Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome: Metropoliz, The Squatted Città Meticcia 3030708489, 9783030708481

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Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome Metropoliz, The Squatted Città Meticcia

Margherita Grazioli

Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome

Margherita Grazioli

Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome Metropoliz, The Squatted Città Meticcia

Margherita Grazioli Gran Sasso Science Institute L’Aquila, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-70848-1    ISBN 978-3-030-70849-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of ­ illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

‘Prima di sgomberarci sgomberatevi il cervello Noi siamo la comunità toglietevi il cappello!’ Assalti Frontali, Roma Meticcia

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of an activist and research journey that started years ago. There are therefore several institutions, comrades and colleagues to thank for contributing to its completion. First of all, I am thankful to the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) for awarding me the postdoctoral grant that has given me the opportunity to refine what I started during my PhD at the University of Leicester. During my doctoral journey at the School of Business, my supervisors Dimitris Papadopoulos and Keir Milburn offered me invaluable guidance, and provocations of thought, for navigating the unchartered waters of research. I also owe a big ‘thank you’ to the friends and colleagues who have shared my political enthusiasm and a relevant bit of life during the Leicester time: Marco Checchi; Irina Cheresheva (missing you and Emma so badly hon!); Matteo Ciccognani; Andrea Ghelfi; Martina Martignoni; Daniele Pizio; Martón Racz; Maddalena Tacchetti. At the GSSI, I would like to thank current and former GSSI colleagues for their support and feedback: Alessandra Faggian for her institutional and practical support as Social Sciences Area director; Sara Caramaschi (thank you friend for your invaluable support); Giuseppe Carta; Francesco Chiodelli; Alessandro Coppola; Ugo Rossi and all the junior and senior faculty members. Special thanks to my beautiful friends, colleagues and comrades Carlotta Caciagli and Maurizia Russo Spena for their persistent friendship, intellectual and emotional support, as well as Raffaele Traini for our ten years friendship. I am also indebted to the people who have read and commented on different parts of the book during informal chats, conferences and offered their endorsement: Emanuele Belotti; Vincenzo Carbone; Serena Caroselli; vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Osvaldo Costantini; Deanna Dadusc; Chiara Davoli; Enrico Gargiulo; Michele Lancione; Gaja Maestri; Miguel Martínez; Nicola Montagna; Pierpaolo Mudu; Gianni Piazza; Alessia Pontoriero; AbdouMaliq Simone; Giuliana Sorci; Pietro Vicari. One cherished thought goes to Sandra Annunziata, who I wish could still be with us and her daughter. One special dedication also goes to Tano d’Amico, whose affection (and pictures) I will carry with me permanently. The biggest dedication yet goes to my Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare comrades, and the warmest of ‘thank you’ to the inhabitants of Metropoliz that let me into their houses and lives. Without you all, none of this would have been nearly possible. One warm acknowledgement also goes to my family, my mum Stefania and my dad Attilio who are Metropoliz’s friends and supporters, and to my uncle Marco for being absolutely the coolest one. And last but not least, this is for you Alberto: a ‘comrade’ of mine in every possible notion, and one of the most talented urban scholars I have ever met. I hope this is not too cheesy, but you totally deserve to be on this page. Ci vediamo nelle strade….

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 First Impressions of Metropoliz  1 1.2 Research Design: The Città Meticcia and the Squatted City  5 1.3 Metropoliz as a Lens for Housing, ‘Right to the City’ and Urban Commons 10 1.4 Summary and Structure of the Book 11 Bibliography 14 2 Housing Squats, Urban Commons, Right to the City 19 2.1 Neoliberal, Mediterranean Urbanisation 19 2.2 ‘Housing Squats’ Beyond Informality and Squatting Taxonomies 23 2.3 Urban Squatting Movements and the Lefebvrian ‘Right to the City’ 26 2.4 Housing Squats as Urban Commons? 30 Bibliography 33 3 The Activist Ethnographic Method 41 3.1 Why Activist Ethnography? 41 3.2 Negotiating the Fieldwork 44 3.3 The Ethics and Politics of Activist Ethnography 46 3.4 A Research Project in, About and for Urban Squatting 49 Bibliography 52

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4 Rome, the Squatted City 55 4.1 Rome’s Urban Regime: A Historical Perspective 56 4.2 Housing Crisis and Informality in Post-crisis Rome 59 4.3 Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and the Housing Rights Movements 63 4.4 The Contested Governance of the Squatted City 67 Bibliography 73 5 Occupy Metropoliz 79 5.1 Metropoliz and Tor Sapienza, a History of Self-Made Habitation 79 5.2 ‘Who Are You? How Did You Get Here?’ 83 5.3 Squatting, Becom(mon)ing Community 88 5.4 From Exceptionality to Eurhythmisation 93 Bibliography 96 6 The Commoning and Eurhythmisation of the Città Meticcia 99 6.1 The Organisational Rites of Housing Squats 99 6.2 Communal Spaces and Barricades as Sites of Encounter103 6.3 The Assembly as the Site of Pluralistic, Consensus-Based Decision Making107 6.4 The Commoning of Social Reproduction113 Bibliography118 7 The Politics and Urban Commons of Metropoliz and the MAAM123 7.1 The Multi-scalar Politics of the Città Meticcia124 7.2 From Space Metropoliz to the MAAM: The Barricade of Art of the Mestizo City128 7.3 The Urban Commons of Metropoliz in the Squatted City133 7.4 Grassroots Urban Regeneration and the ‘Right to the City’137 Bibliography141 8 Without Metropoliz, This Ain’t My City!145 8.1 Understanding Metropoliz in the Squatted City145 8.2 For a Theory of Housing Squats as Urban Commons151 Bibliography157 Index161

Abbreviations

ACER BPM CCLC ERP GRA HRMs IIWW MAAM MACRO PCI

Associazione dei Costruttori Edili di Roma e Provincia (i.e. Association of Realtors and Builders of Rome and Province) Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (i.e. Precarious Metropolitan Bloc) Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (City Coordination of Housing Struggles) Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica (i.e. Public Housing) Grande Raccordo Anulare (i.e. the Big Rome’s Ring Road) Housing Rights Movements Second World War Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz (i.e. Metropoliz’s Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere) Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (i.e. Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Arts) Partito Comunista Italiano (i.e. Italian Communist Party)

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

View of Metropoliz from the Via Prenestina: Tor tre teste crossroads (March 2015) 2 The entrance and the visitors attending a MAAM guided tour during the #savemetropoliz event (September 2020) 4 Via Prenestina 913 (January 2018) 9 Artist painting on a wall inside the MAAM’s area (January 2020) 12 The HRMs’ manifesto celebrating the approval of the Lazio Region’s Deliberation’s implementation plan in 2016. (Source: Blocchi Precari Metropolitani Facebook Page) 69 The occupation of the Central Registration Office in via Petroselli (Rome) by HRMs to protest against the approval of Article 5 of the 2014 National Housing Plan (January 2015) 72 Kids looking at a book presentation from the rooftops of the factory (September 2020) 80 Metropoliz ‘Mestizo Autonomous Zone’ banner (November 2014)84 The factory’s outline coming from the Prenestina street (May 2017)95 The original fuses of the industrial plant left on Interviewee 8’s house’s wall (May 2016) 102 The Barricade of Art at the entrance of the MAAM (January 2015)106 A kid playing in the assembly room; chairs prepared for a book presentation during the first MAAM Saturday opening after the Covid-19 lockdown (September 2016–June 2020) 108 The playroom and the stairs painted by Veronica Montanino (January 2015–August 2020) 112 xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

The vigil organised by the Habesha squatter community to mourn the migrants killed by the Islamic State (26 April 2015) 115 The poster of the crowdfunding Pollada organised at Metropoliz in July 2015. (Source: Metropoliz Facebook page) 117 Metropoliz’s inhabitants cleaning the area before the football field while recycling wooden scrapes (September 2016) 124 The Space Metropoliz rocket (May 2015) 129 Team supporters during the 2015 Mediterraneo Antirazzista played at the Metropoliz football field (May 2015) 131 Metropoliz’s assembly at the MACRO during the ‘Stati Generali//Prove Tecniche di Rivoluzione’ (5 October 2019) 136 The red book of special surveillance handed in October 2016 to the Housing Rights Movements’ activists Luca Fagiano and Paolo di Vetta (Source: Blocchi Precari Metropolitani Facebook page)140 Laundry and moon-themed paintings in the ‘Roma’ block (October 2020) 148 Visitors to the ‘Moon Garden’ during the #SaveMetropoliz event (19 September 2020) 155

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter introduces the case study of Metropoliz, the Città Meticcia, a former salami factory located in a peripheral neighbourhood of Rome that was squatted in 2009 by housing deprived households with the cooperation of the housing rights movement Blocchi Precari Metropolitani. After presenting her first approach to the housing squat in November 2014, the author presents the research design and statement to argue for the relevance of the case of Metropoliz for inquiring the role of housing, right to the city and urban commons in cities unsettled by the financial and the pandemic crisis. Finally, the chapter addresses the notion of mestiza used by the activist-squatters and lays out the book structure. Keywords  Città Meticcia • Housing Rights Movements • Mestizo • Metropoliz

1.1   First Impressions of Metropoliz When someone thinks about Rome’s ‘great beauty’ (to quote Sorrentino’s film of the same name), the first things that come to mind are the cityscapes immortalised by Fellinian aesthetics of the city centre, packed with monuments, squares and palaces that are recognisable all over the world. Yet the most eye-catching and breathtaking landscape that comes to my mind when I think of Rome is that of Metropoliz. The former salami factory © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_1

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pops up where you least would expect it, in an unremarkable stretch of the Via Prenestina that is the threshold of the consolidated city as delimited by the Grande Raccordo Anulare (hereby GRA) ring-road (see Fig.  1.1). Prenestina is one of Rome’s historical consular streets, which these days connects the extended Southern-Eastern urban suburbs to the Tangenziale Est (the Eastern Freeway) reaching the junction of Porta Maggiore, close to the San Giovanni Basilica. As we move away from the city centre, the street fades into an inordinate assemblage of logistics routes, commercial facilities of any sort (shopping malls; gas stations; gold shops; 24/7 bars and betting agencies), warehouses and empty spaces that alternate as the

