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. The process of legitimation which led to the creation of a “nation of homeowners” (Di Feliciantonio & Aalbers, 2018) is long and spread out over time, often used as an instrument to gain political consensus and which has led to the almost total defunding of the public housing sector. The familiaristic aspect of the Italian housing regime (Allen, 2006), deriving from a traditionally low welfare provision, makes access to housing not easily open to outsiders.
In this context of housing exclusion comes into play what is, to all intent and purposes, a completely separate housing system: that is, the camp system for Roma and Sinti people. The so-called campi rom, Roma camps, were first created during the late 1980s - 1990s to accommodate people of the Roma communities, purely (as it was said) on the basis of an elusive nomadic character innate to the population (Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011). These camps are, specifically, settlements created with containers, shackles, cabins, where Roma people who can’t afford a different housing solution have been forced into. For decades, politics on both national and local levels answered the housing question of the Roma by creating and pursuing this system, which is one of the main elements contributing to the social exclusion of the Roma (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019). This camp system is so much tethered to the Italian society that the country has been renamed ‘Campland’ in a report by the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC, 2000). According to Maestri and Vitale (2017), there are at least 40’000 people who, to this day, live in the camps - which can either be authorized ones or illegal ones, with terrible hygienic conditions and in a condition of profound social and urban segregation, often located in the fringes of cities. Central to this nomadic vision of the Roma was therefore the creation of the camps, initially conceived as temporary structures for a population that, according to the general discourse, did not want to have a stable home.
5 The period of development of the camps coincides with the crystallization of the so-called Nomad Emergency or Roma Question in Italy. It is from the 90s onwards that new migratory flows from Yugoslavia brought new groups of Roma into the national territory. It is especially in the second half of the 2000s, however, that the situation became extremely dire. The year that is considered to be the moment of definite crystallization of the figure of the Roma as a public enemy in the popular imagination is that of 2007-2008 (Armillei, 2017; Clough Marinaro & Daniele, 2011; Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011), when a series of highly publicized criminal events in connection to Roma people took place. These events became the catalyst for the reinforcement of an emergency discourse in regards to the Roma, which culminated with the Prime Minister’s Decree (at the time Silvio Berlusconi), on the 21st May 2008, which declared:
“The Prime Minister [...] decrees [...] the state of emergency in relation to the settlements of nomadic communities in the territory of the Campania, Lombardy, and Lazio regions” (DPCM May 21, 2008)
The segregation of the Roma certainly did not begin only in 2007. What took place instead, at the level of public opinion, was the stabilization of the criminalizing perception of the Roma, and the political strengthening of segregating policies. Special security powers were granted to Security Commissioners in Rome, Milan, and Naples (Clough Marinaro, 2009), such as increasing security and police presence in the camps, and the census of all Roma people in the cities, collecting fingerprints, photos, and documents, even of minors (Clough Marinaro, and Sigona, 2011). But, as previously mentioned, the treatment of Roma as separate entities from the rest of the Italian context has more distant origins than in recent 2007.
Scholars in Italy have mainly analyzed the development of the camps at different national (Sigona, 2005, 2011) or local levels - for example, Clough Marinaro regarding Rome (Clough Marinaro, 2003, 2014; Clough Marinaro and Daniele, 2011). The focus of academic research has mainly been on the institution of the camp per se, reconnecting it to Agamben’s state of exception and often viewing Roma as homo sacer, bare life stripped of their citizenship rights and banished from the community (Armillei, 2015; Clough Marinaro, 2009, 2015; Clough Marinaro and Bermann, 2011). Sigona (2015) expanded Agamben’s conceptualization of bare life to the concept of ‘campzenship’, the specific condition of citizenship derived from the camps. In regards to the Roma and wider housing processes, Maestri (2014) integrated the perspective of Roma in the camps with the squatting movement in Rome, studying the integration of a few Roma people in the famous Metropoliz squat in the city. The focus has thus mainly been on the discriminating conditions in the camps, often leaving a gap in the connection with the wider context of housing deprivation, and on the implications of this structural deprivation in the outcome of housing exclusion for the Roma.
Retracing back to the statement previously made, that Roma people are inserted in a multidimensional system of social exclusion, the purpose of this research thesis is to analyze the process of legitimation of a given discourse based on housing exclusion, as a specter of a broader condition of social exclusion. A condition that has been implemented over the years,
6 at a national and local level. What I was interested in analyzing, was not only comprehending the exceptional character of the condition of segregation for Roma people - which is indeed exceptional, both when confronted with other European countries (Italy is the only country in Europe which has institutionalized this camp system [ERRC, 2000]) and when seen in the Italian landscape; but at the same time the non-exceptional nature of this segregation itself, understood as an integral and historical part of the Italian housing system.
1.1Research question and aim The condition of social exclusion is therefore understood as the result of a specific discourse, carried out at the political and social level, and a corresponding process of problematization, leading to (and being aided by) segregating and discriminating policies. The first step is to observe how “things come to be” (Bacchi, 2012:7) - in this case, how the housing exclusion of the Roma has developed through the use of a specific discourse, aided by the structural lack of social support of the Italian welfare state. As Di Noia pointed out (2016:45), “the Italian population, made increasingly socially insecure by structural elements such as the world economic crisis, the unemployment crisis, the progressive cut in social policies, was offered a scapegoat that bordered on perfection: the immigrant Roma”. Analyzing and framing the discursive development in regards to Roma’s housing exclusion is taken as the starting point to then frame this exclusion under the broader context of the Italian housing regime.
What has been framed as a specific, exceptional, and emergency situation (an emergency that has been going on for over 30 years), is nothing of the sort: not only because it is not acceptable to single out one specific group as deviant and in need of an emergency approach, but also because the same mentality and often the same kind of response is used in the broader housing context. An approach constantly driven by emergencies and ad hoc policies, which are always temporary but more often than not end up becoming permanent. The second step, and purpose of this thesis, is to analyze the underlying conditions of segregation as the natural progression of an increasingly inaccessible housing regime - the Roma are indeed a residual population in a residual space, as Sibley (1995:68) described them, and may I add, in a residual housing regime.
This research project will then try to answer the following research questions:
(a) How can Roma’s social (housing) exclusion be framed in the wider context of the Italian housing regime?
And, in order to understand this;
(b) How has this exclusion been framed and problematized on a national and local level?
7 The study will thus have a double focus: an analysis of the discursive framing regarding Roma people and their housing conditions will be implemented in order to understand how the current, segregating housing system has been informed by specific narratives which have singled it out as an exception; and a broader comparison with the wider housing regime in order to understand the deeper structural causes of it. Thus, the method of discourse analysis will be implemented, following a Foucauldian approach centered on understanding the historical and social development of a said regime of truth (Foucault, 1980), while the condition of Roma people will be analysed under the lens of social/housing exclusion and its connection with the housing regime.
1.2 Structure of the thesis In order to implement the proposed analysis, the thesis will be structured as follows:
The first part of the thesis will be focused on describing, in the first chapter, the methodology used to carry out the research - that is, discourse analysis. Reflections on what a discourse analysis is will be brought forward, as well as the more technical aspects of using such a method, while also discussing the broader theoretical framework surrounding the chosen method. The second chapter will delve deeper into the theoretical development of some particular concepts used in the research - the concept of social exclusion and of housing regime.
The second part of the thesis will be reserved for the study of Roma housing (and broader social) exclusion in Italy. In this section, the fourth chapter develops the historical framing of the Roma presence in Italy, discussing also the implications of the use of a specific terminology with respect to Roma people. The fifth chapter frames the multidimensionality of Roma social exclusion, looking at the health, education, and employment dimensions, while the sixth chapter delves deeper into the housing dimension. In the chapter, it is analyzed the development of policies and discourse from the ‘inception’ of the camps up to this day, at a national level. Chapter seven will instead focus on the broader perspective of the Italian housing regime, highlighting first the key features of the housing regime, and then the presence of the camps before the institutionalization, and the issue of temporality, here presented as a key aspect in the institutional response to housing distress. Chapter eight brings forward the case of Rome. The situation is analyzed by first presenting the political response to the Roma presence in the city; then the latest policy action undertaken by the mayoralty; and finally the issues connected with accessing public housing. The final chapter will provide a discussion regarding the data provided, bringing forward reflections in regards to the research questions.
8 Part I
2. Methodology The purpose of this chapter is to develop and explain the method employed in the research in order to understand how Roma’s exclusion/inclusion from housing has been framed on a policy-governmentality level, in light of a context of growing housing exclusion in the Italian housing regime. To carry out this study, the chosen method has been that of discourse analysis. But why a discourse analysis, and most importantly, what is a discourse analysis?
2.1 A theoretical perspective on discourse At the heart of a discourse analysis lies, arguably so, the understanding of a certain discourse. But this understanding is shaped by many different factors - how discourse is created, how it needs to be analyzed, and most importantly, what discourse is. Understanding what discourse is and what this term encompasses is the first step towards developing the analytical framework. Fairclough describes “discursive practices” as the “production, distribution, and consumption of texts” (1992:71). There is already a shift from discourse to the practice of discourse - Bacchi and Bonham (2014) highlight how it would be more correct to speak of discursive practices instead of discourse itself: the attention must be placed on the fact that discourse, understood in the Foucauldian sense, is not the practice of discourse, the act of speaking or writing, but a set of practices that include but are not limited to the use of language.
It is important to highlight the dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures (Fairclough, 1992) - stemming from Foucalt’s understanding (1980), discourse is actively shaped and constrained by societal dimensions, i.e. class, laws, institutions, norms; but at the same time has an active role in constituting those same dimensions. Thus, discursive practices and social practices must be seen as part of the same system constructing meanings (Fairclough, 1992).
The theoretical framework employed in this thesis thus follows Foucault’s poststructuralist understanding of the world, believing in the dialectical relationship between power and discourse, and in the necessity of framing the “socially and historically conditioned context” (Flyvbjerg & Richardson, 2002:10). The concept of discourse in this thesis is therefore understood as the socio-historically conditioned system that produces knowledge and meaning and, thus power (Foucault, 1980; Bacchi & Bonham, 2014) - rather than only language per se. By connecting the meaning of discourse with knowledge rather than with language itself, there is a shift from the meaning of (linguistic) statements and speeches, towards the process that led to the formation of said statements (knowledge).
2.2 What is a discourse analysis? Michel Foucault’s work has been regarded as one of the most popular approaches towards a discourse analysis methodology (Fairclough, 1992). Lees (2004) singled out two main
9 schools of thought regarding discourse analysis, with the main difference being the epistemological framework they draw from. One originating from a Marxist and Gramscian tradition embedded in political economy studies, and a second one entrenched in a poststructural sensibility, whose main theorist can be identified in Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. The former focuses on the role of ideology in concealing the hegemonic interests of powerful elites - Lees (2004) notes how under this understanding, discourse is almost synonymous with ideology itself” (p.102). The analytical method she connects with this framework is Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis - CDA (Fairclough, 1989, 1995[2010], 2013). This method of analysis is entrenched in a “critical realist approach” (Fairclough, 2010:4), which theories the existence of a real world existing “irrespectively of whether or how well we understand it” (p.4). Thus the study of language focuses on linguistic and structural features of texts in order to investigate “the relations of language to other social processes, and of how language works within power relations” [original emphasis] (Taylor, 2004:436). CDA is then a systematic analysis that aims to understand “how practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power” (Fairclough, 2010 [1995]:132).
The latter theoretical strand is instead entrenched in a poststructuralist sensibility, recognizing that “there can be no universal truths or absolute ethical positions” (Graham, 2011:666), but rather that different discourses have the capacity of creating regimes of truth (Foucault 1980). Analyzing language does not only mean uncovering the hegemonic ideology behind power relations but also developing an understanding that language itself is a vehicle in the creation of meanings and in shaping power relations (Jorgensen and Phillips, 2002). Under this analytical framework, discourse becomes the conjunction between language, power relations, and knowledge (Lees, 2004). A discourse analysis embedded in a poststructuralist-Foucauldian understanding of reality ultimately sees power as a network of relations, of which language and discourse are part. This viewpoint has often a historical focus, analyzing how certain regimes of truth have come to be in the social, political, cultural contexts in which they are embedded. As Graham (2011) points out, in a Foucauldian discourse analysis the first step is that of recognition, meaning “tracing the process involved in their constitution” (p.670).
