Residual People, Residual Spaces Framing Roma (Social) Housing Exclusion in Light of the Housing Regime

Residual People, Residual Spaces Framing Roma (Social) Housing Exclusion in Light of the Housing Regime Livia Del Duca Urban Studies Two-year Master 30 credits Spring semester, 2021 Supervisor: Martin Grander Table of contents Abstract 2 1. Introduction 3 1.1Research question and aim 6 1.2 Structure of the thesis 7 Part I 2. Methodology 8 2.1 A theoretical perspective on discourse 8 2.2 What is a discourse analysis? 9 2.3 How is a discourse analysis developed? 9 3. Conceptual Framework 10 3.1 Framing social exclusion 10 3.2 Conceptualizing housing regimes 13 3.3 Housing exclusion as social exclusion? 15 Part II 4. The Roma in Italy: historical perspectives 16 4.1 The importance of being (called) Roma 16 4.2 Who are the Roma in Italy? 17 4.3 The legal status of Roma in Italy 19 5. The dimensions of Roma’s social exclusion 19 5.1 Health 20 5.2 Education 21 5.3 Employment 22 6. Housing exclusion of the Roma 22 6.1 “Campland” Italy 23 6.2 “Safeguarding nomadic culture”: The inception of camps 24 6.3 The “Nomad Emergency”: criminalising discourse 26 7. Housing in Italy: a permanent crisis 27 7.1 The housing regime 28 7.2 The camps before the camps 30 7.3 Temporality as a solution 32 8. All roads lead to Rome: testing grounds for social exclusion 33 8.1 The ‘Piano di Inclusione’: good intentions, bad execution 35 8.2 Public housing: Double standards or silver lining? 36 Conclusion 39 References 41 1 Abstract Italy is the only country in Europe that has institutionalized a completely parallel and segregating housing system - the camp system for Roma people. These camps were created purely based on an elusive nomadic character innate to the population. Over the decades, with further migratory flows of Roma people reaching the country, conditions have only worsened, developing a system so much tethered to the Italian society that the country has even been renamed ‘Campland’. Over time, this same exclusion has been problematized, resulting in the criminalisation of Roma people, at the same time bringing to light the exceptionality of their living conditions. The first part of this study is devoted to understanding the process of discursive legitimization of said exclusion. The approach, inspired by a Foucaldian understanding, involved also grasping the dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures (Fairclough, 1992) - in this sense, it entailed situating it outside its boundaries of exceptionality and inside the broader context of wider housing exclusion affecting Italy. The aim of this thesis was thus to reconstruct both the specific condition of Roma exclusion, and the structural inequalities innate to the Italian housing regime which enabled its development. The concept of social exclusion (Levitas et al, 2007) is implemented in the study first as a way to understand the overall condition faced by Roma people, and as a way to bring forward reflections on the role of housing as one of its fundamental dimensions. The study illustrates how the implementation of the camps and its relative discourse were enabled by the constant retreat of the State from the provision of housing, and how the current institutional incapacity to solve the Roma Question is directly connected to the inability to answer the housing needs of wider segments of the population. The only proposed institutional responses, in both cases, are only ‘filler’ solutions embedded in ideas of temporality, thus failing to address the underlying problem: the structural shortage of public housing. Keywords: Social Exclusion, Housing Exclusion, Housing Regime, Roma, Italy, Urban Policy, Discourse Analysis 2 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank Martin Grander, who has been my supervisor for this research project. His advice has been of great value, as well as his support through the whole process. I would also like to thank all the professors who have guided me during those two years, their knowledge has been invaluable. A great “Thank You!” goes to all my friends in Malmö. Their presence and support through these months has been essential. They were there when I needed to discuss all the challenges, complaints, and struggles I faced during those months, but also when I was in need of a distraction. Those two years have been possible thanks to their presence. There is a special group of people I would like to thank: Angelica, Maria, John, Martina, Gloria. I am so grateful for your friendship, even though we are always so far away from each other. In particular, Gloria: we’ve known each other for twenty years and you have always been the greatest of friends - I keep asking myself how you can still put up with me after all this time! Finally, I would also like to thank my family. Their love over the years has allowed me to go through this journey. Papà, thank you for your constant support, and for being my unofficial supervisor! Mamma, thank you for always believing in me. And, last but not least, I have to thank my sister Fulvia - we are each other’s biggest supporters, and with her intelligence and hard work over the years, she has always been my inspiration. 