Fig. 1.1  View of Metropoliz from the Via Prenestina: Tor tre teste crossroads (March 2015)

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queues of commuters returning to their suburban homes become longer and longer in correspondence to the GRA’s Exit 16. It is still astonishing for me after when, shortly after the crossroads between the Prenestina and Tor Tre Teste road, a multicoloured ‘moon tower’ pops up, totally unexpected and shockingly ‘out of context’ even for those familiar with it, although I have known it for a number of years now. My first visit to Metropoliz in Via Prenestina 913 was in November 2014. Just the day before, I had met with the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM) activists who had first squatted the former Fiorucci salami factory at the end of March 2009. At the time, they agreed not only to be my ‘gatekeepers’ for my research and to host me during my brief, preliminary trip to Rome, but they also accepted to introduce me to Metropoliz’s inhabitants and to facilitate my move into a housing squat in order to carry out the ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation (see Grazioli 2018). We went there on a Saturday after attending a party the night before, celebrating the release from house arrest of two activists who had been arrested in front of the Parliament while protesting against the ratification of the 2014 National Housing Plan. The latter included an article specifically designed to punish squatters by excluding them from access to welfare services and regular utilities (see Chap. 4). As we arrived by car through the Tor Sapienza neighbourhood, I could see many riot police vans and armed policemen lined up around the Giorgio Morandi, the biggest social housing estate in the area. A few days before, residents led by far-right representatives had protested and rioted against the presence of a refugee reception centre close to the public housing block, alleging the migrants would insult and assault them (Grazioli 2018). Given this grim, tense atmosphere, the sight of Metropoliz’s facade seemed even more unexpected, and dissonant, beginning with its aesthetic impact. From a superficial glance, Metropoliz appears to be another example of the established partnership of redundant industrial architecture and contemporary art that has been experimented with across the world, from the Italian industrial districts to the hipster headquarters of Tokyo, Berlin and Detroit. However, one starts to understand that something is different when, just beside the gigantic graffiti of the human rights activist Malala Yousafzai, you notice dozens of coloured mailboxes on the gate that marks the entrance to the astounding, self-proclaimed Città Meticcia (Mestizo City). As you enter the first section, you cannot but notice the desecrating ‘F.A.R.T’ inscription over the roof, as well as adults, children, dogs and cats moving in different directions towards

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their houses and the different areas of the factory, signposted and organised in the same way as a small town would be. Walking down the main path, the first things you encounter are the main block of Metropoliz’s Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere (The Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz, henceforth MAAM) (see Fig. 1.2). Then you can find on the ‘Plaza Peru’ (the space where South American families firstly moved), the ‘space-rocket’ monument (now under maintenance), and the football field and recreational facility. At that point you clearly realise this is not just a museum in a former industrial site: it is an inhabited museum. Or, even better, it is an inhabited factory where a squatted museum lives. As you enter in the main building, you get lost in a maze of rooms, halls and gardens packed with different art pieces. In this same corridor in early 2015 you could find one of the few reproductions of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere degli Stracci (Venus of the Rags), miscellaneous salami-­ themed art pieces, and a memorial boat for the migrants who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Yet the ‘boundaries’ between the museum, the inhabited spaces and the former industrial machineries are not strongly defined. When you see carpets, laundry, garbage and even electrical appliances hanging on the balconies and in the main hall, you cannot help asking yourself whether it is an art performance, a part of the factory or an object belonging to the inhabitants. In a way, it is all these things in the making. Recently, one of Metropoliz’s teenagers told me that they tricked some visitors into believing that some toys abandoned in the corridor were deliberate art installations, and not objects forgotten by someone for a long time. I understand why they would fall for this! It was

Fig. 1.2  The entrance and the visitors attending a MAAM guided tour during the #savemetropoliz event (September 2020)

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obvious to me from the start that this place was at odds with any previous understandings I had of squatted spaces. It was in that moment that I made the resolution not only to pick Metropoliz as the first case study for my doctoral dissertation, but also to commit as an activist to cooperate with the people whose collective intelligence and bravery had transformed an abandoned, decrepit salami factory in one of the most fascinating and radical experiments at grassroots urban regeneration I had ever seen.

1.2   Research Design: The Città Meticcia and the Squatted City Extensive scholarship has analysed how the prolonged aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis has brought the legitimacy of neoliberalism on the edge of a cliff, thus opening the political space for global forms of contention and protest. On the one hand, the austerity measures allegedly implemented to pay off national debts have been viscerally perceived as a further capitalist move to strip sovereignty and maintain the conditions of capitalist accumulation at the expenses of the collective without taking responsibility for actually producing the crisis (Enright and Rossi 2018). On the other hand, the strategic dismantling of social security and labour protections has not only made precarity, impoverishment and displacement a tangible existential condition for a large portion of humankind. It is almost a commonplace that austerity and neoliberalism have undermined all the crucial dimensions of welfare, from the access to healthcare to housing. The gravity of their repercussions is also becoming even more visible during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. As the economic precarity caused by the pandemic has added to the long wave of the 2007–8 financial recession, the transnational mantra ‘stay at home’ has become simply unfeasible for millions of people, as levels of poverty and prospective evictions and foreclosures soar. In Italy, these intertwining crises affect the property-based model of access to housing that has been prevalent for decades. In fact, the intergenerational transmission of homeownership is considered the main means of family welfare security and affirmation of social status (Belotti and Annunziata 2018; Buckley 2018; Gentili and Hoekstra 2018), as the figures pertaining to housing tenure status show. In 2016, 71.5% of families were living in houses they own, whilst 18.5% of households were in a rental position, with a strong prevalence of tenants renting privately

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(15.8% of the national total) over those housed in the institutional Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica (public estates, hereby ERP) which constitutes 2.7% of the national total (Nomisma 2016). Against this background, both tenants and homeowners have been significantly affected by the repercussions of the economic crises. In an October 2020 report about the progression of poverty in Italy before and during the pandemic, the Italian Catholic charity Caritas pointed out that since 2015 the web portal Astay listed over 230,000 property auctions per year, 80% of those regarding small and medium-sized houses repossessed after the completion of foreclosure procedures (Chiaro 2020, p. 74). The report indicated that loss of employment by at least one member of the household, and the fact that owners use houses as the only guarantee for accessing credit allowances, are the primary causes of foreclosure (ibid.). This pattern conflates with the one characterising the eviction rates within the rental market. In 2016, 1.7 million of the round to 4.1 million households living in privately rented accommodation were experiencing economic hardships as the rent took over 30% of their overall income (ibid.). Many of these struggling households did not manage to rise above the poverty threshold. In 2019, the national government listed 48,583 eviction judgments; 25,930 of those were executed by the police, notwithstanding the fact that 87.2%were tabulated as having an ‘inculpable arrears status’ (CUB 2020). Paradoxically, these numbers represent a moderate improvement in comparison to the figures of the previous years, when the eviction rates were higher by an average of 23–25%. In addition, the Bank of Italy’s report (Loberto 2019) concerning the trends in the real-estate market stressed that, especially in metropolitan areas like Rome, the rental market has retained a profit margin as sale prices dropped, showing how fees per square meter have grown on average by 1.6% in 2017, and by 2.2% in 2018 (Loberto 2019, p.  23). The conflation between national and local trends caused Rome to represent on average 13% of the national eviction rates, whilst Rome’s Association of Builders and Realtors (the Associazione dei Costruttori ed Edili di Roma, hereby ACER) estimated that 57,000 households in Rome are experiencing housing poverty while 37,500 potential homes sit vacant and/or unsold (Grazioli 2019; Sina 2018; see Chap. 4). As only a few hundred households per year can obtain public housing in Rome, even after an eviction, it is probably an easy prediction that the epidemic’s economic repercussions will only exacerbate the pre-existing housing crisis. At the time of writing, some revealing statistics are already

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available. Since the pandemic has begun, over 160,000 families have applied for the one-off city council food stamps, whilst over 50,000 households living both in ERP and in private market houses have filed a request for the City and Regional Rental Bonus (Mechelli 2020). In many cases, families filed the requests after failing to reach a private agreement for lowering the rent with their landlords, 50% of whom are corporate owners and real-estate societies (Rent Strike, 2020). Against this background, it is frankly unsurprising that squatting for housing purposes and makeshift urbanism (Cellamare 2019; Chiodelli and Grazioli in press; Vasudevan 2017) have been resurfacing as the only viable responses to housing deprivation in Rome in these circumstances, in the same way as they have been a popular response against poverty and failed urbanisation models since the Fascist Regime period (Grazioli 2018; Villani 2012; see also Chap. 4). Additionally, it is important to discern the different types of self-made housing that have characterised Rome’s inordinate urban development during the last century. On the one hand, the political influence of entrepreneurs and real-estate owners on planners has determined two types of widely tolerated abusivismo (a specific Italian word for illegal construction): (1) the white-collar, individualised satisfaction of residential ambitions and ownership models outside of sanctioned regulatory systems (Brazzoduro 1989; Clough Marinaro 2020) and (2) large-scale corporate, real-estate speculation (Campos Venuti 1978; Cederna 2006; d’Albergo and Moini 2015; Insolera 1962). On the other hand, the decades-long presence of vast shanty-towns and informal settlements (the so-called baraccamenti) (Berlinguer and Della Seta 1960) housing the poorer urban dwellers has fostered the contentious politics of Housing Rights Movements (HRMs) since the 1970. They emerged as the grassroots forms of coordination of the shanty-towners’ demands, first and foremost a massive plan for the construction and occupation of council estates (Armati 2015; Di Feliciantonio 2017; Vasudevan 2017). The persistence of HRMs within Rome’s political arena resulted in a rich archive of practices and demands that they have managed to mobilise to configure new forms of activism and social reproduction that can intervene in the new demographics of the housing crisis (Grazioli 2017; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018). This evolution has been particularly evident since the late 2000s, when BPM and their closest (and longest) allies, the Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (hereby CCLC), have changed the name of their platform from Movements for the struggle for housing (Movimenti di Lotta

