Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the socio-economic practices of Barikamà, a Social Cooperative managed by African migrants in Rome, Italy, as they trespass the boundaries between formality and informality, between the categories of "migrant" and "non-migrant" and produce new values in creative connections.

Paper long abstract:

This paper observes the lives of African migrants in Rome, Italy, their struggles in a context of social, political, and economic marginalisation, adverse incorporation, and exploitation, and the transformative strategies that they enact in order to sustain their livelihoods and actively tilt the surrounding environment towards their needs, desires, and values, thus affirming their belonging and ownership of the new social reality. It uses dynamic conceptions of economic and social life that allow to understand the "embeddedness" of economic activities in social relations (Polanyi 1977[1944]) and to the formal/informal dichotomy in order to restitute the complexity and fluidity of ways in which people provide for their needs (Power 2004). Drawing on ethnographic accounts of the experiences of the West African men who have founded the Social Cooperative "Barikamà", the paper highlights social creativity in the face of crisis and within an adverse environment. It describes how people and groups are able to adapt their strategies for provisioning and to overcome vulnerability and critical conjunctures through the formulation of new values and new practices that create links with other people and with the urban fabric, creating ownership of places and manufacturing original assemblages in their participation in the social system.