblies that take place in these spaces, which had both CCLC militants and Porto inhabitants to reset the political function of this space in relation to the context that surrounded it. Porto Fluviale is now in the centre of a very busy neighbourhood, something that happened in the years following the squatting, thus putting Porto Fluviale in a delicate situation of high visibility and, therefore, fragility with respect to possible eviction. In the specific case of Porto Fluviale, the active participation of the squatters did not only occur through assembly processes but also, as discussed above, through the opening of the space to the outside world, which entailed the organisation of many public activities and events that do not normally take place in a purely residential squat. These activities have therefore exposed squatters to many new stimuli for political participation, even in playful activities. In this specific squat managed by CCLC, therefore, the inhabitants are constantly exposed to the participation of activities also thanks to the conformation of the internal communal space that often hosts meetings or artistic/cultural cycles with a politicised verve such as film sessions or art exhibitions, therefore even people less engaged in political issues can cultivate political involvement because they are directly in touch with the social and political struggle of CCLC (Caciagli, 2022). In addition to political participation, this squatting also indirectly stimulates cultural integration with other lifestyles as it is extremely multicultural squatting; this exchange takes place both in assembly moments but also in common everyday practices, such as seeing families of different nationalities and religions cooking together in the communal kitchen of the Sala da tè and then having lunch together, “In the squatting, everyone comes with their own baggage and, beyond the material baggage, they also bring their own cultural baggage” (Interview R6). The strength of this space lies in the fact that from the cruelty of the gentrification processes, the militants and squatters were the main reasons why the inhabitants of Porto FLuviale decided to make this building a space to develop the social and political life of the neighbourhood, precisely in that neighbourhood where there is a strong lack of public squares and spaces. “For us, this process also represents protection because we realised that if we manage to have good relations with our neighbours and put down deeper roots in the area, it will be more difficult for the institutions to start an eviction process” (Interview R5). Moreover, being Porto Fluviale in the heart of this speculation 246 process offers an opportunity for CCLC to enter into the heart of the neoliberal model and hinder it through the proposal of alternative forms of sociality. Porto Fluviale, therefore, exemplifies how insurrectional urban regeneration (De Carli & Frediani, 2016) can be a multiplier of urban worlds and a barrier against the voracity of the urban real estate regime. In this sense, the struggle for Porto Fluviale’s right to remain in the city against the threat of eviction has, according to a study by Margherita Grazioli (2021), a triple significance: - The defence of the city’s public and social spaces. - The reconceptualization of urban regeneration and housing policies in the direction of economic, environmental and social sustainability. - The redefinition of the city’s geographies and resources on the basis of their use value rather than their nominal exchange value, thus freeing the debate on urban spaces from the trap of their ownership, enfranchisement and management (Grazioli, 2021). PORTO FLUVIALE AND THE PARTICIPATION IN THE CALL FOR PROPOSALS OF THE PROGRAMME FOR QUALITY LIVING (PINQuA) Participation in the PINQuA call through the interaction of different actors Porto Fluviale squat was one of the housing squats slated for a self-recovery project, according to what was regional resolution no. 110 of 2016, but as noted above (see Chapters 5 and 6,) this resolution had problems being implemented. With the arrival of the pandemic, new projects were launched with the aim of rebuilding Europe through the ‘Plan for the Recovery of Europe’, an EUR 1.8 trillion stimulus package designed as an opportunity to ‘emerge stronger from the pandemic’. Included in the package is the ‘NextGenerationEU’ plan, a EUR 750 billion plan of loans and grants to member States. The first beneficiary country was Italy, which was allocated EUR 191.5 billion. NextGenerationUE came at the end of a five-year period in which a series of attempts were made to implement national urban regeneration policies. Among them, the aforementioned PINQuA programme was launched in 2020 by [Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility] ([Ministro delle Infrastrutture e dei Trasporti]; hereafter [MIT]) Paola de Micheli. PINQuA, as stated on the page of the MIT, aims to build new public housing, reducing housing difficulties, redeveloping degraded areas and focusing on sustainability and green innovation (MIT, 2022). It is a new management of Social Housing, exploiting inclusive models and tools to ensure social welfare and urban decency. 