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per la Casa) into Movements for the Right to Habitation (Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare) (Armati 2015; Caciagli 2016; Grazioli 2017; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018). This is not simply a ‘formal’ change, for it indicates a shift from housing-focused advocacy to a more comprehensive vision of the city and its resources. Within it, the right to stay put (Annunziata 2017; Hartman 1984) and having habitation (Caciagli 2020; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018) represents the point of departure for the fruition of multiple rights connected to the daily social reproduction, settlement and movement inside the city, as opposed to the seclusion and exploitation determined by neoliberal patterns of dispossession at scale (Harvey 1989, 2012). Dwelling upon this political theorisation, the Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare have since 2012 promoted a new season of squatting for housing purposes (the so-called Tsunami Tours, see Armati 2015) that has consolidated a geography of the squatted (Grazioli 2018) self-made city (Cellamare 2019) made up of over 100 squats repurposed for housing and manifold uses, as the double configuration of Metropoliz (see Fig.  1.3) exemplifies (see Grazioli 2019; Grazioli and Caciagli 2017; Mudu 2014). Regardless of this richness, the extensive scholarship concerned with informality, urban squatting and social movements (e.g. della Porta and Mattoni 2014; SqEK 2013, 2014) struggles to fully appreciate the relevance, and potential, of squatting for housing purposes in relation to what Enright and Rossi define as ‘the end of neoliberalism’s heyday’ (Enright and Rossi 2018, p. 8). These studies tend to concentrate on clear patterns of comparability (e.g. Grashoff and Yang 2020) or consider the need for a house as a ‘self-explanatory’ determinant for the ontology and epistemology of squatting for housing purposes (see Prujit 2013). Nevertheless, borrowing Wacquant’s argument, ‘one of the main tasks of ongoing and future research on advanced marginality is to establish how each of its […] properties specifies itself differently in different countries and/or types of urban environment as a function of the social and the political city of which the city and its divisions are the theatre and product’ (Wacquant 2007, pp. 248–99). Hence, the research design underpinning this book tallies with the growing effort of activist anthropologists and critical geographers to challenge ‘the deeply ingrained dichotomy between “pure” and “applied” social sciences’ (Hale 2001, p. 13) to the service of knowledge and theory production about the ontology, and politics, of Metropoliz and housing squats in Rome.

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Fig. 1.3  Via Prenestina 913 (January 2018)

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1.3   Metropoliz as a Lens for Housing, ‘Right to the City’ and Urban Commons By applying the wide range of methodological tools offered by social sciences to fieldwork research, I argue that Metropoliz (the Città Meticcia) is a case study which is relevant not only in the limited context of Rome, but in relation to the transdisciplinary scholarship which intersects anthropology, geography and urban as well as political sciences concerned with housing, social movements, and urban commons production. On a theoretical level, this book takes stock of the critical urban scholarship that, from different disciplinary perspectives, is taking on the challenge of examining the plurality of grassroots responses that are emerging globally to the post-neoliberal, post-2007 recession reorganisation of urbanity, authority, citizenship and social reproduction (Enright and Rossi 2018), and which often evoke the ‘right to the city’ to frame their demands (Grazioli 2017). In addition, I draw upon social movements studies (e.g. della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Tilly and Tarrow 2015) to inspect the dynamics of HRMs and urban squatting in Rome. Furthermore, I embrace Wacquant’s (2007, 2008) invitation to ‘hybridise’ socio-spatial analyses of the city with critical citizenship studies (Isin 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013) to discuss the contemporary reflections on the actualisation of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ (Grazioli 2017; Lefebvre 1996; Merrifield 2011; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013; Purcell 2002). As for these matters, Metropoliz’s case offers a generative standpoint, starting with the use that BPM activists and inhabitants make of the notion of meticcia (mestiza). By naming Metropoliz La Città Meticcia (the Mestiza City), they allude to a vision of the city, and of urban citizenship, where the formation of a collective identity is not based on organicist, exclusionary paradigms, nor on the postulation of the ‘natural’ impossibility of communicating among different cultures (Stolcke 1995). First of all, the making of a collective identity begins with the rupture of the oppressive, inherently colonial and sedentary (Amselle 1998) idea of citizenship and territory that underpins formal, identity politics (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Then, it is formed through the attuning of daily rhythms, everyday life and rites that find their own ‘syncretism, a mixture whose parts remain indissociable’ (Amselle 1998, p. 161). By the same token, the mestizo city is intended as a place de frontera (Anzaldúa 1987, p.  77), which is made starting from the mutual recognition of the intersectionality

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(Davis 1981; Crenshaw 1989), ambivalence (Anzaldúa 1987) and similarity that underpin the commonality of housing deprivation (see Chap. 5). In this process, diverse subjectivities make their own ‘intrinsically oral, pagan and segmentary’ (Amselle 1998, p.  161) collective identity every day, to which new spatial and social infrastructures correspond. This is where the notion of ‘urban commons’ comes into place. In this book, I propose a conceptualisation of the urban commons as all those home-making, crafting practices that allow a group of former strangers to make their daily lives in common (Dadusc et al. 2019; Linebaugh 2008; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). Second, they are made from the contentious politics (Tilly and Tarrow 2015) and collective knowledge that are circulated in the city to foster the settlement and movement (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013) of the urbanites who experience, both differently and similarly, everyday routines and dynamics of dispossession (Lefebvre 2004; Lancione 2018). Lastly, they are all those social and spatial infrastructures that pursue not only the satisfaction of ‘basic needs’ (like having a shelter), but manifold desires and necessities (Bresnihan and Byrne 2014). Their presence thus alters predefined geographies, uses and entitlements of the urban space through spatial and relational regeneration, as the cooperation among the BPM activists, artists (see Fig. 1.4) epitomises (De Angelis 2019; Grazioli 2017; Martínez and Cattaneo 2014).

1.4   Summary and Structure of the Book To sum up, this book examines the case study of Metropoliz, the Città Meticcia, through the lens of the textual as well as visual ethnographic accounts I have collected since my first visit there in November 2014. My argument is that its presence is relevant not only in relation to Rome’s urban peculiarities, nor just in terms of its contribution to the re-framing of HRMs’ contentious politics in the post-2007 scenario. From the research, it appears that the case speaks to an extensive body of literature concerned with three main points: (1) housing as an analytical lens for reading post-neoliberal patterns of urbanisation and governmentality, (2) squatting for housing purposes as a lens for the action of grassroots urban movements concerned with the contention of the ‘right to the city’ and (3) the prospects, and limits, of the existing debates about the ontology of the urban commons. The book advances these arguments in eight chapters which comprise this introductory one and the conclusive remarks. Chapter 2 builds upon the existing literature about neoliberal

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Fig. 1.4  Artist painting on a wall inside the MAAM’s area (January 2020)

urbanisation, ‘right to the city’ and urban commons to gauge their fitness as interpretive lenses for the Città Meticcia’s complex social reproduction, organisation and politics. It also proposes to adopt the definition of ‘housing squats’ to highlight their peculiarities in comparison to existing taxonomies of urban squatting and informality. Chapter 3 addresses the practical, political and ethical concerns associated with the activist ethnographic methodology and eliciting of data applied during the (ongoing) fieldwork. To this purpose, the chapter mobilises two sets of debates (the one animating contemporary anthropology, and the other developed inside the social movements I am part of) about the positionality and impact of the activist social scientist. The chapter additionally discusses how to put methodology in the service of accomplishing two policy goals: (1) the decriminalisation of squatting for housing purposes and political activists; (2) the promotion of a new, sustainable public housing plan based on the principle of regenerating existing urban vacancies and housing stocks instead of feeding the endless reproduction

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of real estate. Chapter 4 brings into focus the context of Rome as a selfmade, squatted city governed by a composite real-estate urban regime. Drawing on the extensive literature concerning Rome’s post-war development, in-depth interviews and the analysis of different scale policy documents (from the nation state to the local city council), it outlines Rome as a metropolis where self-made urbanism, housing and real-estate speculation have for decades represented crucial fields of contention within which grassroots popular actions like squatting thrived. Through the words of the activists, this chapter also accounts for the new conceptions of housing struggles, the right to the city, urban social movements and regeneration that have emerged within HRMs and BPM since the 2007 financial crisis has resulted in surging evictions, foreclosures and demands for public housing. This discussion paves the path for introducing the innovations that BPM has brought to the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare in terms of organisational practices, contentious politics and social compositions, and of which Metropoliz represents one of the most advanced experiments. Chapter 5 delves into the historical, subjective and political factors that led to the occupation of the former Fiorucci salami factory in March 2009. The first part reconstructs the self-­ made, and industrial history of Tor Sapienza, whilst the second one is concerned with the demographics of the squatters who populated Metropoliz from 2009 onwards. It describes how they got in touch with Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and then converged in the exceptional moment of squatting, when the first group entered the abandoned salami factory with the activists’ support. Besides, the chapter frames squatting not as an event, but as a process of space and community-making that unfolds from the exceptional moment of cracking in into everyday life, as the integration of different ‘generations’ of squatters suggests. Chapter 6 moves forward from the ‘exceptional’ temporality of occupying Metropoliz into its quotidian life as defined by the ‘organisational rites’ that constitute the framework of the Città Meticcia’s urban commons: the collective care of communal space and barricades; the assembly as the modality of plural, consensus-based decision making; the commoning of social reproduction. These organisational rites are scrutinised, highlighting their transformative application to the double configuration of Metropoliz as a housing and autonomous museum space. Hence (1) the MAAM is interpreted as a barricade of art that puts together a composite solidarity net around Metropoliz by furthering multiple encounters; (2) the assembly is doubled to make the MAAM an equally plural

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decision-­making body as the housing space is; (3) art projects, activists’ resources and knowledge are put to use to support Metropoliz inhabitants’ daily life and collective necessities. This brings forward the question of the subjectivity and praxis of activism in BPM (and the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare) that is discussed in the final part of the book in relation to the multi-scalar politics of the Città Meticcia. Chapter 7 reconstructs the process that led to the MAAM experiment, and how Metropoliz’s double configuration is a proxy of the innovations that HRMs have been applying to their strategic politics and tactical negotiations pertaining to housing policies, the right to the city and grassroots urban regeneration. In Chap. 8, I return to the initial research questions outlined in the introduction and elaborate on the book’s key points, contributions and eventual limitations in order to speak to a variety of readers and open up further lines of research. To this purpose, the first part wraps up the main empirical and theoretical findings presented in the book, gauging them in the light of the provisional considerations regarding the ways in which Metropoliz and BPM activists have reacted to the crisis triggered by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In the second part of the conclusion, I discuss how the analysis of the Città Meticcia, and housing squats, can provide an alternative reading of the burgeoning debates about the ontology, purpose and institutionalisation of the commons. Moreover, I line up the general elements of reflection that can be harvested by scholars and students concerned with the critical approaches to the fields of urban studies and geography, anthropology and urban social movements. Paying tribute to the activist ethnographic nature and scope of this work, the book ends on the words of Metropoliz’s inhabitants and BPM activists, calling on all the possible allies to give their solidarity to the Città Meticcia, because ‘Without Metropoliz, this ain’t my city!’

