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Paper short abstract

Comparing Chinese and Romanian diasporas in Italy, this paper shows how popular economies sustain livelihoods through care, kinship, and relational finance. Rather than informality, these practices act as economic infrastructure, shaping governance, conflict, and coexistence under uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among Wenzhou-origin Chinese entrepreneurs and workers in Prato’s fast-fashion districts, and comparative fieldwork with Romanian immigrants in Tuscany (care, construction, transport), this paper traces the everyday infrastructures through which economic life is made durable under conditions of uncertainty. In Prato, Chinese firms are sustained through dense assemblages of family labour, childcare and eldercare, transnational credit, rotating saving and lending practices, and enclave trade-credit chains. These arrangements function as economic infrastructure: they coordinate liquidity, labour, and goods while enabling navigation of labour inspections, regulatory pressure, and racialised suspicion.

By contrast, Romanian popular economies are largely organised through remittances, interest-free kin loans, and household-centred moral obligations that stabilise multi-sited families. Here, care work and social reproduction - often feminised and performed under precarious conditions - absorb risk and secure everyday provisioning, while entrepreneurial activity frequently remains an extension of household strategies rather than consolidating into collective or firm-level productive infrastructures.

Rather than indexing different “stages” of modernity, these cases reveal distinct configurations of popular economies shaped by migration regimes, moral economies, and institutional contexts. Conceptually, the paper returns to the notion of people-as-infrastructure (Simone 2021), showing how care, obligation, and relational finance generate their own modes of coordination, subjectivation, and conflict management. By locating political polarisation in concrete sites of friction such as regulation, neighbourhood tensions, and moral hierarchies of “honest work” and “illegality”, the paper argues that ethnographic attention to socioeconomic life can unsettle polarised narratives about migration, informality, and economic conflict in provincial contemporary Europe.