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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I intend to analyze the Italian context - through the case study of the city of Milan - as a privileged site to understand the social value of "housing career" to improve or obstruct local mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The recent economic crisis has not only caused the real estate market collapse, it has also made it more difficult for tenants to bear the economic burden of paying rent [Tosi 2017]. Recent data presented by the Ministry of the Interior confirm that in Milan in 2015 there were 32,249 requests for eviction (sfratto) [Ministry of Interiors 2016]. At the same time, data from the Municipality of Milan show that an increasing number of citizens are applying for the assignment of a social housing. Nowadays more than 25,000 families are registered on the waiting lists [Éupolis Lombardia 2015].

In this context, an ethnographic perspective is a vehicle for

conveying the socio-political value of home and "home loss" in the everyday life [Desmond 2016] as much as for understanding the relationship of power between the State (and its agents) and citizens [Fassin 2015]. According to this perspective, as Carsten stated, homes "embody the interconnections between individual trajectories, kinship

and the state" [Carsten 2018: 103].

In this paper I intend to analyze the Italian context - through the case study of the city of Milan - as a privileged site to understand the social value of "housing career" to improve or obstruct local mobility. In this configuration evictions play a symbolic and material role. Evictions represent fundamental rites of institution [Bourdieu 1993] that structure the social possibility of individual or familiar stability, mobility or settlement. As rites, evictions contribute to the formulation of politics and practices of inclusion and exclusion.