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Armati, C. (2015). La Scintilla: Dalla Valle alla Metropoli, Una Storia Antagonista della Lotta Per La. Fandango Editore: Casa. Belotti, E., & Annunziata, S. (2018). Governare l’Abitare Informale: Considerazioni a Partire dai Casi di Milano e Roma. In A.  Balducci, O.  De Leonardis, & V. Fedeli (Eds.), Mind the Gap – Il distacco tra politiche e città: Terzo Rapporto sulle città di Urban@it. Bologna: Il Mulino. Berlinguer, G., & Della Seta, P. (1960). Borgate di Roma. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Brazzoduro, M. (1989). L’Abusivismo a Roma e la Formazione delle Nuove Aree Periferiche. In E. Aureli Cutillo & F. Mignella Calvosa (Eds.), Abitare a Roma: Urbanizzazione e Crescita Urbana (pp. 215–247). Milano: Franco Angeli. Bresnihan, P., & Byrne, M. (2014). Escape into the City: Everyday Practices of Commoning and the Production of Urban Space in Dublin. Antipode, 47(1), 36–54. Buckley, M. (2018). Between House and Home: Renovations Labor and the Production of Residential Value. Economic Geography, 95(3), 209–230. Caciagli, C. (2016). La Questione abitativa a Roma: Politiche di Emergenza e Azioni Collettive. Urban@it Working Papers, 2(Ottobre), 1–12. Caciagli, C. (2020). Generating Solidarity in Diversity: The Case of Housing Struggles in Rome. Critical Sociology. Advance Online Publication. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0896920520943657. Campos Venuti, G. (1978). Urbanistica e Austerità. Milan: Feltrinelli Editore. Cederna, A. (2006). I Vandali in Casa: Cinquant’anni Dopo. Laterza Editore. Cellamare, C. (2019). Città Fai-Da-te Tra Antagonismo e Cittadinanza: Storie di autorganizzazione urbana. Donzelli Editore. Chiaro, G. (2020). La Questione Abitativa: Un’Analisi del Fenomeno e delle Risposte. In F. De Lauso & N. De Capite (Eds.), Gli Anticorpi della Solidarietà: Rapporto 2020 su Povertà ed Esclusione Sociale Italiana (pp.  74–81). Rome: Caritas Italiana. Chiodelli, F., & Grazioli, M. (in press). Global Self-urbanism: Self-organisation Amidst the Regulatory Crisis and Uneven Urban Citizenship. In M. Lancione & C.  McFarlane (Eds.), Cities and Global Urbanism: Situated Knowledge, Power, Practice. Routledge. Clough Marinaro, I. (2020). Living the Liminal Life: Informalities in a Utopian Housing Project. International Journal of Housing Policy. Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2020.1803532. Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB). (2020, August 6). Sfratti nel 2019: Significativo il Fatto che Oltre l’80% delle Sentenze Restano per Morosità. Retrieved from https://www.cub.it/index.php/117-­organizzazioni-­cub/ unione-­inquilini/13995-­sfratti-­nel-­2019-­significativo-­il-­fatto-­che-­oltre-­l-­80-­ delle-­sentenze-­restano-­per-­morosita

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Hale, C. (2001). What Is Activist Research? Social Science Research Council, 2, 13–15. Hartman, C. (Ed.). (1984). Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning. New Brunswick: CUPR Press. Harvey, D. (1989). From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B, 71(1), 3–17. Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London/New York: Verso. Insolera, I. (1962). Roma Moderna: Da Napoleone I al XXI Secolo. Einaudi. Isin, E.  F. (2009). Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen. Subjectivity, 29, 367–388. Lancione, M. (2018). The Politics of Embodied Urban Precarity: Roma People and the Fight for Housing in Bucharest, Romania. Geoforum, 101(May 2019), 182–191. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writing on Cities. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press. Loberto, M. (2019). Il Mercato degli Affitti nelle Città Italiane: Un’Analisi Basata sugli Annunci Online. Banca D’Italia. https://www.bancaditalia.it/ pubblicazioni/temi-­discussione/2019/2019-­1228/index.html Martínez, M. A., & Cattaneo, C. (2014). Squatting as a Response to Social Needs, the Housing Question and the Crisis of Capitalism. In Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK) (Ed.), Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism (pp. 26–57). London: Pluto Press. Mechelli, S. (2020, May 8). Buoni Spesa, i Fondi non Bastano: Restano Fuori 27 mila Domande. Retrieved from https://www.romatoday.it/politica/buoni-­ spesa-­i-­fondi-­non-­bastano-­restano-­fuori-­27-­mila-­domande.html Merrifield, A. (2011). The Right to the City and Beyond. City, 15(3–4), 473–481. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Montagna, N., & Grazioli, M. (2019). Urban Commons and Freedom of Movement: The Housing Struggles of Recently Arrived Migrants in Rome. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 577–592. Mudu, P. (2014). Ogni Sfratto Sarà Una Barricata: Squatting for Housing and Social Conflict in Rome. In Squatting Europe Kollective (Ed.), Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism (pp. 136–163). London: Pluto Press. Nomisma. (2016). Report Nomisma per Federcasa: Dimensione e Caratteristiche del Disagio Abitativo In Italia e Ruolo delle Aziende per la Casa. Nomisma Società di Studi Economici. http://www.federcasa.it/wp-­content/uploads/ 2017/03/Disagio_abitativo.pdf

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Papadopoulos, D., & Tsianos, V. (2013). After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons. Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 178–196. Prujit, H. (2013). The Logic of Urban Squatting. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1), 19–45. Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant. GeoJournal, 58, 99–108. Sina, Y. (2018, November 11). Emergenza Casa, i Costruttori si Appellano a Comune e Regione: “Collaboriamo, Servono Risposte”. Retrieved from http:// www.romatoday.it/politica/convegno-­acer-­politiche-­casa-­.html Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK). (2013). Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK). (2014). The Squatters’ Movement in Europe. Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Stolcke, V. (1995). Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. Cultural Anthropology, 36(1), 1–24. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2015). Contentious Politics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vasudevan, A. (2017). The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting. London: Verso. Villani, L. (2012). Le borgate del Fascismo: Storia Urbana, Politica e Sociale della Periferia Romana. Milano: Ledizioni. Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity. Wacquant, L. (2008). Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(1), 198–205.

CHAPTER 2

Housing Squats, Urban Commons, Right to the City

Abstract  The chapter builds upon the existing literature about neoliberal urbanisation, ‘right to the city’ and urban commons to gauge their fitness as interpretive lenses for the Città Meticcia’s complex social reproduction, organisation and politics. It frames the connection between austerity urbanism, the commodification of housing and the post-crisis patterns of neoliberal urbanisation that have been unfolding in neoliberal, Mediterranean cities like Rome. Besides, the author advocates for the definition of ‘housing squats’ as crucial to grasp the heuristic value that existing taxonomies of urban squatting and informality tend to conceal. Lefebvre’s theorisation of the ‘right to the city’ is also critically assessed in the light of its centrality in the political grammar of grassroots urban social movements. Lastly, a spatial-relational conception of urban commons in relation to grassroots practices of urban regeneration is proposed. Keywords  Housing squats • Informality • Right to the city • Urban commons • Neoliberal urbanisation

2.1   Neoliberal, Mediterranean Urbanisation At the end of the 1970s, the urbanist Giuseppe Campos Venuti predicated a politically and morally dense notion of ‘austerity’ (austerità) as the radical application of severe economic, social, ecological solutions to planning © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_2

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in order to further community, place-oriented interests over technical support to real-estate profitability (Campos Venuti 1978). For instance, when applying the austerity principle to the rethinking of the quality of ‘private’ houses and estates, Campos Venuti argued that the renovation of the existing housing stock towards more economically, environmentally and community-oriented solutions was needed to respond to the demand for low-income, decent estates. Such a strong public intervention in orienting housing models was also the only way to influence the quality and price of real-estate housing production (Campos Venuti 1978, pp. 196–198). It is undeniable that this redistributive understanding of austerity has been irreversibly trumped in the negative sense. Nowadays, this noun indicates the sinister bundle of enforced transnational policy and economic measures that have restored capitalist accumulation by emptying out local welfare systems and sovereignty in the aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis. Austerity also speaks to the massive neoliberal processes of labour precarisation and exploitation, privatisation and enclosure,1 that in the urban context find their privileged site of operation and accumulation (Harvey 1989; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019). Neoliberalisation, as Pinson and Journel (2016) assert, is primarily a process of a political nature, entailing the creation of new institutional arrangements, the re-engineering of State governmentality and the residualisation of redistributive policies in order to inject market and entrepreneurial ethos and discipline into all social spheres (Brenner 2004a, b; Marshall and Bottomore 1992). As David Harvey (1985, 1989) points out, it has to be also understood as the product of the dramatic shift from a Fordist-Keynesian conception of political economy to a post-industrial setting where the accumulation of surplus takes place by spatial as well as social extraction (Gibson-Graham 2006; Hodkinson 2012). By extension, if the individual becomes the primary body of accumulation, housing represents a fundamental site of accumulation in two main ways. First, the home designated ‘a nuclear household’ becomes the site of reproduction of a specific division of social labour, gendered relations, attitudes, emotions, behaviours and relational patterns that enforce the neoliberal mindset in its daily reproduction (Laslett and Brenner 1989; McDowell 1999), for instance as the gendered division of care work; or the class and ethnically biased segregation of access to different housing forms (see McDowell 1999; Maestri 2019). Second, habitation is a commodified resource and a status symbol which is individually competed for and earned, undermining its meaning