247 With the decree signed by MIT Minister Enrico Giovannini on 7 October 2021, EUR 2.8 billion from the RRP and about EUR 20 million from 2019 and 2020 residues are allocated to implement PINQuA. The projects that will benefit from the funding were selected by the High Commission for the implementation of the programme, taking into account, for the first time explicitly, the Next Generation EU principle of ‘not causing significant damage to the environment’ (MIT, 2022) and on the basis of social, cultural, economic, financial and technological impact indicators. Porto Fluviale squat, thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between institutions and MRH, decided to participate in this call for bids through a multi-headed project. The time to participate in this call for bids was very tight, and in order to be able to submit Porto Fluviale project in time, a group of students and architects worked intensively to renew an existing project on Porto Fluviale developed within an architecture course at Roma Tre to adapt it to the requirements of the call for bids. In addition, the various Porto Fluviale workshops had to be transformed into associations in order to fall within the specifications of the call and thus have these bottom-up experiences recognised and included in the final project (Careri, 2023). Of all the projects presented at PINQuA, that of Porto Fluviale is the only experience of a squat and this meant that in addition to all the inhabitants it was also necessary to get the activists who are part of CCLC to agree by starting an intense negotiation, thus activating a close collaboration between actors who normally only interact through conflict, i.e. bringing together activists and institutions. “There was a great willingness on the part of the squatters to tread that path that we had already been proposing for over ten years” (Interview R9). It must be said, however, that it was not the MRH that decided which projects to send to the call for tenders and that if this project could be developed today, it is because the CdR decided which projects to submit and the MRH was only consulted when it was decided that Porto Fluviale could fall within the specifications of the call. The idea of submitting a project for Porto Fluviale to this call came to the then Councillor for urban planning of Rome, Luca Montuori: “My first idea was to turn this squat into a cooperative and then restore the building through the call for bids, but after several clandestine meetings with Professor Careri (Roma Tre), then with the Ministry of Defence (owner of the building) and then with the Lazio region (because the call for bids had to be approved by the region), and finally with the mayor (I must say I didn’t expect her to listen to me), in short, in the end when the call for bids came out I managed to get everyone to agree. So, I had a letter from the Minister of Defence, who was in agreement, a letter from the [Ministry of Cultural Activities and Tourism] ([Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo]; hereafter [MIBACT]) in agreement, and the word of the mayor. At that point, and only at that point, did Professor Careri present himself to the squatters he already knew, proposing a path of co-design” (Interview R9). 248 This interview excerpt shows all the actors who were involved in the participation process of this call; the CdR had intended to propose mixed housing units, i.e. ‘Council Housing’ and ‘Social housing’, a proposal that was rejected by the MRH, which in the end envisaged the complete preservation of that community already in that context through the allocation of ERP Social Housing. For the drafting of the proposal made, as discussed, by the then Councillor Montuori and professor of architecture at Roma Tre, an interdisciplinary academic consultancy involving Roma Tre, Sapienza University of Rome and [Free International University of Social Studies] ([Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali]; hereafter [Luiss]) was proposed. For several years, in fact, forms of collaboration and research had been initiated by the inhabitants with the nearby Department of Architecture of Roma Tre, which, on the occasion of this call for proposals, initiated with the community a process of participation and co-design of the entire proposal, which was then deepened in terms of social management by the Luiss University (Careri, 2023). The Department of Architecture of Roma Tre has therefore been building a relationship of mutual trust with Porto Fluviale community for several years. “Many students have come here during the last three years to produce projects and dissertations and have ultimately produced many feasible projects for this space” (Interview R5). It is through this consolidated relationship that it was possible to draw up the building and social recovery proposal, in every single aspect, shared with Porto Fluviale community. The university’s presence in the Ostiense area, therefore, played, as this case demonstrates, a proactive function in being a place where a public design model could make use of the high-level academic expertise that the university could guarantee. Montuori’s idea was, therefore, not to uproot an interesting experience that had arisen on its own like that of Porto Fluviale. “if such an interesting seedling is born that has settled in the neighbourhood that does not produce direct conflict and where honestly no planner would be able to reproduce these same forms and cohabitations, instead of clearing out, let us try to see if we can make this seedling change its internal rules and its attitude towards the city and thus begin to modify itself while maintaining its founding characteristics” (Interview R9). This point represented one of the most important issues for both squatters and CCLC militants, i.e., this project was not to devitalise the critical voice that characterises squat practices. Therefore, a way had to be found to not simply assimilate this squat to the same dominant urban model but still maintain the autonomous self-organisation that they have practised over the 20 years of squatting. After the release of the PINQuA Call for Proposals and throughout the drafting of the Proposal, the following co-design activities were organised: meetings with representatives of the inhabitants and the broader MRH; institutional meetings with the CdR and the VIII District; visits with Roma Tre and Luiss working groups, the CdR and the Superintendency; presentations