2.3 How is a discourse analysis developed? As far as analytical methods go, a discourse analysis following a Foucauldian approach is uncharacteristically abstract and un-methodological. This abstract characteristic has been criticized - Fairclough (1992) stated that it is not really possible to implement a discourse analysis using Foucault, instead, it concerns more ‘putting Foucault’s perspective into work’ (p.38) by using more analytically-developed research methods, such as CDA. It is indeed true that Foucault’s analysis is extremely vague and often not exactly concerned with the specific analysis of spoken and written language (Fairclough, 1992) - it is also true that researchers should avoid the “positivist trap of essentializing the research method” (Graham, 2005:5), pairing their work with an understanding that the analytical process, being essentially based
10 on the subjective interpretation of the author, will rarely produce the same results (Graham, 2005).
However, researchers have tried to formulate more developed methodologies of poststructuralist discourse analysis, as is the case of Carol Bacchi’s (2009) WPR approach (What’s the Problem Represented to be?), which looks specifically at policy discourse analysis, by formulating a set of six questions that need to be answered while analyzing a specific policy. Her conceptualization of the method stems from the understanding that when policies explicitly (or not) deal with certain problems, they contribute to the formation of said problems in a dialectical relationship by emphasizing what needs to be fixed in a determined system (Bacchi, 2009). While Bacchi’s methodological approach will not be used in this research, her method of understanding which are the elements that are identified as the problems, in order to fully comprehend the discursive practices and how they translate into policy development, will be part of the analytical framework in this thesis. Foucault looks at problematizations as the social and historical process which produces ‘objects of thought’ (Bacchi, 2012:1) - in order to understand ‘how and why certain things (behavior, phenomena, processes) become a problem’ (Foucault, 1985:115, as cited in Bacchi, 2012:1). The shaping of problems is a production of meanings, of implicit truths that innately guide governing practices. Problematization as a method relates to what Foucault calls ‘thinking problematically’ (Foucault, 1977, as cited in Bacchi, 2012:1) - it is the method of analysis that involves the study of certain objects of thought that have been problematized over the years through the analysis of the historical process which led to their production. When it comes down to it, studying problematizations entails critically understanding the role policies play in shaping and developing the very same problems they claim to be fighting.
3. Conceptual Framework This chapter outlines the theoretical framework underlying the analysis presented in the thesis. The first paragraph defines the concept of social exclusion, used to frame the condition of structural marginality related to Roma people. By discussing the multidimensionality of social exclusion, the concept of housing exclusion will be brought forward, along with the conceptualization of housing regimes in order to develop an understanding of the specific system of housing provision brought into the future analysis.
3.1 Framing social exclusion The concept of social exclusion is still relatively recent in academic and policy environments. The term was first traced back to René Lenoir (1974), the then Secretary of State for Social Action of the Chirac government during the 1970s. It was initially used to describe as socially excluded those outside the social security system and, in many cases, the labor market. Those individuals were recognized as the mentally and physically disabled, substance abusers, suicidal people, abused children, single parents, or people with antisocial behaviors - and they were all grouped together under the term of “exclu”, outcasts (Sen, 2000; Davies, 2005). At first, social exclusion was considered mainly in terms of exclusion from the labor market and as a consequence and extension of poverty (Levitas, 1996), but it then evolved to be
11 specifically distinct from that of poverty, and the idea in the policy environment shifted from overcoming poverty to overcoming social exclusion. The boundaries between poverty and social exclusion are somewhat still blurred, mainly because both concepts can be formulated in a vague and somewhat unclear manner.
Jehoel-Gijsbers and Vrooman (2007) trace the difference between poverty and social exclusion to two schools of thought: the French school, which builds on social exclusion, inspired by a Durkheimian tradition looking at social cohesion and integration; and the Anglo-American school, with a more scientific approach to access to income, basic goods, and relative deprivation in general. They then develop a comparison between poverty and social exclusion, noting how the former is a static condition relating to (generally) a determined income at a moment in time, and the latter is instead a dynamic process, which looks at the causes of exclusion. They also note that while poverty is unidimensional, related to the financial resources and material goods possessed by an individual, social exclusion is instead multidimensional - connected to a wider set of domains, pertaining from material/economic resources to social resources, cultural participation, access to services, civic participation and others. Finally, they highlight how poverty has a distributional character, while social exclusion has a relational one, concerning relations between different societal, cultural, and political domains. Levitas (2005) has identified one of the ‘discourses of social exclusion’ as the redistributionist discourse (RED), in which the primary cause of social exclusion is identified as poverty. While poverty seems to be a more limited and narrow concept, it is also easier to observe and identify, since the lack of economic and financial resources has a more ‘objective’ connotation - the concept of social exclusion is vaguer and it has been noted by scholars how it ‘suffers from a lack of clarity’ (Madanipour, 2011:188).
Walker and Walker (1997, cited in Byrne, 2005), aptly distinguish social exclusion from poverty: “We have retained the distinction regarding poverty as a lack of the material resources, especially income, necessary to participate in society, and social exclusion as a more comprehensive formulation which refers to the dynamic process of being shut out, fully or partially, from any of the social, economic, political or cultural systems which determine the social integration of a person in society. Social exclusion may therefore be seen as the denial (or non-realization) of the civil, political, and social rights of citizenship” (1997:8). If social exclusion can be understood in the first place as the ‘multidimensional conception of disadvantage’ (Silver, 2007:15), poverty can be regarded as one dimension of social exclusion, but not a necessary aspect of it. Social exclusion overcomes the material dimension of poverty - it is not only the lack of economic resources but a process whereby certain individuals and/or groups become excluded. But what does excluded even mean? This exclusion is mainly understood as the lack of access to social opportunity (Sen, 2000), or as ‘the inability to participate when the individual would like to do so’ (Levitas et al., 2007:22), or as ‘[the] institutionalized form of controlling access: to places, to activities, to resources and information’ (Madanipour, 2011:189). Scholars working on social exclusion theory have thus emphasized the aspect of participation in relation to social exclusion/inclusion. Levitas et al. (2007) define social exclusion as ‘a complex and multi-dimensional process. It involves
12 the lack or denial of resources, rights, goods, and services, and the inability to participate [author’s emphasis] in the normal relationships and activities, available to the majority of people in a society, whether in economic, social, cultural or political arenas. It affects both the quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society as a whole.’ (p.18). Specifically stressing the aspect of inability to participate is extremely important. Davey and Gordon (2017) also reflect on the fact that it is not the lack of participation per sé that should be taken as a ‘symptom’, an expression of social exclusion, and stress towards a more nuanced definition of participation/non-participation. Non-participation in society can also be a choice of an individual who could, if they wanted to, actually participate, but for some reason chose not to. At the same time, non-participation can also be the outcome for individuals or groups who do want to participate but are incapacitated from doing so. Important is then the question of whether or not the opportunity to participate is actually available to those considered socially excluded - not whether they decide to do it. It is important to eliminate, on socially excluded groups or individuals, the blame for their own exclusion. But while the main aspect is the lack of access - it is still vague what it is that people are excluded from. On an abstract level, the addition of the term ‘social’ to exclusion easily connects the term to societal aspects, mainly related to vague concepts of citizenship (Sommerville, 1998; Madanipour et al., 2015). Levitas et al. (2007) describe the main domains of social exclusion as ‘access by all to resources, rights, goods and services’ (p. 86), divided into social resources, material/economic resources and public/private services; then ‘participation in economic, social and cultural life’ (p. 75); and quality of life.
There is a general consensus among scholars (Levitas, 2005; Levitas et al., 2007; Millar, 2007; Madanipour et al., 2015) on a number of key characteristics that define social exclusion. Firstly, the nature of social exclusion is multidimensional, as stated in Levitas et al.’s definition (2007). This multidimensionality means that there is a plurality of factors that influence social exclusion and inequality to different degrees. It is dynamic, since future prospects and opportunities need to be factored in, as well as considering the dynamic role social and institutional processes have in shaping social exclusion. It is relational, since it focuses on the relation between the included and the excluded at different levels. And finally, it is contextual - the concept of social exclusion, with its multidimensionality and dynamisms, differs according to the specific social and economic context in which it is analyzed. Taking into consideration that there are different dimensions influencing social exclusion means understanding that there are many different sources that cause, or could potentially cause, social deprivation - not all of the sources and processes are always activated at the same time, or in different places. Different processes can be the cause of social exclusion, depending on which context (and which social group) is analyzed. The key to understanding social exclusion is to refer to the structural character of it, in relation to wider social, economic, cultural processes related to a specific system. According to Madanipour (2011), it is institutionalized exclusion that becomes an operating mechanism by controlling access to resources. As it is important to refer to the characteristics of a specific society, it is also important to refer to the experiences of individuals situated within these (Levitas et al., 2007:21). As long as the power of social, political, and cultural institutions goes, the social exclusion could be regarded as an ‘exercise in normative boundary setting’ (Cameron,
13 2006:401), an expression of sovereign power defining the included as the ‘normal’, (and therefore acceptable) part of society, and the excluded as the abnormal. Thus while developing this study on the concept of social exclusion, one should keep in mind how the use of the term itself on determined individuals or groups implies the application of a certain narrative, which is inevitably embedded in the intrinsic power relations of society, and an expression of it. It is the power of deciding who is excluded - the power of the ‘included’ to identify the ‘excluded’ and to impress determined (usually negative) characters upon them. This relates to one of the ‘social exclusion discourses’ identified by Levitas (2005), the moral underclass discourse (MUD). The narrative of social exclusion is brought forward by conceptualizing the excluded as the counter-image of the included, thus lacking the (assumed) positive characteristics intrinsic to those included in society (which could be morality, competitiveness in the labor market, responsibility). According to the MUD discourse, the focus is on the behavior and the characteristics of those who are ‘excluded’, as alleged failings and deficiencies are imputable to them. Exclusion thus becomes attributed to cultural characteristics of the excluded as society’s outsiders, since power relations shape the general imagery - the focus can be shifted to alleged cultural and moral shortcomings intrinsic to socially deprived groups in our societies. In her identification of different discourses inside British politics, in the MUD discourse, the solution proposed is often to apply stricter criteria to access and maintain welfare benefits. In understanding the structural societal processes causing exclusion, the welfare regimes and its various institutions gain an important role as one of the structural pillars of society’s organization.
3.2 Conceptualizing housing regimes The theoretical formulation of housing regimes takes as a starting point (although with consistent later departures) Esping-Andersen’s theory of welfare state regimes, developed in the 1990s mainly through his seminal publication The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). The idea of welfare regime per se was a multi-dimensional type of classification of different interrelationships between the three main social institutions: the family, the market, and the State. The ‘Three Worlds’ in the title correspond to the three different welfare state regimes which emerge from Esping-Andersen’s analysis:
1. The liberal welfare state regime, characterized by an extremely selective and residualist provision of social services and a high reliance on market principles; 2. The social-democratic welfare state regime, characterized instead by a universalistic approach to welfare provision to the whole population, and thus low differences in terms of accessibility to services; 3. The conservative-corporatist welfare state regime, in which welfare provision can still be regarded as fairly high, but without the strong re-distributive approach that characterizes social-democratic regimes. There is a different grade of accessibility to services, mainly based on class/gender differences. It must also be noted how in a corporatist regime the State is often not the only provider of services: family and other institutions have a much similar (if not bigger in some cases) role. In his analysis,
14 Italy (the only Southern European country part of his study) was regarded as a corporatist regime.
Esping-Andersen developed his theory by analyzing mainly the relationships between State’s social policies and labor market arrangements while neglecting the institution of the family and informal labor. Later debates have criticized this shortcoming, arguing on the existence of additional types of welfare regimes - mainly a Central-Eastern European and a Southern European/Mediterranean welfare regime (Castles and Ferrera, 1996; Allen, 2006). The position of housing inside welfare regime theory has always been blurry and subject of discussion - mainly because housing was not really a topic of consideration in Esping-Andersen’s development of welfare regime theory (Stephens, 2016). Famously, Kemeny (1992, 2001, 2006) developed a housing regime theory, considering housing as a pillar of the welfare state along with social assistance, health, and education - even if more related to the market than the others. Kemeny argues that the organization of the rental housing sector is the main parameter that differentiates housing regimes. He identifies a dualist rental system (mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries), in which there is a clear separation between the private rental market and the social rented sector, reserved for low-income households; and the unitary rental system (countries like Sweden and The Netherlands are an example), in which the social rented sector plays a bigger role in housing provision and is put on an equal footing with the private market, often in direct competition with it (Kemeny, 2006; Hoekstra, 2009). Stephens (2020) formulates a critique of Kemeny’s theory, arguing that housing regime theory needs to take into account the embeddedness within the wider welfare regime, and to acknowledge wider forces like globalization, ‘while also recognizing the importance of institutional detail’ (p. 586).
