Paper short abstract:

The paper shows the links between the concept of Otherness and the temporariness of housing solutions in Rome through an ethnographic research inside a squat, within which migrants and Italians are spatializing their cultural values in an abandoned building in order to create a model of coexistence.

Paper long abstract:

The paper describes the relationships between Otherness and housing policies for low-income people in the city of Rome. It argues that the common point between the two issues lies in the chronicization of an emergency approach, which has led as a consequence a paradoxical "stable housing precariousness" for all those who are perceived as "Others".

Since public housing was born in Rome, it has immediately been related also to migration and it has gradually constructed a cultural configuration of housing as a "social award"; for all those economically and socially disadvantaged categories, policies have always been designed in the name of temporariness and with a little access to basic urban services.

Nonetheless, Rome has also a long counter-story of the squatting for housing, which today guarantees a permanent housing situation (however precarious) to all those who are in housing emergency. These movements are now characterized by the co-existence of migrants and Italians and, for this reason, they are reshaping the historical purposes of the roman struggle over housing in trying to transform the individual right to a house into a more comprehensive right to inhabit the city for everyone. This contribution will focus these aspects through a case study, a squat called Spin Time Labs inside which squatters are carrying on a moral economy (Fassin, 2009) made of a shared system of values, in order to perceive housing not as an ultimate prize but as a right that must be earned through the struggle and the internal collaboration.