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Paper short abstract

Ethnography at Milan's BiG intergenerational housing project reveals residents practicing critical care: simultaneously supporting and contesting urban regeneration. Their engagement challenges binary framings of projects as either neoliberal or resistant, revealing civic capacity in action.

Paper long abstract

Urban anthropology has productively documented how regeneration projects become sites of contestation between different visions of the city. Yet analytical frameworks often position such projects along a spectrum: captured by neoliberal governance logics on one end, or expressing authentic grassroots resistance on the other.

Ethnographic attention to residents' actually-existing practices reveals more complex forms of urban inhabitation that trouble this framing.

This paper draws on twelve months of fieldwork at BiG (Borgo Intergenerazionale Greco), an intergenerational housing cooperative in Milan's Greco neighborhood, examining how two key actors practice what might be called critical care: forms of engagement that simultaneously critique structural limitations while actively laboring to make the project succeed.

Clara, a lifelong social housing advocate, performed harsh critiques of BiG's governance before revealing this was pedagogical—meant to foster change, not offer sterile critique. Gianni, universally recognized as the neighborhood's memory-keeper, constitutes the groundstone of BiG's historical archive while maintaining what he describes as a "down and dirty" stance toward the project.

Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) matters of care and Blanco and León's (2017) concept of platforms for reciprocity and political contestation, I argue these practices reveal critical engagement as dual function rather than contradiction.

Clara and Gianni enact what Blanco and Nel·lo (2017) identify as civic capacity—the ability to organize around community matters while remaining critically engaged. Their positioned labor demonstrates how residents stitch together urban fractures (Ingold 2010; Lefebvre 1974) by working with rather than against them, revealing generative modes of inhabiting transformation.