I would argue that this critique of the housing regime theory mainly based on the rental structure as narrow and limiting is particularly relevant to housing studies. Housing is ‘deeply embedded in the social and cultural structures of societies’ (Ruonavaara, 2020:8), and it is an integral part of its social practices. Clapham (2002) argued that, while most of the approaches to housing studies have a positivist view, assuming the existence of an objective reality that just needs to be unveiled by academic and social research, there is the need to use a social constructionist approach. That is, a fundamental part of housing research should focus on the interactions between different actors and on the use of language. Inspired by Foucault, discourses produce, reproduce and alter reality (creating their own “sub-universes of meanings” [Clapham, 2002:61]), and take part in housing processes by legitimizing views, policies and institutions. Housing policies and, more broadly, housing systems are thus also discursively constructed.
Blackwell and Kohl (2019) argue that a different framework regarding housing studies should focus on a path-dependence perspective. According to them, housing systems should not be analytically studied as static portraits (p.300), but have to be historically (and discursively) understood - and keeping in mind that future policies and developments in housing are bounded, limited, and shaped by past developments. It is from this point of view that Clapham’s approach to housing studies, strongly relying on discursive practices, can be
15 brought forward (Clapham, 2019). According to what has been said before, I believe in the importance of framing, at least partly, housing regimes within discourses shaping practices of housing regulation and provision. I look at discourse regarding housing regime theory as both an outcome and an origin of housing policies, keeping in mind, as Ruonavaara points out (2020:8), that ‘discourses define policy problems as well as policy solutions’. It is thus important to tie the concept of a regime with the patterns of actions of players in the housing systems, at a particular place and time, adding the perspective of discourse. The definition of housing regime that will be adopted in this research is thus the one proposed by Clapham (2019:4), as ‘the set of discourses and social, economic and political practices that influence the provision, allocation, consumption (of housing), and housing outcomes in a given country’.
3.3 Housing exclusion as social exclusion? By defining exclusion according to Levitas et al.’s definition (2007), it has been noted that social exclusion is characterized by a multitude of factors contributing to it, and looking at social exclusion implies at a certain level, to look at housing exclusion. The housing system can and does play a part as a fundamental element of social and spatial stratification. According to Sommerville (1998), ‘social exclusion through housing occurs when housing processes deny certain groups control over their lives and reduce access to wider citizenship rights’.
There has been little research examining the nexus between housing and social exclusion/inclusion. Hulse et al. (2010, 2011) have tried to conceptualize this relationship specifically in connection with the Australian policy context. Berescu et al. (2013) highlight how there are mainly two approaches regarding the discourse of housing exclusion. On the one hand, a human-rights-based approach looking at housing exclusion in the individual sense, implemented and exacerbated by elements such as spatial segregation and forced evictions. On the other hand, there is a research approach focusing more on the causes of this exclusion, mainly identified in the constant withdrawal of the State from the provision of public housing, the general commodification and financialization of housing3, and the general dismantling of welfare states in Western Europe. The exclusion of individuals or communities from access to housing can thus be tied to the discourses regarding social exclusion identified by Levitas (2005). I believe that all discourses can be somewhat interconnected in the wider context of housing exclusion. Firstly, the moral underclass discourse, focusing on alleged inherent negative behaviors of those excluded, can shed light on specific regimes of truth which shape the direction of housing policies as skewed against certain segments of the population - as in the case of the Roma. Secondly, both the redistributionist and the moral underclass discourse mainly refer to and reflect the housing exclusion of certain categories to structural factors relying also upon, but not exclusively, structures of welfare provision.
3 The topic of housing financialization has been further elaborated by M.B. Aalbers in the book The financialization of housing: A political economy approach, 2016.
16 Looking at the housing question and at housing exclusion using the concept of social exclusion helps to broaden the issue to wider debates of citizenship, integration, structural racism, and wider societal issues; and it especially helps to highlight and better understand the fundamental role housing plays in regards to those problems. From housing segregation and exclusion derive a multitude of limitations that affect many social groups - health status, education, access to the labor market, good social relations (Di Noia, 2016). While it can’t be claimed that solving housing exclusion could solve the other issues presented, it certainly seems logical to attest that exclusion from housing deepens other structural inequalities, and that overcoming housing exclusion is a necessary step towards overcoming the multidimensionality of broader social exclusion. Analysing the conditions of housing exclusion (inside a specific housing system) and relating them to the concept of social exclusion, allows us to comprehend with greater depth what are the wider experiences related to housing inclusion/exclusion, and how those lived experiences are shaped by specific housing conditions. Housing exclusion should not only be understood as a practical measure for conditions of disadvantage - it should be understood as a driving force behind social exclusion and, in opposition to it, as the pathway leading to possible social inclusion. It is thus important to understand in concrete terms what are the fundamental set of practices in a specific housing regime which enable and reproduce said housing conditions and outcomes in order to allow for housing to shape the trajectory of future broader inclusion.
17 Part II
4. The Roma in Italy: historical perspectives The purpose of this chapter is to give a brief overview of the historical development of Roma communities in Italy. As the scope of the chapter is to summarize briefly the social and historical conditions of Roma and Sinti in Italy, certain aspects that are shortly described will be expanded upon later on in the research.
4.1 The importance of being (called) Roma The Roma communities present on the Italian territory are an incredibly varied galaxy of different groups, dialects, traditions, and religions - many varied communities also with different names. As a first step towards introducing this research analysis, It is important to define what is the terminology used and the implications of it. While carrying out the research, I encountered many different names for Romani people: gypsies (‘zingari’ in Italian), nomads, travelers, Roma. Each of these terms has its historical development and use, and its different implications. In focusing to understand ‘how language works within power relations’ (Taylor, 2004:436, see paragraph 1.1), choosing a specific term is not a neutral action, devoid of meaning and repercussions, placed above societal structures - it is an action that carries with it meanings, imageries, and symbolisms which cannot be underestimated. “First of all, we must put an order in the words themselves and define them well. [...] Deciding the word is not unlike deciding the method of analysis. [...] Deciding the word is establishing a frontier”4. As we will also see later in the research, deciding the word means also shaping different sets of rights and the access to them; it means shaping ethnically and culturally defined groups outside of the norm; it means establishing the frontier between us and them.
The Italian term zingari (tsigani, cigani, zigeuner in other languages) is believed to derive from the greek-byzantine term athinganoi, which meant ‘untouchables’ (Horvát, 2014; Malini, 2010; Montrella, 2019). This term not only carries with it a negative dimension originating from the Middle Ages, connected to the idea of Roma people being heretics, pagans; believing the Roma to be native of the Indian subcontinent, the use of the term ‘untouchables’ is also connected to the infamous lowest caste (or better yet, non-caste) in the Indian caste system, those of the dalits, also known as ‘untouchables’ (Malini, 2010). The term was indeed in general use for a long time in Europe, and it is still used in a derogatory way, while many Roma communities and organizations have called out the term for its historical racist implications (Horvát, 2014). While the English translation of the term zingaro is indeed gypsy, the English term is related to the Spanish gitano, which is considered to be derived from the old belief that Roma people came from Egypt (Malini, 2010).
4 Extract from the book Aspects de la marginalité au moyen age [Aspects of marginality in the middle ages] (G.H. Allard [Ed.], 1975, L’Aurore.)
18 The term nomads, while it is generally outdated and criticized in academia, is still heavily used in popular discourse as a way to address the Roma people. The etymology of the word is attributed to the Greek word νομάς which meant ‘roaming about (especially for pastures’. The impact of the term has been generally underestimated, because it is believed to have less negative connotations than zingaro; consequently, it has been often used even at a political and normative level to describe Roma people as those without a stable home. The use of the term nomad to describe Roma people is considered not only wrong in relation to the fact that most of the communities around Europe have not been culturally nomadic for centuries, shifting to a sedentary lifestyle, and only regained a sort of ‘nomadic’ lifestyle on account of the constant persecutions and expulsions they were historically subjected to, being forced to a sort of ‘compulsory nomadism’, as Malini (2010:40) described it. It is also wrong in relation to the fact that not having a stable home has historically been regarded with suspicion, and believed to be a reflection of alleged deviant characteristics (Malini, 2010).
In this research thesis, with the purpose of facilitating the analysis and the comprehension of the work, the term “Roma” will be adopted to identify the diverse populations present in the peninsula. The term Rom (plural Roma), means in romanés “man, human being” (Montrella, 2019), and is the general term which was recognized by the very same Romani communities - it was chosen as the general name to cover the groups during the 1st World Romani Congress in 1971 (Council of Europe [CoE], 2011). I am aware of the limitations imposed by the conceptualization of this incredible cultural variety under the same collective identity, at the same time, however, I acknowledge the necessity to simplify the recognition of these groups as a necessary step in order to be able to present the proposed research. Nonetheless, I consider it important to briefly summarize the history and the presence of different Roma communities in Italy.
4.2 Who are the Roma in Italy? It is now believed that originally, Roma people came from what is now India, leaving the area between the XI and XIV centuries (CoE, 2011). The first Roma communities reached and started spreading around Europe from the XV century, suffering from episodes of discrimination quite immediately - for example, experiences of slavery in Eastern Europe or persecution in Western Europe (Sigona, 2007). The main groups in Italy are the Sinti people, who reside mainly in Central Europe and northern Italy and have a tradition as circus artists; the Lovari (whose name comes from “lob”, horse in Hungarian), traditionally horse farmers; the Kalderasha, traditionally copper workers; the Rudari, originally street artists and musicians; the Khorakhané, Muslim Roma coming from Bosnia, whose name means ‘khorá (Quran) bearers’; and the Caminanti, a group of unclear origins that has historically been stationed in the city of Noto, Sicily (Montrella, 2019).
Four main migratory flows have been identified regarding Roma history in Italy (Sigona, 2007; Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019; Istat, 2017): The first wave of immigration was the one starting from the XV century. During this period, especially in the XVI century, many repressive laws against Roma people started to be implemented all around Europe: in what is
19 modern Romania, Roma communities were enslaved; in 1493 the first order of expulsion against Roma was emanated in the dukedom of Milan, and again in 1512, as the Roma were accused of bringing the bubonic plague to Italy (Malini, 2010). The second wave of immigration started at the end of the XIX century and intensified after WWI and WWII - that’s when 7’000 rom Kalderasha reached Italy from the Balkans, and Sinti communities came fleeing Nazi Germany. The genocide committed against Romani people under Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy is often overlooked and forgotten. The Roma call it Porrajmos, a romanés term which means devastation, destruction. Historians believe that over 500.000 Roma were killed in concentration camps (Malini, 2010). Most of the communities who came in the first half of the twentieth century have gained Italian citizenship over the years. A third influx was identified between the 1970s and 1990s, when approximately 40’000 Roma coming from Yugoslavia (and then after the dissolution of it, and the civil war in Bosnia in 1992) reached the country. And the final wave of migration, which will be discussed more in-depth later on, is the one that started in 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria entered the European Union, and thus the borders between the countries were open. Most of the Roma of recent immigration are not Italian citizens, but have the same rights recognized to every EU citizen.