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as a fundamental, collective asset that guarantees the right to stay put in the city (Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; Hartman 1984). It is not, then, an accident that the 2007–8 crisis stemmed from the uncontrolled marketisation of housing and indebtedness as the primary forms of accessing habitation, from which massive processes of displacement and disenfranchisement also emerged. Yet the opposition to these economic (and socio-political) patterns is the common denominator that underlies the global emergence of various attempts at radically transformative urban politics and alliances among dispossessed urbanites (della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Lancione 2018). The latter may be successful in terms of how they acknowledge and make generative their intersectional differences to share knowledges, tricks of survival, sociabilities and networks (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). These urban subjects should thus coalesce to pursue the intent (and the necessity) to effectively oppose the unbearable consequences of enforced neoliberalisation and austerity (Cattaneo and Martínez 2014; della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Mayer 2013). As these actions are highly spatial and subjectivity-intensive, they determine the re-making of a new sense of the city, its societal infrastructures (Simone 2008, 2018) emplacement and political legitimacy (Ferreri 2020) as they have been unmade by processes of commodification, dispossession and displacement. Against this background, I argue that the forms of squatting for habitation that have been proliferating in Rome during the past two decades align with the contentious politics (Tilly and Tarrow 2015) activated across the globe by urban social movements that contest the lack of social justice and the primacy of neoliberal economics that has been characterising the urban processes collated under the label austerity urbanism (Davies and Blanco 2017; Mayer 2013; Peck 2012; Tonkiss 2013). Although these patterns are global, in Rome they are imbricated with the neoliberal Mediterranean urbanisation that is peculiar to Southern European cities (Leontidou 1990, 1993). There, the uneven development, and lack of planning beyond the ‘old’ urban fabric, is heavily dependent on the interaction and allocation of differentiated modes of property and the distribution of land (Leontidou 1990; Violante 2008). As these interact with the cultural importance of housing and homeownership (Belotti and Annunziata 2018; Gentili and Hoekstra 2018), the definition of the dominant model of habitation has become a key point of contention for establishing, or disrupting, the neoliberal forms of territorialisation and social reproduction that have dramatically increased in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis (Ferreri 2020; Grazioli 2017b; Stavrides 2016).

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In fact, even in this context of crisis, neoliberal Mediterranean cities maintain the peculiar prevalence of homeownership as the primary form of access to housing. This is explained by the persistent perception of housing as the bedrock of households stability against the growing precarisation of labour and incomes, and therefore as the main inheritance in the intergenerational transfer of wealth (or indeed inequality) (Belotti and Annunziata 2018; Gentili and Hoekstra 2018; Grazioli 2018). Yet, even within these contexts, the generalised financialisation of daily life (Martin 2002) has led individuals and households to choose permanent (and often untenable) indebtedness to affirm their self-entrepreneurship and economic prowess (Foucault 2008; Lazzarato 2012). Within this ideological framework, tenancy is perceived as an undesirable form of accommodation, whilst welfare-based housing is stigmatised and made residual, within the progressive residualisation of welfarism as a parasitic form of dependence (Stedman Jones 2012) attached to an obsolete concept of social citizenship (Marshall and Bottomore 1992). By the same token, the number of civic estates has been sold and reduced to an irrelevant portion of urban stocks, whilst their poorest recipients have been channelled into the emergency-based, ‘Humanitarian Industrial Complex’ that subsidises privatised welfare services (Dadusc and Mudu 2020), as the case of temporary housing shelters clearly exemplifies (Grazioli 2019). In the context of Mediterranean cities, squatting has therefore become a massive, popular form of shaping social movements which claim urban space (Leontidou 2010, p. 1183). In Rome, these forms of re-­appropriation have been consolidated when the inhabitants have engaged with the daily effort of commoning their daily living according to some specific organisational and political coordinates, at the same time opening up the production of manifold urban commons (Bresnihan and Byrne 2014) concerned with the ‘right to the city’ (Grazioli 2017b; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; see also Chaps. 5 and 6). On the other hand, this phenomenon is also the inevitable product of the contradictions embedded in the daily operation of neoliberal, austerity urbanism within the conflicted contexts of the post-crisis, Southern European cities like Rome. In fact, urban regime actors are constantly navigating the dilemma of balancing repression and negotiation to retain electoral consensus (Esposito and Chiodelli 2020). Besides, neoliberal regimes need the conservation of a minimally acceptable level of redistribution to maintain the status quo (Clough Marinaro 2020; Holland 2017). These considerations urge reflection concerning the colliding spatialities and temporalities embroiled in the notion of

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‘informality’ and in the existing categorisations of urban squatting that attempt to offer a common interpretive umbrella of global grassroots responses against neoliberal post-crisis urbanisation.

2.2   ‘Housing Squats’ Beyond Informality and Squatting Taxonomies The previous section introduced the point of informality, and its grey governance, as constituent features of Rome as a Mediterranean city, according to Leontidou’s definition. It also delineated the stark opposition between the commodified, property-based model of housing fuelled by neoliberal urbanisation and the idea of housing as fundamental post-crisis urban commons. This draws forth a fundamental reflection about the theoretical fitness of existing categorisations of informality and urban squatting for empirically describing the products, and exceptional magnitude, of Rome’s makeshift ‘squatted city’ (Cellamare 2019; Grazioli 2018; Vasudevan 2017). In fact, Metropoliz and other housing squats spread throughout the city cannot be equated with deprivation-based forms of land and vacancy occupation in terms of durability, purpose, composition and organisational forms (e.g. unauthorised Roma camps or the Baobab Experience urban camp for migrants in transit, see Maestri 2019; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). At the same time, they cannot be assimilated into other forms of housing informality and urban squatting that are pervasive in Rome and Italy (like unauthorised construction, and the squatting of public housing), since these are predominantly individual responses to the dearth of accommodation and/or law enforcement (Chiodelli et al. 2020; Clough Marinaro 2020; Cremaschi 1990). Furthermore, the coordinated, visible and collective nature of organised squatting for housing purposes in Rome can hardly be analytically elided with forms of dwelling that develop within ambiguous or selectively implemented regulatory frameworks that leave room for discretionary interpretations and actions (Altrock 2016; Clough Marinaro 2020). In fact, squatting has been the object of intense regulatory (and repressive) efforts by powerful institutions like the City Council, the Region and even the nation state (Armati 2015; Caciagli 2016; Grazioli 2017a). If anything, the legislative loopholes and ‘grey areas’ are the unpredicted outcome of the overabundant, yet uncoordinated, stratification of legislative and administrative tools on different governance levels that do not share

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the same agendas or expected outputs, as Chap. 4 sets out. Hence, the HRMs’ ability to crack the structure of political opportunity open (della Porta 2013) and their validation as politically representative agents (Caruso 2015; Chiodelli et al. 2020) in relation to housing matters have not been the products of benevolent institutional dispositions or calculated areas of tolerance. Rather, they are the result of a pluri-decennial effort of mobilising multi-scalar political spaces through a considered combination of confrontational acts and negotiations (Tilly and Tarrow 2015) that unearth the systemic nature of the housing crisis in Rome. Hence, I propose to adopt Simone’s suggestion that we overcome ‘rudimentary divisions of formal and informal’ (Simone 2001, p.  111) which still persist in urban and planning theory in order to demarcate the socio-spatial effects produced by specific territorial formations, categories of groups and communities, organisational forms (McFarlane 2012) and policy epistemologies (Roy 2005). Consequently, I argue that places like Metropoliz help us rethink informality as the site, and temporality as where new infrastructures are created (Larkin 2013; Papadopoulos 2018), and whose persistent ‘temporariness’ enables the creation of new subjectivities and spatial assemblages that question the value, distribution and entitlement of the resources imbricated in contemporary processes of urbanisation (Simone 2015, 2019). This way of conceptualising informality allows us to reconnect informality to the demand for the ‘right to the city’, whereby they are both concerned with temporality and everyday life, and the problem of the subjectivities produced by specific processes of accumulation and urbanisation. It also helps us to read the intense situatedness (Simone 2018) of squatting as generative, instead of trying to flatten it into typologies that risk being inevitably imprecise, as they impose a common reference for geographically specific notions of formalisation, visibility and legitimation (see Harris 2018; Grashoff and Yang 2020 on the debate concerning the comparability of global forms of informality). The same epistemological problem applies to existing taxonomies of urban squatting that focus upon features like the degree of politicisation of the squatters, their supposedly predetermined temporal durability and purpose, the buildings’ infrastructural conditions and so on. What these taxonomies share is the tendency to crystallise static residential, subjective, political and spatial trajectories. In so doing, they obliterate the generativeness of people’s collaboration in making the city (and a sense of it) (McFarlane 2012; Simone 2008), as well as the politicisation that stems from the necessary commoning of everyday life (Bouillon 2017; Bresnihan

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and Byrne 2014; Caciagli 2019). For this reason, I argue that a separate definition of a housing squat is needed to understand the finer detail of the similarities and divergences of this type of urban squatting in comparison to other forms that can be observed in neoliberal, Mediterranean, post-­ crisis European cities (Squatting Europe Kollective 2013, 2014). Hence, I define housing squats as urban vacancies of private or public properties, which are occupied and reconverted to housing purposes by groups of people (individuals and households) in conditions of severe housing deprivation without the consent of the owner and/or the legislator, often with the logistical and political support of coordinated groups like HRMs (Grazioli 2017a, b, 2018). As already mentioned, transdisciplinary scholarship has been engaged with the effort of finding fungible classifications for interpreting the forms of urban squatting that have returned to the centre of the European political arena since the explosion of the 2007–8 financial crisis. The recession has in fact aggravated the structural dearth of public, low-income accommodation determined by the commodification of housing and erosion of welfare. Although diverse, these classifications attempt to find some patterns of comparability: the division by ‘configurations’ (Prujit 2013); the squatters’ residential trajectories (Bouillon 2009, 2017); goals and available resources (Aguilera 2011); the ideological background and range of actions available (Péchu 2010); the degree of politicisation, relationships with institutions and their purpose in relation to mainstream forms of housing (Fuller and Jonas 2003); the geographical context (e.g. the Balkans; see Tsenkova 2010); the degree of anti-capitalist orientation (Piazza 2012). Within these taxonomies and the analysis of autonomous urban geographies, as Bouillon (2017) notes, ‘political’ forms of squatting (i.e. social centres; see Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Squatting Europe Kollective 2013, 2014) have been prioritised in the analytical focus over housing approaches, despite the predominance of the latter. Indeed, this emphasis implicitly establishes a hierarchy of heuristic and political salience. Within extensive scholarship, squatting for housing purposes is important mostly in light of its magnitude, heritage and belonging to the protest repertoire of urban movements (Armati 2015; Di Feliciantonio 2017; Madden and Marcuse 2016). On the other hand, it is not considered as epistemologically and politically relevant as ‘ideological’ squatting, because deprivation is supposed to be self-explanatory and inherently obstructive to any conscious political acts (Grazioli 2018; Dadusc et al. 2019). These assumptions are problematic in two main ways.