of the project’s progress 249 to the inhabitants; focus groups on particular issues such as the self-census and the building of the associations for social functions on the ground floor. Throughout the initial process, continuous informal meetings took place to fine-tune the project strategies, and at the end of January, the community made the Sala da tè spaces available to turn them into a Participatory Co-design Workshop. Here, teachers and students worked side by side with the inhabitants, sharing doubts and making proposals that substantially modified the project to the synthesis result. Finally, on 23 February 2021, the entire project was presented to the Plenary Assembly of Porto Fluviale in the presence of Prof. Arch. Luca Montuori and the directors of Roma Capitale, Dr. Amedeo Ciaccheri (President of the VIII District of Roma Capitale) and the members of the CdR, CCLC spokespersons, teachers and students of Roma Tre and Luiss working group (Careri, 2023). Thanks to the intervention of the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre, a more integrated approach to the projects has been facilitated, one that is attentive to emerging urban processes, making it possible to valorise knowledge and territorial approaches sedimented and matured through long work in the field (Gainsforth, 2022). The then mayor Virginia Raggi also commented on the project, highlighting the fact that in this case, structured and non-emergency solutions were proposed to tackle housing discomfort, enhancing social integration processes also through innovative solutions (Raggi, 2021). Another important actor in this project was Rome’s District VIII, which had the role of binding the relationship between Porto Fluviale and the CdR even more and also trying to understand what declination and what territorial landing this project could have for the neighbourhood, “we declined an interlocution with the territorial actors outside of that place to verify what had to be the prerequisites for doing this project. District VIII, in this sense, performed this function of uniting partnerships by defining what the priority functions were for the neighbourhood and what the functions that had to be part of that structure could therefore be” (Interview R7), i.e., what territorial impacts that project had to have, not only for the squat’s residents or the residential function of the space but for the social and urban function on the territory in which it was already inserted. This project is, therefore, the result of a fruitful interaction between different actors who have designed its feasibility through a long phase of co-designing, which has seen the community currently living in the building as well as the MRH, the CdR, and in particular, the Department of Urban Planning, District VIII, the Universities of Roma Tre, Luiss and La Sapienza, with the support of the Lazio Region, the Air Force, MIBACT and many city and neighbourhood associations that have signed the project that I will analyse in the next section. 256 previously abandoned spaces that will be transformed into new urban public spaces accessible to the entire city community. Therefore, I argue that the recognition of the autonomous practices produced by the Roman MRH is not only a matter, as stated by the institutional sphere, of resolving a social problem relating to the legality or illegality of the act of practising squatting, but it is above all a matter of recognising that there are other actors capable of designing spaces and social services for the city that do not depend solely and exclusively on institutions. Therefore, it can reinforce the actors' sense of place and rootedness as they can reproduce themselves generatively (Gainsforth, 2022) and not exclusivist or worse extractivist. The fruitful relationship between institutions and MRH that characterised this project, I maintain, has opened up truly innovative perspectives in the Italian panorama concerning public spaces and the city’s housing policies. As far as public spaces are concerned, the city of Rome alone has countless squats and spaces managed autonomously by the MRH, similar to Porto Fluviale, formed by territorial projects attentive to the social impact that these spaces have in the territories in which they are inserted, social projects therefore already underway with respect to which an aura of illegality reigns and which are often only attacked as idlers or troublemakers by the media. These experiences thus can become alternative projects fostered from below for collective use within the social policies proposed by the CdR. In addition, this new co-design proposal opens up the possibility of working precisely with realities that have been operating in the territories for years with tried and tested projects. Removing the noose around the neck of illegality from these spaces would, first of all, mean guaranteeing the continuity of the social services for the city that were formed to make up for the inactivity of the institutions in certain neighbourhoods of the city. Concerning housing policies, on the other hand, even though 53 public ERP houses are to be allocated, the housing problem in Rome is much bigger than that. Likewise, the instrument that financed it (the RRP) will not solve Rome's housing crisis. But through this project, an opportunity may arise to change how the institutions deal with the housing emergency, that is, through the understanding that the housing problem in Rome is now structural and that in order to deal with such a complex problem, it is necessary to have the courage to utilise the energies and efforts of all those realities that have been trying for years, through a real production of alternative spaces to neo-liberal practices, to solve the housing problem in Rome autonomously. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]