3 1. Introduction “Rome is becoming a horrible city [...]: on the old borgate that survived like an indelible dream-city, archaic, new peripheral layers arise, even more horrendous, if possible. This is the spectacle that appears before my eyes every day. You know very well that your “well being” [...] implies “malaise”. [...] I am in the position to only perceive this regress: it’s the impoverishment of Italy that is, for me, relevant.” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963)1 With these words, during an interview, writer Pier Paolo Pasolini described Rome, a city caught between two realities - one of expansion and prosperity, and a remote one, cut out from these social improvements, consigned to the outskirts of the city, hidden, which found its ultimate expression through the proletarian neighborhoods of the time, the borgate. Two faces of social and economic “development”, two faces that the city, as the years went by, tried to forget, but which still exist to this day, under different forms. The city of Rome is here taken both for its peculiarities and as the general expression of an Italian malaise, which leaves in a sort of limbo of social segregation an increasingly large part of its population. In this thesis, an emblematic expression of this social malaise is encapsulated by the condition of housing exclusion, and on wider terms, social exclusion, Roma people face on the Italian territory. The man regarded as the father of modern criminology, Cesare Lombroso, cataloged all those he defined as “gypsies” as a “whole race of criminals”2. The idea that people considered gypsies were ethnically inferior and devoted to the most basic human instincts did not disappear with the passage of time, if anything it grew stronger - we need only think of what happened in the concentration camps during nazism (Di Noia, 2016). In other instances, more recently, this idea lurked behind several national rhetorics, turning into a belief, a conviction, hidden in the (European) man towards Roma people. The history of the Roma present on the Italian territory is the emblematic manifestation of the criminal, vile consideration reserved to the Other. Roma people are around 0.23% - 0.28% of the total Italian population (CoE, 2011; UNAR, 2012), while the legal condition of the Roma present on the Italian territory is extremely varied: it is estimated that at least 60% has Italian citizenship (Sigona, 2005), while the remaining 40% is composed of EU citizens (coming mainly from Romania), non-EU citizens (coming from the Balkan countries), and those that are apolidi, that is, people without any citizenship, born in nations no longer existing - this is the condition of many Roma coming from former Yugoslavia. It has been widely acknowledged how Roma populations in Italy live in a persistent and heavy condition of marginalization and poverty, which translates into a constant condition of social exclusion; and how they are in real terms subjected to 1 This is an excerpt from an interview included in Sessanta posizioni (Alberto Arbasino, 1971). 2 These considerations can be found in the book The criminal man (‘L'uomo delinquente’), first published in italian in 1878. 4 discrimination and racism, also on a structural level. Under this condition of social exclusion, multiple dimensions actively interact in its formation. The multidimensionality of the concept (Levitas, 2005; Levitas et al., 2007; Millar, 2007; Madanipour et al., 2015) is reflected in the various dimensions of inequality and exclusion, which are translated into labor, economic, health, educational, and housing inequality, following the dimensions identified by the European Commission in the National Roma Integration Strategy (EC, 2011). The extremely heavy conditions of housing inequality to which they are subjected can be considered as the cornerstone of the Roma marginalization, the principal instrument which separates, discriminates, and limits the living conditions of a part of the population. Housing is thus only one dimension in the multidimensionality of social exclusion, but an extremely important one. The housing exclusion of Roma people is a contemporary expression of a history of exclusion that even today can be found under different forms. It is the exclusion of a housing regime structurally incapable of finding a new vision, and which is falling towards wider conditions of housing deprivation which is affecting an increasing part of the population. The Italian housing regime is characterized by a system of public housing provision which is extremely residualistic, and it is rooted in a tradition mainly directed towards homeownership.

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