Nowadays, estimates of the number of Roma present in the Italian territory vary, and are often difficult to precisely obtain. However, the most widely accepted estimates vary around 150’000-180’000 Roma people in Italy (Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011; Maestri, 2014; Sigona, 2005, 2007), approximately about 0,23% of the overall Italian population. Many of the Roma and Sinti currently living in Italy are Italian citizens, around 60%, while the remaining 40% comprises the foreign Roma of more recent immigration (Sigona, 2005; Maestri and Vitale, 2017). Around ⅓ of all Romani people, both Italian and foreign citizens, live in either authorized or unauthorized camps, usually located in the outskirts of towns, in living situations characterized by extremely bad hygienic conditions, bad connections to the rest of the city, and extremely high levels of segregation (Clough Marinaro, 2015; ERRC, 2000).
4.3 The legal status of Roma in Italy Research and dialogues on the social conditions of Roma people in Italy are made even more difficult by the many different legal conditions that characterize different Roma groups (Sigona, 2005). The Roma of oldest immigration and those who came during the first half of the 20th century are, by now, fully Italian citizens, with the complete set of rights which should be given to this legal status. Secondly, there are EU citizens, mainly comprising of Roma of most recent immigration, who came after the EU enlargement of 2007 from Romania and Bulgaria. The Roma communities who came during the 70s and 90s, from Yugoslavia, have extremely diversified legal conditions: some are citizens of their country of origin, and thus non-Eu citizens; while others are in the extremely difficult condition of being apolidi, that is, ‘stateless people’ - this usually is the legal status of those who left Yugoslavia before its dissolution, and thus never managed to obtain citizenship from the new nations that were created after the breakdown of the state (Sigona, 2016). Different legal statuses do, of
20 course, influence the level of social inclusion/exclusion experienced by Roma people - such as being able to access healthcare services more easily, being able to apply for public housing, or being advantaged in finding a job - even though, as it will be described in the following chapter, having Italian citizenship or another ‘favorable’ legal status does not obstruct processes of social exclusion from different social dimensions. Sigona (2016) has highlighted the difficulties, both in obtaining citizenship from their country of origin, and in gaining the actual legal status of being stateless in Italy, for which a lengthy, complicated and expensive procedure is required, for which Roma people rarely receive assistance. One of the main aspects which cause the most difficulties in being able to gain legal recognition, is the condition of residing in the camps: an important requirement to gain any kind of legal recognition (as a stateless person, or even citizenship), is being able to prove residence - for stateless people, it is required that the person has resided in Italy for at least 5 years. But it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to gain proof of residence for those living in the camps (Sigona, 2016). These difficulties become inter-generational ones, since the Italian legislation follows the principle of ius sanguinis: Italian citizenship is acquired at birth by those who have at least one Italian parent; while children born in Italy from foreign parents need to wait until reaching 18 years, but even then they need to be able to prove “to have been residing legally (with a residence permit) in Italy without interruption until reaching the age of majority” (Legge 91/1992, art. 4 comma 2). This can prove to be difficult for those who grew up in the camps.
5. The dimensions of Roma’s social exclusion The Roma constitute one of Europe’s largest minorities - estimates on the number of Roma people in the European Union vary between 10 to 12 million (Amnesty International, 2011; EC, 2011). But they are also one of the most disadvantaged - the European Commission, in the ‘EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020’ (2011) states that ‘many Roma in Europe face prejudice, intolerance, discrimination and social exclusion [emphasis added] in their daily lives’ (EC, 2011:2). Having previously framed social exclusion as a ‘complex and multidimensional process’ (Levitas et al., 2007:18), it is important to understand what those dimensions are and how they interact with each other, in order to define the Roma as socially excluded. The analysis will follow the dimensions highlighted by the European Commission (2011), with the focus on the Italian context.
5.1 Health In regards to health conditions and access to healthcare, an obvious gap can be observed between Roma people and the majority of the population. Whereas on a European average, life expectancy is 76 for men and 86 for women, life expectancy for Roma is 10 years less (EC, 2011). Extremely bad health conditions are a general characteristic among Roma populations across Europe (Scullion & Brown, 2016). In Italy, there is a lack of national data coverage on the health condition of Roma communities, as well as a lack of a clear and unified policy regarding Roma access to medical assistance (Azienda USL 5 2007), a right that is recognized by the art. 32 of the Italian Constitution. Mostly, the safeguard of health is left in the hands of the local health authorities ASL (Azienda Sanitaria Locale) by regional
21 laws. For example, in the Lazio region, the regional law (L.R. 82/1985) ‘Norme a Favore dei Rom’ (norms in support of the Roma), which historically was one of the first laws developed specifically in regards to the Roma populations, states in art. 4 that ‘the local health authority responsible for the territory ensures to the rest camp the hygienic surveillance [emphasis added] and medical assistance’. The same term is used in the Veneto regional law, art. 3 (L.R. 54/1989) - ‘medical surveillance is ensured in the rest camp’. It is particularly interesting to note the use of the term surveillance (‘vigilanza’ in Italian) - it seems like what is ensured is merely an act of control, instead of the access to the health facilities per se. In regard to this observation, Perocco (2016) notes how, after his analysis of the health conditions and health disparities of Roma people, what emerges are critical issues in the access to sanitary structures - such as limited fruition for the people residing in camps (which also leads, as he points out, to improper use of the emergency room, given the lack of other options); and direct and indirect discriminations put in place.
Overall, the main critical issues in regard to Roma’s health conditions that can be drawn from Perocco’s (2016) analysis are: the lack of vaccinations, and a high percentage of people who are not registered in the national health service (SSN). In regards to this aspect, a distinction has to be made between the different legal status - for example, in Rome, it emerged that are in possession of the national health card 97.5% of Italian Roma, who have been residing in Italy for a long time; 75% of Yugoslav Roma, 37.6% of Romanian Roma; and 18.4% of Bulgarian Roma, the ones of most recent immigration (Fondazione Abriani, 2012). It is also important to highlight how the health condition is heavily connected to the housing question. Many Roma camps are located in extremely unsanitary conditions - peripheral areas characterized by high environmental and noise pollution, often located close by to landfill sites, incinerators, or highways - locations that have often been connected to an increase in cancer mortality (Perocco, 2016).
5.2 Education The aspect of education is also telling in regards to the condition of exclusion of the Roma. It is acknowledged on a general level in Europe that Roma children have an extremely low level of completion of even primary education in many countries, that they are often over-represented in special education (Amnesty International, 2011; EC, 2011), and that illiteracy rates often are over 50% (Scullion and Brown, 2016). In Italy, a slight increase in registration has been shown in preschool and middle school - but still, the rate of children who leave the education system after middle school without proceeding to high school, is abysmal. According to a report from the Ministry of Education (MIUR, Fondazione ISMU, 2016:40), in the academic year 2014/2015, on a national level, 2.179 children were enrolled in preschool, 6.441 in primary school, 3.569 in middle school, and only 248 were enrolled in high school. The same report states that ‘it is undeniable that the number of Roma enrolled in school is extremely inferior to the number of Roma minors in the age for compulsory education’ (p.40). In Italy, the education system used to be outright segregated for Roma children: In 1965 the Ministry of Education established separate classes, called Lacio Drom. They were definitively abolished in 1982, when Roma children were integrated into the
22 general classes, with the help of special ed teachers. While the education system is not outright segregated anymore, many problems still persist. A report from Associazione 21 Luglio (2013), highlighted the many difficulties Roma children face everyday in Italian schools: many teachers have stated that, due to the difficult social disadvantage many Roma children come from, they often struggle to keep up with the curriculum (p.23), and many teachers interviewed in the report have said that they believe it is the ‘context’ that makes all the difference, because the institution didn’t put them in the necessary position for them to be able to count or even write properly (p. 25). While more often than not these shortcomings are only reconnected to alleged cultural deficiencies - for example, a general belief that Roma parents don’t want their kids to go to school, because they bring them with them to beg in the streets (Di Noia, 2016b). What this discourse purposefully ignores are the structural difficulties Roma children face in relation to schooling, such as the constant conditions of economic and housing precariousness they have to deal with everyday. This is especially true for the children who come from the camps - an absolute lack of services, constant evictions and re-collocations, and the placement of the camps in extremely peripheral areas - all contribute to damaging even a basic thing such as reaching the school. For example, interestingly enough Associazione 21 Luglio (2013) highlighted the difficulties for the children living in the via Salone camp, in the eastern periphery of Rome. Since there was no bus line close to the camp which connected it with the neighboring areas, the children had to be escorted by social cooperatives’ workers to all of their schools - going as far as 16 km at times. Having to stop at each school to escort the children inside, some of them at times arrived to class even 60 minutes later, and sometimes had to leave earlier at the end of the day in order to pick up children from other schools in time (p.16). All of this, because of the completely isolated placement of the camp. These conditions cause not only practical disadvantages - they contribute to shaping a particular psychological condition of segregation which hinders their active participation in the school system (Di Noia, 2016b).
5.3 Employment The ‘EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020’ (EC, 2011) set as a goal 75% of Roma aged 20-64 to be employed. A report on the implementation of the strategies (EC, 2019) showed that the share of Roma aged 20-64 in paid work was 43%, while the employment rate in the EU in 2020 was 73.1% (Eurostat, 2020). In Italy, employment conditions for Roma people are very dire: Basso (2016) confronts several surveys and reports in different Italian cities, and what emerges is an unemployment rate in a range between 39% and 65%, while the average unemployment rate in Italy is 9.2% (source: Istat) - although it has to be noted that youth unemployment is particularly higher, reaching 29.7% at the beginning of 2021 (Tucci, 2021). The severe conditions of discrimination Roma are subjected to has a multitude of effects also on employment, stemming from ideas that Roma are prone to stealing, which leads to people being less inclined to hire them (Basso, 2016). There is also a relation between employment and housing conditions - Fondazione Abriani (2012) highlighted relevant differences between Roma living in an accomodation and Roma living in the camps (even then, there are differences between those residing in the formal and the informal camps). The report showed that the employment rate for Roma
23 residing in an accomodation was 46.6%, it was 33.2% for those living in a formal camp, and it went down to 24.0% for the residents of the illegal camps. Also, for those residing in camps, illegal, undeclared work involved at least 50% of the population (Fondazione Abriani, 2012). There are many factors contributing to this labor marginalization - historically, it has been noted that the ‘traditional’ occupations for Roma and Sinti communities, different typologies of craftsmanship, slowly lost their importance and demand due to processes of modernization and industrialization - by then, the segregating and discriminating living conditions heavily hindered the possibilities of finding new types of solutions regarding employment.
6. Housing exclusion of the Roma “The right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head or views shelter exclusively as a commodity. Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.” (UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1991)5
As it has been discussed in the previous chapters, the overall condition of marginalization has different causes and various dimensions participating in its formation. This is true both on a general level, as well as in the Italian context. One of the fundamental variables shaping this exclusion has been identified in housing exclusion, which takes on different aspects in the Italian housing system - mainly, what has been called the ‘camp politics’ (Clough Marinaro, 2015).
Retracing what has been said before (paragraph 3.3, ‘Housing exclusion as social exclusion?’), I believe that in order to fully understand processes of social exclusion put in motion, it is necessary to comprehend the fundamental role played by housing, as one of the dimensions of social exclusion. It has already been briefly addressed the role housing exclusion for Roma people plays in influencing other dimensions (health, education, and employment), following categorizations previously presented in reports (EC, 2011, 2019; Fondazione Abriani, 2012) and identified by previous researchers (Di Noia, 2016; Scullion and Brown, 2016). As the focus of the research is on housing exclusion, this dimension will be explored more in-depth in the current chapter.
The chapter will begin with an overview of the current system of exclusion that has been put in place, and its different mechanisms. The subsequent paragraph will retrace the institutionalization of said exclusion through the use of a specific terminology; after that, the criminalization Roma people had to face in relation to their own exclusion will be brought forward as the problematization of the Roma question.