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First, they put politicisation and deprivation in a dichotomic opposition by setting a static (and artificial) demarcation between squatters and activists. Second, they exclude the importance of the grassroots regeneration operated by the squatters by confining it to the realm of deprivation, conservation (Prujit 2013) or anti-capitalist protest (Mudu 2004; Piazza 2012). Against this background, the configuration of housing squats is needed to allow their peculiarities to emerge in the composition of a new vision of the ‘right to the city’ (Grazioli 2017b). The latter is here intended as the grammar of the current urban challenges that urban social movements and dispossessed urbanites are confronted with when conceiving urbanity, citizenship and anti-capitalist struggles (Dadusc et  al. 2019; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; Lancione 2018).

2.3   Urban Squatting Movements and the Lefebvrian ‘Right to the City’ In the preceding sections I anticipated that housing squats like Metropoliz, and politics like the BPM’s, produce configurations of squatting that cannot be assimilated into pre-existing taxonomies. Nor they can be disconnected from the larger debate about urban social movements and forms of protest arising globally to contest the (post-)neoliberal agenda shaping the urban built environment and social reproduction (Enright and Rossi 2018; Grazioli 2018; McDowell 1999). In fact, they represent a rupture in the dominant urban layout, in the residential models that inform the neoliberal social division of labour, and in the segregation between the private and public arena (Fournier 2013; McDowell 1999). HRMs are thus part of those grassroots urban movements that acknowledge the city as the oeuvre of social relations (Lefebvre 1996), and create more or less persistent alternative geographies (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Vasudevan 2015a) and place-bound forms of protest (della Porta and Piazza 2008) to re-appropriate the city as the site, and the stakes, of their activism (Lefebvre 1996; Kern 2020). Lastly, they share with other urban social movements not only the pursuit of urban justice but the wide use of the Lefebvrian ‘Right to the City’ (Lefebvre 1996) vernacular to shape their reflection and contentious political actions (Tilly and Tarrow 2015). On the other hand, it is justifiable to question the theoretical fitness of the Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ as a framework for the actions and demands of contemporary urban movements. First of all, the Lefebvrian conceptualisation of the ‘right to the city’ is patently attached to a late

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1960s understanding of urban space, characterised by a clear-cut idea of what is in and what is outside the city. By the same token, the realisation of the ‘right to the city’ assumes a strong presence of the ‘working class’ as an identifiable and collective urban subject that can both dwell in the urban space and propel transformative processes in it (Lefebvre 1996; Merrifield 2011). Furthermore, post-neoliberal processes have stretched urban territoriality into a formless, expansive process pointing to the strategising and connection of multi-scalar operations, whilst urban politics have become the realm of a multi-scalar governance which produces complex and often incoherent regimes (Brenner 1998; Merrifield 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019; Sassen 2007). In these cities, processes of transition, settlement and movement intertwine in multiple temporalities of dwelling (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). This plurality is also reflected in diverse subjective arrangements, where a coherent notion of the ‘working class’ is disrupted by fragmented, multitudinous processes of subjectivation, and intersectional layers of differential citizenship (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Negri 2014a, b). These aspects, coupled with the lack of an ‘operational’ definition of the right to the city, has led authors to question the political purchase of the concept (Merrifield 2011), or even to consider it inapplicable to contemporary, post-neoliberal urban spatialities (Negri 2014a, b). Nevertheless, I maintain that the persistence of the ‘right to the city’ in the grammar of urban social movements aligns with the radical openness of the Lefebvrian concept as a container of a plurality of rights, time and space dimensions (Grazioli 2017b). In fact, even though cities are global, urban struggles are inherently place and time-bound, whereby the priority of the demands is assessed in the light of their effectiveness for opposing specifically territorialised processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 1989, 2009). In Rome, for instance, the right to inhabit the city (Grazioli and Caciagli 2018) is invoked by HRMs as the point of departure for re-appropriating material, symbolic and political rights within the urban space (Cuppini 2015; Purcell 2002). It is thus pursued through housing re-appropriation, conceived as the grassroots and situated contentious politics of encounter that produces autonomous geographies through the commoning of the daily means of urban social (re)production (see de Certeau 1984; Merrifield 2011; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Purcell 2002; Vasudevan 2015a, b). Hence, these movements materialise the ‘right to the city’ by ‘withdrawing, and transforming, urban interstices and vacancies from neoliberal utilization for profit-making and disrupting the private property-based

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logic of capitalist urbanization’ (Mayer 2013, p. 6). Put this way, the ‘right to the city’ becomes a generative analytical standpoint for observing how the dispossession and enclosure of space and social reproduction operated by neoliberal urbanisation is countered by grassroots urban movements that, through their daily action and inhabitation of the city, redefine the urban scales by producing new autonomous geographies, while prefiguring new political and social subjectivities (see Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Martínez and Cattaneo 2014; Thörn et  al. 2016). Second, the emphasis on the transformative potential of everyday practices and social reproduction shatters the presumption of neoliberalism as an inevitable, natural and thus unrivalled force by offering collective alternatives for urban habitation (Fournier 2002; Pinson and Journel 2016). Against the background offered by the experience of HRMs in Rome, I maintain that the ‘right to the city’ framework is still evocative, and effective, for urban activists across the globe on the basis of three theoretical (and political) tenets: (1) the reaffirmation of the right to centrality, (2) the conception of the citadin in opposition to a formal understanding of citizenship and (3) the emphasis on everyday life. Right to Centrality From a geographical perspective, Rome’s uneven post-IIWW development has progressively emptied the city centre of its residential connotation, whilst the inhabited ‘peripheries’ have progressively moved from the margins of the consolidated city centre to the suburbs circling the inner and outer sides of the city’s GRA (see Chap. 4). Against this background, HRMs in Rome claim and practise the right to centrality in two intertwining ways. First of all, they subvert the hierarchical subordination of the urban peripheries to the city centre by claiming the centrality of the supposed peripheries from which their autonomous geographies depart, and the right to stay put and live a dignified everydayness in peripheral areas (Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; Mudu 2014; Nur and Sethman 2017; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006). Second, they demand the repopulation of the city centre for residential purposes, contesting the negative impact of over-touristification and real-estate speculation on the (already scarce) availability of affordable houses (Gainsforth 2019; Lelo et al. 2019). As well as this, they oppose the commodification of central estates and urban vacancies that could be renovated (and/or reconverted) to tackle the soaring public housing demand (Grazioli 2019). Lastly, HRMs target the central headquarters of local and national institutions to represent the multi-scalar purview of the contemporary housing crisis in Rome (Grazioli 2017a, b; see Chap. 4).

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From Citizens to Citadins  Thinking about the urban as a coherent and cohesive subject is difficult, because post-neoliberal urbanisation has over time loss of that intimacy, and internal coherence, that used to connote the narration of ‘traditional’ cities (Merrifield 2011, p. 474). At the same time, authors like Isin (2009) have predicated the changing substance of citizenship. Others have theorised that we are even beyond the demand of citizenship (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013), because it is configured as a dispositif of differential inclusion (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) instead of as a facilitator of the access to multiple settlements and movement rights. Is the ‘right to the city’, then, an attribute of ‘formal’ citizenship, as it is might be implied by Harvey’s (2009) framework of the right to the city as a universal human right? This riddle can be solved if we pay attention to the tonality of Lefebvre’s theorisation of the citadins (Lefebvre 1996, p.  34). The latter are the urban inhabitants enfranchised to the ­decision making and production of the urban space by their practice of ‘living out the routines of everyday life in the space of the city’ (Purcell 2002, p. 102). In this sense, the activist-squatters epitomise the Lefebvrian citadins in that they collectively transform the urban space, starting from a common condition of deprivation, and making their intersectional differences generative for producing new spatial and subjective assemblages, regardless of their formal status and enfranchisement to do so (Grazioli 2017b; see Chap. 5). The Emphasis on Everyday Life  In his work, Henri Lefebvre paid great attention to everyday life, whose reproduction follows driven as well as compelling rhythms and rites (Lefebvre 1991, 1996, 2004). The ­spatialised temporality of urban everydayness can be harmonic as different rhythms attune and reconcile ‘a theory of practice as meaningful performance with the experience of time and space’ (Stavrides 2010, p.  24). Among these practices, rites of different kind (profane, religious and political) mark the bodily experience of the city (Lefebvre 2004). The daily experience of housing squatters as transformative urbanites adds a further type of urban rites, organisational ones (Grazioli 2018), which are deployed to create, and maintain, eurhythmisation (ibid.). The latter concept dwells upon Lefebvre’s notion of eurhythmia (Lefebvre 2004) in order to stress the processual nature of living in common among urbanites who have not chosen each other, but who develop commoning practices and radical infrastructures out of necessity (De Angelis 2019; Larkin 2013; Linebaugh 2008; Stavrides 2016). In this book, I identify three

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main organisational rites that represent the fundamental requisites for making housing squats into urban commons (Montagna and Grazioli 2019): (1) assembly-based decision making; (2) collective care for communal spaces and infrastructures of resistance; (3) community-based social reproduction (Chap. 6).