5 CESCR General Comment n. 4: The Right To Adequate Housing (Art. 11 (1) of the Covenant). December 13, 1991. Retrieved from: https://www.refworld.org/docid/47a7079a1.html
24 6.1 “Campland” Italy A report published by the European Roma Rights Center in 2000 described Italy as ‘Campland’ (ERRC, 2000), a fitting title to describe a country which has created and maintained over decades a totally separate housing system specific to one ethnicity, and a title that is still true to this day, twenty years later. A denial of adequate housing for Roma people is not uncommon in many European countries (Amnesty International, 2011; CoE, 2011; EC, 2011) - but the institutionalization of this segregation, which leaves the development and management of the camps to municipal authorities, has been singled out by scholars (Clough Marinaro, 2003, 2014; Sigona, 2005, 2011) and reports (Fondazione Abriani, 2012; Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019) and it has been singled out for its exceptional nature in the European landscape (ERRC, 2000). This housing policy has been specifically managed by different levels of government - it is mostly managed by local and regional authorities, but it has also been reinforced on a national level. According to Maestri and Vitale (2017), there are approximately 40’000 Roma people currently living in this secondary housing system throughout Italy.
Housing for Roma is a varied and multifaceted condition, and I am aware that it would be restrictive to limit its definition to the structure of the camp (which is a variegated reality of its own). Thus, the first distinction that needs to be made is between the different living arrangements. A report by Associazione 21 Luglio (2019:24), focusing on the conditions on the camps, distinguished between formal/legal settlements (‘insediamenti formali’) and illegal settlements (‘insediamenti abusivi’), while the report from Fondazione Abriani (2012) expands the analysis, adding the categories of ‘house’ (included in this category are all the permanent structures outside of segregated contexts - this includes homeownership and renting, both on the private and public market), and ‘other locations’ (such as reception centers managed by ONGs, and the condition of homelessness).
Table 1 illustrates the amount of people in the different living arrangements, dividing them both geographically and by place of origin. What emerges from the data is not only the fact that there is a large share of Roma population which resides in either legal or illegal camps, but that there is an obvious connection between the time of permanence on the Italian territory and housing solutions - for example, Bulgarian Roma and Romanian Roma are particularly present in the illegal settlements, while former Yugoslavian and Italian Roma are more represented in the legal camps. Italian Roma are also the group with the highest percentage of people residing in an accommodation. The table allows us to understand also something else: former Yugoslavian Roma, who upon arriving in Italy were some of the first victims of the institutionalization of camps (that were supposed to be temporary), mostly remained there (52,9%). And that for those who came after them, it shows that not only the system implemented over the course of 30 years did not evolve in any way, but also that when the ‘institutionalized’ solution reached its maximum capacity, no other solution was implemented - leaving the only option of the illegal camps.
25 Table 1. Type of settlement according to family and territorial characteristics. Data retrieved from Fondazione Abriani (2012). Rapporto nazionale sull’inclusione lavorativa e sociale dei Rom in Italia.
6.2 “Safeguarding nomadic culture”: The inception of camps The “Roma question” saw its inception in the arrival of flows of immigrants from former Yugoslavia, after the dissolution of the state. Many Roma reached Italy during that time, making the Roma presence more visible in the Italian territory, and with it the necessity to find a housing solution for these new influxes of migrants reaching the country. The institutionalised camps for Roma people are, as stated above, an Italian peculiarity, which finds its inception in the regional laws that were implemented between the late 1980s and early 1990s, in various regions all around Italy (Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011). It has been highlighted how these laws emphasized nomadism as an alleged cultural trait of Roma people - the majority of those fleeing Yugoslavia were not, in fact, nomadic, but led a sedentary life in their original countries. The first regional law to be approved in this regard was the L.R 41/1984 of the Veneto Region (later repealed and substituted with L.R. 54/1989, ‘Measures to safeguard Roma and Sinti culture’), and it was quickly followed by the Lazio region ‘Norms in support of the Roma’ (L.R. 82/1985), and others (Sigona, 2007).
This conception of nomadism as a right that should be granted to Roma people in order to preserve their identity (and thus, making this kind of segregation some kind of positive discrimination), is indeed the basis of these laws: “The region dictates norms for the safeguard of Roma identity and to prevent any obstruction to the right to nomadism [emphasis added] and to stop in the regional territory [...] [The region] will supply fundings for the implementation of stopover and transit camps [emphasis added]’ (L.R. Lazio 82/1985, Art. 1), or ‘The region recognises the right to nomadism [...] The municipalities will implement stopover and transit camps [emphasis added]’ (L.R. Lombardia 77/1989), or even ‘The Piemonte region recognises to gypsy groups the equal right to nomadism [emphasis added] and to permanence [...] The region will implement the realization of equipped stopover areas [emphasis added] for the gypsies’ (L.R. Piemonte 26/1993). The discourse is essentially the same in all the regional laws. There are indeed differences in the ways Roma people are referred to - in some they are outright called zingari (gypsies), in other ‘nomads’ (L.R. Umbria 32/1990) or ‘traditionally nomadic ethnicities’ (L.R. Lombardia 77/1989), or
26 Roma (L.R. Lazio 82/1985) - but it doesn’t seem to influence the conception of Roma as nomadic, thus only needing temporary resting areas instead of a system which could guarantee the inclusion in the housing system. Many of these laws are still in force, often causing disdain between Roma communities - for example, Roma people and NGOs submitted a request to repeal the regional law in Lazio in 2018 (La Repubblica, 2018).
Even when those laws are indeed repealed, it seems as if the institutions cannot fathom a different approach than that of temporality in the camps and a connection to nomadism. That is the case, for example, of the Piemonte region: a new law was proposed in 2019 to substitute the ‘Interventions in support of the gypsy population’ (L.R. Piemonte 26/1993), which was described as a ‘revolution in the relationship between municipalities and nomadism’ which would ‘pave the way for overcoming the sedentary nomad camps in the main Italian cities’ (Regione Piemonte, 2019). But it was indeed nothing but a reiteration of old discourses regarding the Roma: in the end, the idea was just to ‘create new areas designed for nomadism, which will completely substitute the old ones’, substituting the concept of the ‘nomad camp’ with that of ‘transit area’ (Regione Piemonte, 2019). It’s not exactly clear which part of this proposal is revolutionary in any way, since in its original conception, what became the current permanent camp was conceived as a ‘temporary stopover area’ even thirty years ago! Even the name seemed like a mere reformulation of the old discourse: ‘Norms regarding the regulation of nomadism [emphasis added] and contrast to unauthorized building’. Through these discursive practices related to the idea of nomadism, Roma people were ‘constructed as permanent migrants [original emphasis], which normalises their confinement in the nomad camp’ (Armillei, 2018:13).
Figure 1. Castel Romano camp, periphery of Rome. Retrieved from: https://www.ilmessaggero.it/roma/news/rom_campi_mappa_emergenza_favelas_oggi-4714203.html
27 6.3 The “Nomad Emergency”: criminalising discourse The year 2007 has been widely recognized as a significant moment regarding Roma’s presence and condition in the country (Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011; Armillei, 2014; Pasta, 2019; Stasolla, 2020). What was undoubtedly a pivotal moment was the homicide, on the 30 of October 2007, of Giovanna Reggiani, a woman killed while going back home outside of the Tor di Quinto train station in Rome. The killer was later identified as a Romanian citizen (La Repubblica, 2008a). It didn’t matter that the man was not a Roma (and that the essential witness in the case was indeed one [La Repubblica, 2008a]), the media and public opinion were quick in identifying the man as a Roma only due to his Romanian nationality, and a smear campaign was launched against both Romanian and Roma immigrants. The then-mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, even stated that “Rome was the safest city in the world before the entrance of Romania in the EU” (La Repubblica, 2007). Thus this sudden, new presence of impoverished Romanian Roma and non-Roma came to be seen as an emergency situation and a threat to public order. Roma people thus emerged as a minority group that severely threatened the security of the nation (Armillei, 2017; Maestri and Vitale, 2017). An obsessive discourse on the ‘right to security’ was brought forward, characterising Roma people as a threat to the nation, its culture and its people (Basso, 2016; Ivasiuc, 2020). The Roma were reaffirmed as the Other, whose lack of morality had to be regulated through an intensification of police control and expulsions, in an effort to criminalise poverty6. This climate of fear was crystallized in the Decree-Law n.181 ‘Urgent provisions regarding the removal from the national territory for public safety requirements’ (DL 181/2007), issued on November 1st 2007 by the then left-wing national government led by Romano Prodi, which facilitated the removal of EU citizens from Italy whenever they were deemed to ‘represent a threat to national security’ (art.1). After that, during the national elections of 2008, the center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi won also by explicitly targeting the Roma and framing them as a security threat during the electoral campaign (Stasolla, 2020). The newly elected government then issued the now infamous Declaration of the State of Emergency in relation to the settlements of nomadic communities in the territory of the Campania, Lazio and Lombardy regions (DPCM 21 May 2008). Interestingly enough, this emergency was declared by using an older law on emergencies caused by natural calamities - Law n.225/1992 (Armillei, 2014). This climate of crisis reached its peak with the events in Ponticelli, periphery of Naples. On the 10th of May 2008, a young woman accused a Roma teenager of having tried to steal her baby, resulting in a mob lynching against the Roma girl, saved only by the arrival of the police (La Repubblica, 2008b). This event not only fed into the stereotype which saw ‘gypsies’ as child-thieves, but it was the culmination of a climate of racist fears against the Roma. Two days later, on the 12th, angry mobs started attacking Roma camps in the neighborhood - these attacks went on for days, usually setting the camps on fire, while the residents of the camps had to flee their homes. The events caused international disdain and were then highlighted by a report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA, 2008). A few days later, under the ‘Declaration of emergency’, special commissioners were appointed in Rome, Milan and Naples, forming ‘Security pacts’
6 The ‘criminalisation of poverty’ issue has been explored in depth by sociologist Loïc Wacquant in his book Punishing the poor - The neoliberal government of social insecurity (2009, Duke University Press).
28 for the cities and giving them special powers - as in, being able to demolish Roma settlements more easily, increasing security and police presence in the camps (usually 24/7), and most importantly, starting a census of all Roma people in the cities, collecting fingerprints, photos and documents, even of minors (Clough Marinaro and Sigona, 2011, Clough Marinaro, 2014). These new security measures were heavily criticised abroad (ERRC, 2008; The Guardian, 2008), and even later on declared unlawful by the Italian Council of State (CdS n.06050/2011). Nevertheless, a discursive shift began, increasingly criminalising Roma people and preserving them into a segregating sphere of emergency. This signified a powerful shift in the way the government approached the Roma minority, and it showed how powerful a conceptualization of Roma people not only as nomads, but as dangerous to the social order, could be for the authorities on a political sphere.
7. Housing in Italy: a permanent crisis In this chapter, the specificities of the Italian housing context and its key characteristics, as well as its historical development will be brought forward.
Housing deprivation in Italy affects 1,470 million families in 2020 - 780,000 of which are in a condition of acute deprivation (Nomisma, 2020). There are 1.7 million households living in a condition of absolute poverty, and while the number slightly decreased from the previous year, it is still extremely higher than before 2008 - in 15 years this share increased from 3.6% to 6.4% (Istat, 2020). Almost half of poor households (43.4%) are in the rental sector. Overall, 15.1% of all households in the rental sector are in a condition of absolute poverty, while the share is significantly lower for the homeowners, 3.9% (Nomisma, 2020). Young people increasingly struggle to access the housing market - 66% of the population aged between 18-34 years is still living with their parents (Pittini et al., 2019); housing expenditure in rising, but it is not accompanied by an increase in household income (Table 2); and almost 650.000 households are currently queueing for public housing (Federcasa, 2015; Boreiko & Poggio, 2017). Italy is also the second country in Europe for empty homes - 2.7 million houses are left vacant (The Guardian, 2014).
7.1 The housing regime As part of the S-Eu/Mediterranean welfare regimes (Castles and Ferrera, 1996; Allen, 2006), a series of key characteristics can be identified. Those are: a generally low welfare provision, a highly segmented labor market (with a strong propensity towards the informal sector), and the historically greater role of family as an institution of welfare provision (Allen et al., 2004; Allen, 2006; Arbaci, 2007; Hoekstra, 2013). As Gentili and Hoekstra (2019) note, looking at the Italian housing system under the label of Mediterranean welfare regime allows for a greater understanding of the interdependence between cultural and institutional factors of welfare provision and the specific housing system. By considering the housing regime through Kemeny’s classification (2001, 2006) - thus focusing on the organization of the rental housing sector and its scale of de-commodification, Italy can be regarded as a dualist rental system. Two clearly separated systems can be identified: the private rental market, and the social rented sector. The low and weak provision of social housing finds its opposite in the
29 predominance of homeownership as a tenure (approximately 80%), which found its inception as a form of social security and asset-based strategy (Poggio, 2012; Baldini and Poggio, 2014). Retracing back to Blackwell and Kohl’s (2019) framework of path-dependence perspective (paragraph 3.3), the historical understanding for the predominance of this tenure (and the importance of the family) can be found in the legacy of the Catholic Church (Allen, 2006; Belotti and Arbaci, 2021), and of the Fascist regime, which promoted the construction of a homeowners society as a way to fuel economic growth and gain political consensus (Di Feliciantonio and Aalbers, 2018). In this context, highly based on familiaristic wealth and a rather weak welfare provision, it is already understandable how access to housing does not seem to be open to outsiders.
In the Italian welfare state housing policies have often been some of the least promoted, and to this day, social expenditure for housing is extremely low. Compared to one of the strongest and most expensive pension systems in Europe (16.8%), the GDP for social housing is just 0.5% (Nomisma, 2020). While historically there have been favorable policies and tax cuts reserved for homeowners, this does not mean that the tenure is currently an easily accessible one. Financial policies have pushed for the liberalization and expansion of the mortgage market, which led to an unprecedented increase in house prices (Banca d’Italia, 2020), especially between 1998-2007 - but this was not accompanied by economic growth for individual households (Gentili and Hoekstra, 2019). As Table 2 shows, there was a deep discrepancy between family income and house prices.
Table 2. House prices, rent and income in Italy between 1991 and 2007. Source: Gentili and Hoekstra, 2019.
The changes in the public housing sector offer an emblematic viewpoint to understand the commodification of the housing system. It is estimated that only 3%, roughly 700,000 units, of the residential stock is used for social housing (Pittini et al., 2019) - this figure diminished from the already low 7% of circa 20 years ago (Baldini and Poggio, 2014). This decrease is due to a series of factors. Historically, as Belotti and Arbaci (2021) noted, there was a significant increase in housing provision by the national government after WWII. This was
30 also due to the major immigration flows from Southern Italy to the Center-North and created the first housing emergency in the major cities. Especially in the 1960s, the INA-Casa program and then the Gescal (GEstione CAse Lavoratori, Housing Management for Workers) fund, which allocated funds from workers, industries, and government, were the main institutional actions oriented towards the provision of public housing, along with subsidized public housing plans, Piani di Edilizia Economica Popolare. The expansion of the public housing sector ended in the 1980s. Belotti and Arbaci (2021) identify 1978, with the first liberalization of rent control and the beginning of re-commodification of housing, as the beginning of the devolution of public housing in Italy. The Gescal fund was progressively frozen and demonetized, and was officially abolished in 1998 (Mudu and Rossini, 2018) - this meant the removal of the main funding source for public housing; the regionalization of housing provision meant the withdrawal of national government, while Right-to-Buy schemes progressively reduced the housing stock - this is still the case with the Piano Casa, approved in 2014, which allows tenants of public housing to redeem the accommodation after 7 years, reducing the fees already paid during those years from the price (Papanice, 2015). This creates an imbalance in the refurbishment of the housing stock: ERP accommodations are sold at bargain prices, ensuring a very low revenue that often is not even enough to pay for the construction of ⅓ of the sold accommodations (Romito, 2019), while other funding sources have been progressively dismissed. Public housing in Italy is thus constantly decreasing: since 1993, around 190 thousand units have been sold (Romito, 2019), and it is extremely scarce, considering also that the 650.000 on the waiting list are almost as many as the units that are currently available in the sector! (Federcasa, 2015; Pittini et al., 2019). Furthermore, the entire Italian housing stock, which today counts 12.2 million buildings, is among the oldest in Europe: 74.1% of it was built before 1981 - this means, among other things, an above-average thermal impact, and low levels of structural security, for example, seismic safety (Federcasa, 2016). Having an old housing stock with almost no replenishment means also that the accommodations were designed for different households than the current ones. Italian households are smaller than the past: in 1998, single-member households were 22.2%, they are 33.3% now, while families with more than five members fell from 7.7% to 5.2% (Istat, 2020). As Puccini (2019) noted - the demand has changed, but the offer stayed behind.
In metropolitan areas, the housing problem is becoming increasingly serious. In Rome alone, there are about 200,000 people in a condition of housing hardship; approximately 14,000 families are in the ranking for public housing (Comune di Roma, 2019); while 10 thousand families are living in squatted homes (Riva, 2021). Housing hardship is often called 'emergency', and it certainly is: it is a situation of increasing emergency that must be addressed with concrete answers in order to lead to functional changes. But the use of the term ‘emergency’ makes it seem that today’s situation is an exception to a previously non-emergency status quo, when in reality it is not: it is the result of a structural condition that has for decades ignored the housing issue on a national and local scale (Puccini, 2020).
31 7.2 The camps before the camps The housing question in post-war Italy and up to the 1970s - 1980s was a central theme in the political debate. It was the Italy of the economic boom - between the 50s and the 70s, flows of economic migrants from the poorer areas of the Centre-South invested Rome, Milan, Turin, and other cities. But those cities were not prepared to host such an increased number of people in a short time. The case of Rome is emblematic of the changes that invested the country. Lack of housing led to the formation of settlements in the outskirts of cities - these areas were neglected by the administrations, which did not know how to plan accordingly. It was indeed the time of the economic boom, and the building companies were part of it - but the interest was mainly in building homes for the fast-rising middle class and not the masses of proletarians, who had little to no economic prospects. By the 1970s, there were basically two separate cities - the middle class, central Rome, and the slum Rome (Tancredi & Daniele, 2006; Teodori, 2019).
The coexistence between Rome and the slums, called baraccopoli (a name that derives from the union of the word baracche, shacks, and the Greek polis) is ancient history: the phenomenon began in the 1930s, when Mussolini ordered the demolition of historical districts in the city center, by relocating the working-class masses in newly-built districts outside the urban limits, called borgate (literally, ‘village’, ‘hamlet’) (Farina & Villani, 2017; Emiliani, 2019), and in the years after WWII the situation only worsened. A 1968 census counted 57 slums with 62,000 inhabitants (Marchini, 2018). The situation started to change in those years as political mobilization stirred the residents of the baracche: in 1969, 25 apartments were squatted in the peripheral neighborhood of Tufello, in the summer of the same year 300 public apartments, which had been left empty for years, in the center of Rome, were also squatted, while other empty apartments property of the IACP (Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari) were occupied all over the city (Marchini, 2018). By 1976, the situation reached its peak - a segment from a tv program of the time claimed that “There are 300,000 Romans living in the borgate outside the town plan. A city inside the city, as big as Catania, completely abusive. These villages do not have water, schools, buses, sewers, or decent roads. For the municipality, which has tolerated its growth for thirty years, they did not exist until a few months ago. In recent years the inhabitants have organized themselves, the problem has become political” (Villani, 2012). Finally, the institutional response was to organize an intense construction of public housing: with mayor Luigi Petroselli (1979-1981), all the shacks were demolished, and the inhabitants moved to new public housing neighborhood - it is in those years that many of the now-infamous social housing neighborhoods, like Tor Bella Monaca, Corviale, Laurentino 28, Vigne Nuove, were built. Not all of the inhabitants were able to leave the shacks, though.
By the time that many slums in Rome were starting to be demolished, not only Italians had come to inhabit them. For example, the Casilino 900 camp, which was informally created at the beginning of the 1960s by Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants, had come to be inhabited during the 1970s by many Roma families from ex-Yugoslavia, who lived together with the Italian immigrants (ERRC, 2000; Maiello, 2011). During the 1980s, during the final
32 expansion of public housing interventions, Italian families were granted new accommodations, moved away from the slum, and their shacks demolished, while Roma people were left there, only able to rebuild the demolished shacks and keep living in the camp (ERRC, 2000). During the 1990s, the Casilino 900 camp naturally merged with the nearby Casilino 700 camp (also inhabited at the time only by Roma immigrants), creating what was, at the time, the ‘biggest ethnic slum in Europe’ (Stasolla, 2020:98), housing 2000 Roma, mainly from former Yugoslavia. With the 2008 election of the new mayor, Gianni Alemanno, demolishing the camps became the new mantra. In 2009, the municipality implemented the eviction and demolishment of the camp, but this time the situation was different: families were not moved to new public housing buildings: because there were none, as most of the housing production had stopped over the years, and because they were nomads (as it has been described in the chapter above, giving, or in this case denying, public housing to Roma people has been used as a powerful political tool). Instead, they were just moved to other camps around the city, such as via Salone, Camping River, via Candoni, via Gordiani, or were left to rebuild illegal shacks somewhere else (Maiello, 2011).
Figure 2. 150° Roma Capitale. Le Baracche di Roma. Retrieved from: https://comunitaolivettiroma.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/150-roma-capitale-le-baracche-di-roma/
7.3 Temporality as a solution One problem is that there is a lack of long-term policy planning, both at the national and municipal levels. Even in Rome, over the years, the response has often been to implement individual interventions that have only contributed to generate more fragmentation in the housing landscape (Cellamare, 2018). The usual trend that has been identified regarding the promotion of Roma camps can also be discovered in the broader picture: special funds
33 allocated to support certain solutions that are described as temporary but which, due to lack of planning, reforms, and strategic vision, become permanent, inadequate, and expensive.
This is the case, for example, of the structures commonly known as “residences”, and properly called C.a.a.t., or “Centri di Assistenza Alloggiativa Temporanea” (Temporary Housing Assistance Centers). This tool was established in 2006 as a housing solution for those families in serious housing emergency, who were on the waiting list for ERP accommodation, and had usually been evicted from previous private homes. The public housing request in Rome is extremely significant. In the latest ranking (Comune di Roma, 2019), 13.544 households resulted eligible. With a rate of 500 allocations per year, it means that it will take more than 25 years to clear out the list (Puccini, 2019). This is a staggering waiting time. And those accommodations ended up being extremely expensive buildings, paid for by the municipalities to cooperatives or property owners who won the public procurements (Bisbiglia, 2018). What was supposed to be a temporary solution to thin out the rankings of public housing has, predictably, become a permanent housing situation for many families. In practice, these residences usually are housing complexes located in the suburbs of the city, usually managed by private companies to whom the municipality pays hefty sums of money.
In 2016, the new council led by Virginia Raggi aimed at the abolition of the C.a.a.ts, approving in 2017 the “General Aid Plan alternative to the CAAT” (Comune di Roma, 2017b). The plan’s aim was to “sustain and support the entire family unit in emerging from the situation of need” (p.7), through a path based on three steps: the transfer to new institutions called S.a.s.s.a.t. “Servizio di Assistenza e Sostegno Socio Alloggiativo Temporaneo” (Temporary Housing Assistance and Social Support Service), the allocation of a Housing Voucher (Buono Casa) of about € 700 for ‘housing independence’ and, finally, the allocation in a public housing accommodation (Gainsforth, 2018). The creation of the S.a.s.s.a.t. structures is presented as something different, a new tool to start the dismantlement of the older C.a.a.t. residences, but a careful reading of the plan makes it clear that this represents nothing more than the old model adopted up until now, with the difference being the change in the name. Even though the new plan introduced a maximum reception time of 24 months, stating that the plan was to “direct the supported households towards the exit from the temporary nature of their emergency situation” (Comune di Roma, 2017b:8), it doesn’t really clarify what are the solutions proposed to families, when the problem is the structural lack of housing. What once again clearly emerges, is the emergency perspective given to the situation. It is written in the documents of the plan: “in a context in which the prolonged absence of significant public housing interventions by the national authority stands out, it emerges the need for programmatic and planning acts that make it possible to offer specific responses to emergency housing situations, associated with serious conditions of social, economic, and health fragility”, and that, “a series of situations unfolds in which the fragility, of individuals or entire families, takes on an urgent and dramatic character such as to require particular attention and planning” (Comune di Roma, 2017b:6).