2.4   Housing Squats as Urban Commons? In the post-crisis, post-neoliberal age (Enright and Rossi 2018), makeshift urbanisation and habitation, are globally trending, insurgently creative (Mayer 2013, p. 12) forms of intervention and contention, surfacing in opposition to the political and economic framework of austerity urbanisation (Tonkiss 2013; Vasudevan 2017). This phenomenon appears in specific historical, geographical and spatial configurations within Mediterranean cities as a popular form of mobilisation (Leontidou 2010) and formation of less ephemeral social movements and forms of urban activism (Mayer 2013). In fact, urban social movements like the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare in Rome have updated their consolidated repertoire of actions, demands and political networks to mobilise the various groups who have suffered in the post-2007 housing crisis through a combination of contentious political actions, negotiations and acts of re-­ appropriation (Bosi and Zamponi 2015; Di Feliciantonio 2017; Mudu and Aureli 2017; SqEK 2013, 2014). However, the magnitude of the housing squatting phenomenology in Rome entails a huge range of differences in terms of its quality, durability, composition and eventual participation in the HRMs’ social reproduction and politics. What are then the conditions that make housing squats agents of the ‘frontal politics of transformation’ (Peck 2012, p.  651), and not mere deprivation-based containers of the housing emergency? This question is important to avoid the romanticisation of makeshift housing as an inherently empowering, positive experience. In fact, different types of informal settlements in Rome are inevitably constricted by their supposedly temporary function (e.g. camps for temporarily hosting migrants), or compromised by the combination of irreversible infrastructural deterioration and the lack of agency and internal cohesion of their inhabitants (as in the case of the former Penicillin factory in Rome, whose regeneration similarly to Metropoliz, has never been a viable option for its settlers) (Dadusc et al. 2019; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). The plurality of informal housing interrogates the relation between the specific

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subjective and spatial arrangements in which grassroots infrastructures are produced, and the more generalised constraints produced by specific patterns of neoliberal urbanisation (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Thörn et al. 2016). For instance, the argument about whether housing squats can be made, maintained and made durable as an urban commons (Bresnihan and Byrne 2014) cannot elude the analysis of the manifold forms of housing informality that respond to an individualistic, property-­based rationale (and are therefore far from any commoning intent) (Clough Marinaro 2020). Besides, it cannot ignore the complex relationship of these spaces with territorialised governmental operations that can dictate their formation and disruption as ‘temporary enclaves of otherness’ (Stavrides 2010, p. 13). In general, the tenets of neoliberal urbanisation (enclosure, private ownership, real-estate primacy, accumulation by dispossession and extraction) are ideologically and practically incompatible with the growing demand for civic estates and low-income housing that crosses different kinds of urban dwellers, from the impoverished middle classes to homeless refugees (see Chap. 5). The autonomous responses that proliferate in the gaps of the supply create predictable outcomes (i.e. the housing shortage) as well as less-predictable outcomes (such as the proliferation of housing squats), which are dealt with by different urban regime actors with diverging agendas, goals, strategies and tactics. The principal example in this sense is the irremediable drift within the squats’ proprietors’ political pressure (and legal action, in the case of Metropoliz) to repossess the buildings, the governmental criminalisation of housing informality as a spatial strategy of planning and governance (Roy 2005, 2009), and the local institutions’ inability to relocate the evictees without overwhelming the already-saturated emergency shelter system to the point of collapse. The interstices of governmentality are therefore generative for makeshift forms of housing, some of which can entrench forms of territorial counter-power at the core of the neoliberal urban orthodoxy (Harvey 2012; Mayer 2013). Besides, as part of broader urban social movements, HRMs can build their autonomous representativeness and mobilise multi-level opportunity structures (from the strictly local to the transnational) (della Porta and Tarrow 2005) to demand a radical divergence from the individualistic, property-based tenets weaponised in the prolonged cycle of systemic crises and capitalist restructuring. Although most informal settlers’ aggregates are ephemeral and volatile, HRMs’ squatters and activists can be qualified as urban social movements (Tilly and Tarrow 2015) because of their

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continuity in terms of demands, solidarity networks, institutional connections and political legibility (ibid.). As they act as law-breaking policymakers (Mudu and Aureli 2017), they take the matter of materialising alternative, feasible housing models and policy options into their own hands, while contesting the institutional inaction and complicity with realestate capital interests. These forms of squatting materialise anti-capitalist, ethical coordinates of housing in the city (Gibson-Graham 2006; Hodkinson 2012) by conceiving squatting as the primary form of ‘urban trade-unionism’ (Martínez 2019) for the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996). Within this political framework, decent housing is considered the key point of departure for demanding further rights connected to everyday urban living (de Finis and Di Noto 2018). The ‘right to the city’ is thus imbricated with a notion of the commons that pertains to the contemporary urgency of making autonomous solidarity networks and knowledges operative for creating spatial, organisational, social infrastructures that can make the city function according to senses of value and sociabilities that are inherently in contrast with those entrenched in post-crisis, post-neoliberal urbanism (De Angelis 2017; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). This relational understanding of the urban commons fundamentally diverges from the main trends of debate that are concerned with the ownership of the common(s) (Ostrom 1990), and/or the formal enfranchisement to their collective use as non-commodifiable resources (De Angelis 2017; Mattei 2011). By this token, housing squats can be considered urban commons in terms of the social practices that may be generated by the re-appropriation and subsequent regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016; Harvey 2009, 2012) of vacant, unused urban interstices (Brighenti 2013; Mudu and Aureli 2016; Parisi 2019). It also means that the urban commons’ phenomenologies cannot be established a priori, nor assumed as immutable in time, since they are made by the grounded contexts, subjectivities and priorities that produce them (De Angelis 2019, p. 2). Hence, housing informalities and squatting are plural, various, and possible phenomenologies as they depend on the capacity of eurhythmisation expressed by mestizo spatial and subjective assemblages (Grazioli 2017a, b, 2018). They also depend upon some conditions of possibility that, later in the book, I identify as specific organisational rites that help the squatters to pool resources and attune their routines, as these are the compass of ‘exceptional’ politics whenever the durability of the squat is jeopardised (first and foremost, by threats of eviction) (De Angelis 2019;

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Gibson-­Graham 2006; see Chap. 6). At the heart of this theoretical proposition there is a deep ethnographic inquiry into Metropoliz, with the uncommon hindsight provided by being a researcher who is still mostly known for being an activist in the BPM collective. This is reflected in Chap. 3, where I stand by the assertion that an ontological and epistemological shift (Smith 1990) is needed to rethink social sciences not as a semblance of hard or speculative disciplines, but as a textured piece of work that should offer to the reader (and possibly to academia), ‘something of the […] richness and underlying sense of a way of being and doing that could not otherwise be captured in writing’ (Graeber 2009, pp. 14–15).

Note 1. Here enclosure has the double meaning of spatial dispossession (and repossession) and shrinkage of the spaces for moving, settling and mobilising for social justice and citizenship rights. In fact, as Sect. 2.3 addresses, the very notion of citizenship as a vehicle of inclusiveness should be interrogated, especially in the light of migrant struggles, which show how citizenship is weaponised to promote exploitation, precarity and differential inclusion (see Dadusc et al. 2019; Isin 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013).

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CHAPTER 3

The Activist Ethnographic Method

Abstract  This chapter addresses the practical, political and ethical concerns imbricated in activist methodologies and thus in the author’s positionality as an activist research. It initially discusses the stream of debate concerned with the positionality of the researcher during the fieldwork and the burgeoning trend of committed anthropology. The epistemological approach is then translated in the research strategy’s design, and discussed in relation to the ethnographic fieldwork started in late 2014 (e.g. how to conduct interviews; whether to use the recorder; ethnographic analysis and writing; confidentiality; anonymity; a relational understanding of consent). It also offers a research statement about the purposefulness of the dissemination of activist research in the contemporary world. Keywords  Activist ethnography • Anthropology • Ethics • Methodology • Positionality

3.1   Why Activist Ethnography? Activist ethnography as a method springs from the burgeoning debate that is increasingly attracting scholars and policymakers to the richness and vividness of in-depth, well-informed and empirically based research. This approach allows us to explore and grasp complex urban settings and dynamics while yielding a plurality of disciplinary approaches, ranging © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_3

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from sociology to geography to anthropology and cultural studies (Pardo and Prato 2018). Thus, the primary heuristic value of urban ethnography is to provide ‘scientific grounding to socio-anthropological theorization’ (Pardo and Prato 2018, p. 2). Dwelling upon such a multi-layered, processual and ‘creative’ methodology (Lancione 2018), activist ethnography is ‘a method through which we affirm a political alignment with an organized group of people in struggle and allow dialogue with them to shape each phase of the process, from conception of the research topic to data collection to verification and dissemination of the results’ (Hale 2006, p. 97). Primarily, the activist ethnographer combines the investigation of complex social phenomena and political commitment while prioritising the grassroots actions of those who are oppressed, vulnerable and marginalised, and whose voices are often stripped by the researcher in the perhaps genuine, yet frequently paternalistic assumption that their precarity conflates with being voiceless or invisible (Desmond 2016; Lancione 2018). As Matthew Desmond puts it, touching on his book Evicted (2016) during a seminal session in Turin in January 2020, an effective urban sociology/anthropology of housing deprivation should not limit itself to inspecting the evicted; rather it should investigate the powerful structural patterns that lead to people being evicted. In my case, this meant depicting the unique organisational fantasy underpinning Metropoliz and the biographies of its activists and inhabitants, while at the same time delving into the multi-scalar causes of the housing crisis which led BPM activists and the squatters to occupy the former salami factory in the first place. Furthermore, the practice of activist ethnography ‘debunks’ the imperative that social scientists should have an ‘objective’ and neutral relationship towards their fieldwork, as well as the founding axiom of anthropology, namely the equality of all human beings in the sight of anthropology itself (Scheper-Hughes 1995, p. 416). On the other hand, ‘as a minimal requirement, activist ethnographies must always stress the inseparability of knowledge and action, which impel them to be self-consciously interventionist in approach’ (Routledge 2013, p. 267). This means the activist researcher commits to being purposeful and politically, ethically responsible towards the fieldwork and the activist research constituency during all the stages of the study process (Colectivo Situaciones 2003; Russell 2015). When investigating complex and conflicted urban settings, this active commitment translates into an epistemology of participation (Mason et al. 2013) that is concerned with the situatedness and singularity of the case