34 8. All roads lead to Rome: testing grounds for social exclusion The number of Roma people present in the (formal and informal) settlements around Rome is not precisely known. There are different data: in 2009, while presenting the Nomad Plan by the then-mayor Gianni Alemanno, the proposed number was 7.177 Roma (Dalla Zuanna, 2013; Maestri, 2014). In a 2013 report (Dalla Zuanna, 2013:47), following data presented by UNAR and the police department, it counted a total of 4.793 people in the authorised camps and 6.282 in the illegal ones, thus reaching a total of 11.021 Roma in the camps. In 2019, Associazione 21 Luglio counted 6.080 people in the authorized and tolerated camps - a number that is supposed to be higher when counting the people in the illegal settlements, numbers often difficult to obtain (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019). Thus, it doesn’t seem incorrect the estimation made by Amnesty International (2010), which counted between 12.000 and 15.000 Roma people in the city. Rome is also the city with the highest number of racist attacks against Roma - 33.3% on a national scale (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019:50). While the Roma presence in the city seems to be perceived as a constant, imposing threat by politicians and citizens alike, the Roma in the city account only for 0.20% of the whole population (Armillei, 2017). Currently, there are 6 institutional camps left, called by the term villaggi attrezzati (‘equipped villages’).
Rome has had a long history with the institution of the camp, and it is often the case that strategies implemented at the local level in the city are then remodeled and reproposed on a national level - Rome seems to be the testing ground for Roma’s exclusion (Camilli, 2018; Stasolla, 2020). The Lazio region was indeed one of the first to propose a regional legislation regarding nomadism (L.R. Lazio 82/1985). The city has experienced a constant sequence of plans explicitly targeting the Roma presence, which, although each time they are acclaimed as ‘revolutionary’ and the ‘solution’ to the Roma question, more often than not re-propose the same logic and interventions, never accomplishing any kind of improvement. It was in 1994 that the first ‘Nomad Plan’ was proposed by the then leftist mayor Francesco Rutelli, which opened the first ‘temporary stopover areas’, to enter which an identification card was required (Stasolla, 2020). The following left-wing mayor, Walter Veltroni, changed the name to ‘solidarity villages’ (Comune di Roma, 2007). The Reggiani murder in 2007 shocked the city (see paragraph 6.3) - on May 18th, 2007, the mayor signed the Patto per Roma Sicura, ‘Pact for a Safe Rome’ (Comune di Roma, 2007) - according to which, for the ‘needs of containment of the population without a territory [emphasis added], [...] four solidarity villages’ (p.3) will be built. Meanwhile, ‘police forces will arrange for the intensification of surveillance on the current authorized settlements’ (p.4), and ‘the Ministry of Interior will arrange for the intervention of national protection forces to contrast “aggressive criminal phenomena” [original emphasis]’ (p.4). This pact was the crystallization of the double attitude Italian institution have towards the Roma: on the one hand, increasing criminalization of the population was put in motion in those years, with increased surveillance and police presence justified with the assumption that there was indeed an underlying criminal behavior related to Romani people; and on the other hand, the apparent benevolent attitude of the institutions, who despite the negative behaviors and characteristics, still aimed at creating solidarity villages in order to help Roma people get out of their own exclusion! This
35 criminalized image became a central part of the 2008 election strategy of Gianni Alemanno, who won by comparing Rome to New York, saying that ‘the slogan ‘zero tolerance’ must also become ours’ and that as mayor, he was going to ‘implement a systematic mechanism to eliminate the illegals and to move the regular ones outside of the inhabited areas’ (La Repubblica, 2008c). His victory marked a historical shift in the city: it was the first time that a right-wing mayor won in the historically leftist city: Alemanno rose to politics as a member of the far-right party MSI Movimento Social Italiano, and at the time of his victory was a member of the far-right Alleanza Nazionale party (Di Franco, 2008).
One aspect that needs to be highlighted is that Rome has often been considered as ‘the capital of evictions’ (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019:82). Ever since Veltroni’s mayoralty, and then the following Alemanno, Marino, and the current mayor Virginia Raggi, the main instrument proposed to combat the camp system has been that of evictions. The practice of evicting people from a camp, dismantling it (meanwhile highly publicizing the process), only to either build a new one further away from the city, or leave the former residents on their own, has become the standard practice (Battistelli et al., 2018). Evicting is not only a practice that, more often than not, leaves the subjects in a more precarious social position than before - it is also extremely expensive: according to Associazione 21 Luglio (2019), in 2019 the municipality spent 1.260.000 € on Roma evictions alone. This is not the only expense related to the camps - a 2014 report titled ‘Segregating is expensive’ calculated the total expenditure in regards to the camp system in Rome, for the years 2005-2011, to be 86.247.106 € (Ivasiuc, 2014).
8.1 The ‘Piano di Indirizzo’: good intentions, bad execution A new era seemed to be starting in the city after the scandal of Mafia Capitale, which brought to light the extremely deep network of corruption which was running the city, and which extended also to the public procurement for the Roma camps (Il Messaggero, 2016; La Repubblica, 2016). Virginia Raggi, from the anti-establishment party Five Star Movement, was elected mayor of Rome in 2016. The current administration implemented the resolution n.105 on the 26th of May 2017 - Piano di Indirizzo di Roma Capitale per l’Inclusione delle Popolazioni Rom, Sinti e Camminanti (Rome’s Guideline Plan for the Inclusion of the Roma, Sinti and Caminanti Population - from now on referred to as RSC). This new plan had some innovative characteristics: not only for the first time the term nomads was banished from the legislation, using instead the more correct denomination of RSC, but it also seemed to veer towards an approach based on overcoming the camp system: ‘Primary objective is overcoming the camps, which will take place gradually, according to the time necessary for the implementation of individual inclusion plans, realized also through the active participation of the families living in the camps’ (Comune di Roma, 2017a:6). Overcoming the camps would also be possible through ‘measures of financial assistance in regards to housing and employment’ (Comune di Roma, 2017a:5) in order to reach the ‘gradual overcoming of the camps, collection centers and solidarity villages’ (Comune di Roma, 2017a:5). The interventions were to follow four main guidelines: Education, Health, Employment, and Housing. The plan was vague in the description of the measures to
36 implement, but nonetheless seemed like a positive turning point in the city’s relationship with its Roma population, following ideas of integration outside the camp system (Battistelli et al., 2018). The plan was lauded by the unofficial 5 Star Movement leader, comedian Beppe Grillo, as a ‘masterpiece worthy of applause’ (Stasolla 2020, 2021). Things haven’t turned out quite as well though. One of the main aspects worthy of criticism is the Pact of Social Responsibility (Comune di Roma, 2017a). The idea is that families, in order to be able to obtain the benefits of the Piano di Indirizzo, are required to sign this pact with the municipality, stating that they ‘adhere to the project of assistance for the integration in the alternative housing solution’ and ‘accept the proposed housing solution’ (p.34). Associazione 21 Luglio (2020) estimates that roughly 33% of families have signed the Pact, with many people denouncing instances, from municipal authorities, of being pressured into signing the document. Despite the use of terms such as ‘process of emancipation’, ‘direct involvement’, ‘participation of the families’, the underlying approach is a rieducational one, treating the beneficiaries of said policy as subordinates and in need of institutional guidance towards social responsibility. Another emblematic and problematic aspect of this mentality of superiority is the inclusion in the plan of the figure of ‘mental coach’ in regards to employment, helping them ‘making the right decisions’ (Comune di Roma, 2017). The main strategies of the Plan in regards to housing inclusion (as described under point 1.1 ‘Housing’) are the ‘identification of households who have the intention of leaving the camps’, ‘the procurement of housing through the private market’ and the ‘adoption of temporary measures for economic support in accessing the housing market’ - such measures correspond mainly to a monthly housing bonus given to help families with housing expenses, for a maximum of 800€ (Comune di Roma, 2017). But, as highlighted by a report on the implementation of the plan (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2020) - it doesn’t seem like this support measure has been put in motion. The reason is the difficulty faced in persuading private landlords in renting to Roma people faced with the precarious economic situation of many households, and for fear of ‘unfulfilled commitments’ (p.22) from the municipality - that is, fear that not even the Municipality would pay in time. In 2019, after the dismantling of the Camping River solidarity village, data showed that only 12% of families had been able to, precariously, enter the private market through the housing bonus, while the vast majority of the evicted families had just moved to illegal settlements. If the goal of the plan was just to dismantle to official camps, then the direction undertaken seems right: the official villages lost, in 2019, 800 people, while, as reported by Associazione 21 Luglio (2019), the number of people residing in the illegal camps increased of roughly the same number, showing that just closing official camps is not in any way the solution to the problem, and throwing Roma people in the private market with barely any support isn’t either. Public housing, which is barely mentioned in the Plan, seems in recent years to be the only possible solution for Roma people to get out of the camps.
8.2 Public housing: Double standards or silver lining? For Roma people with Italian citizenship or a residence permit, it is possible to sign up for the allocation of public housing. Given the lack of specific national norms regarding housing for RSC people, a key role is undertaken by regional and municipal legislations (as is the general
37 case in Italy, with the progressive withdrawal of the national government) - for example, the case of the regional Law n.82/1985 of the Lazio region, discussed in paragraph 6.2. Despite the fact that, as it has been previously discussed, the camp is still the preferred institutional instrument to answer the housing question of Roma people, there are other solutions that are vaguely proposed - as is the case of the ‘buoni casa’ discussed in the Piano di Indirizzo to support access to private accommodation (which is the same instrument used in S.a.s.s.a.t. plan). In light of the intense condition of economic hardship faced by many Roma households, it is important to highlight the discrimination they face in accessing the private real estate market (Amnesty Internation, 2013, 2016). For many Roma households, public housing seems to be the only option to escape the conditions of segregation faced in camps (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2019). But even this instance is not as easy as it may seem, as it is the case for public housing in Rome.
Access to public housing is regulated by the municipalities through a series of selection criteria that assign points to each applicant - the more points a household has, the higher the chances of being selected in the allocation process. In the 2000 selection criteria, the highest score was given to households who had been previously evicted from private accommodation. Roma people were not part of this category, as camps are not considered to be private accommodations - thus were relegated to lower scores, which often did not make them eligible for public housing (Amnesty International, 2010; Open Society Foundation, 2013; Adnkronos, 2019). This was already a powerful inconsistency: why should an eviction from a camp be considered differently from a private eviction? After that, on December 31, 2012, during the Alemanno mayoralty, a new public notice with different selection criteria was issued (Comune di Roma, 2012), and it seemed as if new possibilities were open for the Roma in the camps. These new criteria were said to be designed to safeguard the most vulnerable groups (Di Pasquali, 2013) - and in theory, they did. The first category A1, which granted the highest score of 18 points, included ‘households in situation of severe housing disadvantage’, which included those families ‘residing in collection centers, public dormitories, or in any other structures provisionally procured by recognized bodies, entities, voluntary associations in charge of public assistance, with a continuous stay in aforementioned structures for at least one year’ or ‘those that are economically assisted by Social Services and present a condition of serious housing hardship determined by temporary settlement [emphasis added], for at least one year, in improper structures, thus lacking essential services’ (Comune di Roma, 2012:2). A statement by Associazione 21 Luglio called this ‘a victory regarding human rights’ (Associazione 21 Luglio, 2013), which would hopefully allow at least 1.500 households to present a request with concrete hopes of gaining accommodation. But shortly after, an internal circular was issued by the Department of Housing Policies on January 18, 2013, specifying that Roma people living in the camps were not to be considered recipients of the highest score, as they resided in permanent structures (Open Society Foundation, 2013; Amnesty International, 2016). The same structures which were previously described by institutions as temporary areas, in order to safeguard Roma’s nomadism! The aspect of temporality was promoted when it ensured the maintenance of segregation, while it was quickly rejected when it meant its possible escape from it. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise - the then-vice mayor, Sveva Belviso, had stated some
38 months prior that ‘There is no alternative solution to the camps. There is no intention of creating a priority lane to give Roma housing. They can forget about it!’ (Corriere della Sera, 2012). Even though granting access to public housing shouldn’t be considered as creating a priority lane at all. This sparked international outrage - Amnesty International, Associazione 21 Luglio, Open Rights Foundation, and ERRC sent a letter to municipal authorities, criticizing the discrimination put in place, and even Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for Human Rights at the time, called for ‘Italian mayors to give Roma a house’ (Eduati, 2013).
In 2014, with the next mayor Ignazio Marino, some changes started to happen: on April 8, 2014, a municipal circular officially banned the term ‘nomad’ from any municipal document, with the mayor stating that ‘I believe that one of the main factors to overcome discrimination is the cultural one’ (Corriere della Sera, 2014), and after that, the new councilor for housing policies declared the withdrawal of the 2013 discriminating circular, thus opening public housing for Roma people living in the camps. This new opening has not been the solution to the problem - as stated in chapter 7, the structural shortage of public housing, coupled with an extremely low turnover rate and an extremely long waiting time, still often preclude access to dignified housing and the exit from camps. All things considered, ever since access to public housing has been opened to Roma people, it seems like it is posing itself as the only possible solution for Roma people outside of the camps. As stated in the previous paragraph, not much focus is given to the topic of public housing in regards to housing inclusion in the current Plan, apart from the ‘identification of properties available to Roma Capitale to allocate to those in housing emergency, included Roma households’ (Comune di Roma, 2017a:19). Despite this, Roma families have finally been able to access public housing: in La Barbuta village, 21 households were allocated an ERP (Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica) apartment. But given the long waiting time for accessing public housing, there hardly seems to be any connection between those positive outcomes and the recent implementation of the Plan. One seemingly upside is what was noted in paragraph 7.1: the old housing accommodations were designed for traditionally bigger households, and this can be an advantage for Roma households, who usually have bigger households. Out of approximately 74’000 public accommodations, 31’000 are destined for households with 4 or more people, while in comparison only 8’000 are destined for two-people households (Puccini, 2016). The excess of large accommodations seemingly facilitates the access of Roma (and other immigrant) households in the ranking. While the problem is not an excessive presence of Roma and other immigrant households in the ranking, but the inadequate composition of the housing capital, the situation is often perceived as the government giving away public housing to ‘immigrants’ and not to ‘Italians’.
In this regard, on April 2, 2019, in the Torre Maura neighborhood in the southeast periphery of Rome, residents and other members of Casapound (a far-right group), protested against the transfer of 70 Roma (including 33 children and 22 women) to a new “Roma Collection Center”, a temporary mono-ethnic reception facility (which, according to the 2017 Plan, were supposed to be eliminated). The angry mob of about 300 people kept guarding the entrance to the facility, shouting “Those bastards have to burn” (Corriere della Sera, 2019). Torre Maura
39 is a suburban working-class district left in terrible conditions, such as the lack of services, including public transport with the rest of the city. Before the Roma families, the center hosted migrants awaiting political asylum, who “did not bother anyone” according to the residents, while the Roma, they “steal, I’m afraid they will break into my apartment, we already have so many problems here” (Corriere della Sera, 2019). Following the protests, the municipality capitulated and moved the people to other structures.
Days later, some residents of the Casal Bruciato neighborhood, in the eastern suburbs of Rome, protested against the assignment of a public housing unit to a Roma family, stating that “we don’t want the gypsies here, that house needs to go to an Italian” (Il Fatto Quotidiano, 2019). The Roma family of 8 people was at first forced to leave the place. Again, there was the reverse of the Municipality, which made the family return to the camp (Stasolla, 2020). On May 6, 2019, another episode. A family that had been assigned ERP accommodation, again in Casal Bruciato, was blocked by a garrison led by Casapound. In this case, at the end of the protests, a few days later, the family managed to enter the apartment (Camilli, 2019).
On January 25, 2021, a few hundred Roma people protested in front of Rome’s municipality, asking for the ‘unfreeze’ of public housing allocations, which have been blocked for months now. Representatives of the group, composed of people from various camps in Rome, wrote an open letter to Rome’s authorities, asking for “the closure of Special Offices - they are useless. The end of the investment of millions for our families - it’s wasted money. The end to the implementation of plans for our inclusion - they are ineffective. It’s those special actions that make us separate citizens for a part of the city who doesn’t understand why we deserve special treatment. To get out of the camps we have done like any other Roman citizen - we applied for public housing. We ask today for the chance to change our destiny, and for concrete action to unfreeze housing allocation and expredite the scroll in the rankings”. (Dinamopress, 2021).
Conclusion This final chapter develops the reflections regarding the research presented in this thesis, which had the aim to better understand the housing exclusion of Roma people by connecting it and analyzing it in the context of the housing regime. Discourse analysis was implemented as a method to understand the process of legitimation undergone by this segregation was brought forward to understand the current situation. On account of this, using the concept of discursive practices instead of limiting it to discourse meant understanding how discourse itself is involved in the constitution of social practices and institutions, such as housing regimes; and how in turn those shape the development of a certain discourse. It thus meant keeping in mind the dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures (Fairclough, 1992), working together in the constitution and stabilization of current conditions. By considering this dialectical relationship, attempting to frame and understand how Roma’s housing segregation “came to be” (Bacchi, 2021:7) in Italy entailed situating it
40 outside its boundaries of exceptionality and inside the broader context of the housing regime, understood as a ‘set of discourses and social, economic and political practices that influence the provision, allocation, consumption (of housing), and housing outcomes in a given country’ (Clapham, 2019:4). But at the same time, it meant bringing forward the process of discursive legitimization of such segregation. This thesis was an attempt to retrace and reconstruct both the narrative development of the specific condition of exclusion faced by the Roma, and the structural inequalities which underlie and enable its development. From the data presented in the research, a series of main points can be brought forward.
First of all, the aspect of temporality, connected with the lack of structural solutions. This is shown in the continuous implementation of regional laws emphasizing the temporary nature of the camps, even only through the terminology used to describe the structures; and by the fact that those same temporary structures have indeed become permanent ones - those who entered the camps in the 1980s-1990s, in most cases are still living there. But the same institutional response (or non-response) can be seen on a wider level in the housing context: by exploring the case of Rome, it has been shown how ‘Temporary Housing Assistance Centers’ are available to families in a condition of profound disadvantage, but those solutions are indeed temporary as the name itself once again suggests. Other actions undertaken are once again still superficial, often in the form of housing vouchers to enter the private market. These are all ‘filler’ responses that do not address in any way the underlying problem, which is the shortage of available affordable housing for the population.
Secondly, the defunding of public housing. It has been highlighted in this research how the time of inception of the camps in the late 1980s corresponded with the end of the expansion of the public housing sector, and the re-commodification of housing (Belotti and Arbaci, 2021). Through a brief historical overview in the case of Rome, it was pointed out how the structure of the camp is not much of a novelty in the Italian landscape as such. What was different was the context surrounding it: at the time of the inception of Roma camps, the country was witnessing the State’s retreat from housing provision and the beginning of a wider process of neoliberalization of the housing regime. The institutionalization of Roma camps in the late 1980s can be understood as the antithesis of the previous solution, which was the implementation of public housing. Thus, Roma people found themselves inserted in the middle of a wider process of residualization happening at a national level, and the retreat of the welfare state inserted itself into an already strong situation of disadvantage and exacerbated it. In this light, it is then possible to understand more in-depth the institutional response which advanced the discourse of nomadism as the ever-present alleged cultural trait of the Roma. This discourse both originated from the lack of solutions present at the time to house Roma people, and also contributed in the following years (and still to this day) to continuously shape and reproduce the conditions of exclusion, acting as an alleged ‘justification’ for the system that had been implemented. The normalization of this condition of segregation through the idea of nomadism not only worked towards presenting a “warped” view of those communities - but it helped depict segregating and discriminating policies under a positive light - the safeguarding of Roma and Sinti culture was something implemented for them, some kind of “benevolent discrimination” or benevolent violence
41 (Barker, 2017). The use of the term nomad intrinsically established a specific frontier between those with a house and those without one. Discourse, social practices and institutions (in this case, the defunding of public housing and the implementation of segregating policies), dialectically relate to each other forming the (discursive) practice of Roma exclusion.
This continuous housing segregation, interconnected inside the broader condition of social exclusion, has resulted in the discursive criminalization of Roma people. Ignoring the structural factors, the focus was instead brought towards the alleged failing of Roma people as a social group, the others outside the normative boundaries of society. The problem was not the Roma in the camps, but the Roma in the camps. That is, not the structural conditions of exclusion they are subjected to, but their inability to better ‘cope’ with those. This traces back to the discourse of social exclusion identified by Levitas (2005): under the moral underclass discourse, exclusion itself is pinned on the excluded as part of alleged cultural faults innate to the social group, and this can be seen on a number of different dimensions. In relation to housing exclusion, it’s because they are nomads; regarding education, it is them who don’t want to educate their children; as for employment, it is them who don’t want to be part of the labour market. Power relations shift the focus from structural inequalities to alleged moral ones. The key to understanding social exclusion, as stated in paragraph 3.1, is to refer to the structural character of it: social exclusion is the mechanism of controlling (and denying) access to resources - the excluded are those who are denied the ability to participate in the broader dimensions of citizenship. The concept of social exclusion is used in this study as a means to understand the importance of the dimension of housing segregation on social integration. By analysing a series of dimensions of exclusion, the fundamental role played by housing is brought forward. In the case of the camps, it hinders proper access to sanitary structures and leaves the people to live in incredibly unsanitary conditions; it impairs school attendance, by placing the children outside the city boundaries with limited connections; it damages access to the labour market. The issue can be broadened to advance reflections on how, from the right to housing, stems a variety of wider citizenship and social rights, access to which is often denied as a result, bringing forward in turn considerations on the role of the State to ensure a decent right to housing for its people. It can be understood how housing deprivation broadens its boundaries to include a wider scope of societal issues, and why it is necessary to look at the social and housing exclusion of Roma and Sinti as a unicum with the rest of society in order to comprehend that it is the insufficiency of housing policies and resources the real conflict that must be addressed. Analysing housing in relation to social exclusion allows for the opportuning to comprehend more in-depth not only how housing conditions influence other dimensions of exclusion, but how housing exclusion itself should not be considered merely in its practical term as the lack of accommodation, but as the focal point in regards to deeper exclusionary conditions and as the pathway towards better understanding how future social inclusion could be shaped and implemented.
This study drew attention on the relevance of understanding housing regimes, defined as sets of interactions between economic, social, political factors (Clapham, 2019), in shaping social exclusion. With this in mind, and by retracing back to the aim of this research, that is to
42 understand Roma’s housing exclusion as a unicum with the constant development of housing inaccessibility inside the Italian housing regime, the fundamental result of this research can be brought forward. Exclusion and inclusion are not distinctly delineated conditions, and it would be limiting to define the differences between the two as rigid and clear-cut. There is a spectrum of inclusion and accessibility, which connects to different sets of conditions affecting a variety of different social groups. Framing it as an exceptional situation faced by a singular social group risks continuing to highlight alleged faults and shortcomings in the specific group. Understanding it in its commonality poses Roma people on an equal footing with broader parts of the population for which housing exclusion and housing accessibility is becoming more and more a pronounced problem, and thus allows to broaden the spectre of available solutions. Not viewing the Roma people as separate from the rest of society enables the understanding of what are the deeper causes of exclusion, and bringing forward a study focused on the characteristics and practices of the specific Italian housing regime makes it possible to look at the structural deficiencies and not the alleged social ones, thus reflecting on what are the possible actions that could be undertaken to shape more positive future solutions.
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