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under discussion, while bearing in mind its relation with different spatial and temporal scales of the city where everyday life and autonomous geographies unfold (de Certeau 1984; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Wacquant 2007). Besides this, the activist ethnographer chooses a partisan stance against inequality and oppression, as opposed to the idea that anthropologists should refrain from active political involvement (Scheper-Hughes 1995). Within contemporary metropolises, this means shedding a light upon a politics of contention and dissent against those austerity, inequality and neoliberal governance (see della Porta 2013; Tilly and Tarrow 2015) that prioritise value extraction and ‘enclosed’ regimes of property (see Harvey 1989) instead of pooling resources ‘in common’ for the benefit of the more disadvantaged urbanites (Tsibiridou 2018). Hence, this processual methodology unfolds and corresponds with the activist researcher’s daily, embodied engagement with the goal of unearthing the logics and the dispersed subaltern knowledges that underpin marginalised forms of urban living, from relational micropolitics to visible repertoires of contention (Apoifis 2016; della Porta 2013; Martínez 2014). Admittedly, this methodology radically challenges the propositions of neutrality towards the fieldwork that inform ‘ethical’ research policies nowadays, as well as the dominant academic discourse which favours a deductive and quantitative approach over methods and epistemologies that are believed to be ‘soft’ and unreliable for producing generalisable, universally valid findings. Against the detachment from the affections and ambiguous manifestations of reality, activist ethnography focuses on a growing trend of ‘carnal’ methodologies that illuminate how individual, collective bodies and their daily micropolitics are affected by social structures and interact with space by engaging the researcher’s body (Papadopoulos 2014; Wacquant 2006). Furthermore, this processual methodology demands a steady reflection on the researcher’s positionality and subjectivity in the fieldwork. On the one hand, the ‘activist’ practice of urban ethnography is deeply messy and emotionally demanding, since it demands the researcher’s bodily commitment to relating and cooperating with others towards a political goal (Brown and Pickerill 2009; Lancione 2016). On the other hand, the researcher’s body, feelings and intellectual capacity should be put on the line as a relational tool for prioritising the voice and agency of other bodies and ecologies throughout the process of knowledge production and dissemination (see Juris 2007; Lancione 2018). These methodological claims resonate with my experience as an early-­ career scholar doing fieldwork inside Metropoliz whilst I was an activist

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within the BPM collective and an inhabitant of another housing squat (Tiburtina 770 and 1099; see Grazioli 2018 for further detail). Since I visited and started planning my fieldwork in November 2014, I have been confronted with concerns pertaining to the negotiation and exploration of the fieldwork, my ethics and politics as an activist researcher, and the modality of the dissemination of my work. In addition, my immersion in the politics and daily routines of the squat and BPM required me to constantly interrogate and extend the purview of my research beyond the realm where I was acting. As I started to collect a sizeable body of findings, the depth and complexity of the emerging realities forced me to often change, expand and then narrow down the theoretical framework and the research questions I envisaged in the beginning. The complexity of the issues emerging from the fieldwork required me to ponder the contribution I expected to make to my activist research constituency, and therefore to tailor my ‘research products’ accordingly (see Lancione 2016). After pinning down what the main tenets of activist ethnography are, and why they matter, the following sections reflect upon the practical applications of these principles during these years of activist research inside Metropoliz and the Housing Rights Movement in Rome.

3.2   Negotiating the Fieldwork During the complex experience of investigating the daily life and politics of Metropoliz and housing squats in Rome, I had to orient my research around compasses that tally with the ones outlined by Michele Lancione (2018) when researching the housing precarity dynamics of homelessness in Turin and evicted Roma communities in Bucharest. They are as follows: (1) inventiveness; (2) a steady focus on situated political economies and societies as well as patterns of settlement, mobility and displacement (see also Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013); (3) a deep understanding of the dynamics of subjectivation and making/unmaking of precarity; (4) attention to how micropolitics as well as visibly contentious politics are assembled rather than predetermined; (5) a focus on governmentalities that produce specific urban regimes and modalities of governance. These lines of focus motivate my choice to dedicate a whole book to a single case study. The multi-layered methods I have been mobilising during these years of research (ongoing since the end of 2014) allow me to demonstrate that the Metropoliz case speaks to trans-scalar urban dynamics and settings that well transcend the spatial, political and social ‘boundaries’ of

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the research subject (in this case, the perimeter of the former Fiorucci meat factory and its community of dwellers and activists). These research orientations translate into the specific modalities of accessing the fieldwork, data-gathering methods and strategies of writing that imply a continuous negotiation with my positionality, my commitment as an activist, and the necessity of my being as rigorous and detailed as possible in my research. The first step to make the research viable was to engage the BPM activists I already knew as ‘gatekeepers’ who would allow me to visit Metropoliz at the end of November 2014, and then to be progressively legitimised and recognised by the squatter community as an activist. Another relevant step was to introduce myself during the squat’s internal assembly, where I had the chance to explain my motivation for pursuing this research topic and my personal history as an activist around housing rights during my Bachelor and MA university years. Once access was ‘secured’, I started experimenting with different sets of methods and techniques. First, archival research was to genealogically reconstruct the urbanisation of Rome as a self-made, squatted city in response to the persisting housing crisis caused by a real estate-based yet governmentally weak urban regime, as the following chapter addresses extensively (Cellamare 2019; d’Albergo and De Leo 2018; Grazioli 2018; Vasudevan 2015). These layers were then conceptualised and combined with an empirical-based analysis which has been the major tool for piecing together Metropoliz’s function in relation to Rome’s urban regime and Housing Rights Movements. Alongside ethnographic walks, taking pictures, writing down countless fieldnotes (see Duneier 1999), and direct participation in everyday life and action, the likely more relevant tool of data collection has been oral interactions, divided into ‘formal’ interviews and unstructured interactions of a different kind. Overall, I have conducted more than 30 semi-structured interviews, to which the account of public assemblies and informal interactions with BPM activists, Metropoliz squatters and MAAM ‘operators’ added up. Informal conversations occurred in diverse circumstances (from demonstrations to day-to-day interactions) and sometimes replaced formally recorded interviews, whilst other times they were a complement to them (Smith 1990). Indeed, I often happened to ask my interlocutors for permission to report bits of an informal conversation, if I was not spontaneously encouraged by them to do so, whenever particularly funny or relevant anecdotes came up. In the cases of ‘formal’, recorded interviews, I opted for a mostly open-ended, in-depth format. Even though I had a

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general idea of the topics I was seeking to address with a specific person (e.g. discussing with a Roma squatter their arrival in Metropoliz at a later stage in 2011; deepening with a fellow—BPM activist the evolution of the initial political projects about Metropoliz), I kept the format open so as not to artificially impose a direction to the conversation. Although this approach to interviewing is unquestionably time-­ consuming (some recordings are 90 minutes long) and can lead to fragmented and/or convoluted outcomes, it has proven particularly effective for unearthing unpredictable facts, emotions and affects that are relevant to a broader conversation about squatting for habitation in post-crisis urban settings (see Dadusc et  al. 2019; Maestri 2019; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). It also illuminated the joint effort, craftiness and patience that the squatters had to deploy in ‘upcycling’ (Coppola 2012) the industrial skeleton of the former slaughterhouse in liveable houses, assemble essential utilities (i.e. water and electricity) as well as fungible and desirable communal infrastructures (i.e. the assembly hall; a kids’ library and a football playground), of course with the cooperation of BPM activists and solidarity networks (Grazioli 2017). Ultimately, my purpose was to highlight the prefiguration that Metropoliz allows for grassroots, insurgent practices of urban regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016) of urban vacancies and interstices (Brighenti 2013) against commodified housing models that foster the growth of inequalities and segregation (see Harvey 1989). These precautions and goals were not all ‘predefined’ before commencing the fieldwork; rather they have been gleaned from my daily practice of self-­reflexivity and the collective and individual reflections I have had the opportunity to develop the fellow squatters and activists with respect to the situated ethics and politics entrenched in all the research stages, from the first approach to Metropoliz to writing up and dissemination.

3.3   The Ethics and Politics of Activist Ethnography The methodologies (epistemological approach) and methods (practicalities of data collection) that I have thus far described bear numerous implications for the possibility of conceiving solidarity not only as a political stance but as a methodological one for aspiring to radical epistemologies of contention (see Dadusc et  al. 2019). Even though these ethical and

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political concerns are present during each step of the research process, here they are divided for analytical purposes according to a ‘concentric’ rationality that departs from the researcher’s individual subjectivity to the collective reflection concerning ethnographic writing and dissemination, as the last section discusses. Starting from the ‘inner’ layer, reflecting on my subjectivity and positionality has been essential to ensure the rigorousness of my research project in different ways, including the evaluation of the different circumstances when my activist ‘credibility’ represented a ‘benefit’ in terms of access and trustworthiness, or an obstacle to the surfacing of critical and conflicting elements and emotions. This goes also beyond the already-relevant fact of being a cis female, white, Italian National, employed researcher who had decided to live in a squatted dwelling entirely freely. Unlike the majority of the squatters, my decision was not driven by the interplay of autonomy and coercion that underpins contemporary forms of movement and settlement in highly policed, segregated settings (Dadusc et  al. 2019; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). On the one hand, as the fieldwork and the reciprocal familiarity with the place and the people as an activist got deeper, I learned to assess the value of silence, elusive replies and unsaid discomforts as insights into the interviewees’ complex positionality in relation to different domains of experience (Maestri 2019). First, elusiveness can point to the fear of disclosing sensitive information that could jeopardise the interviewees’ legal/migratory status, because the recording equipment is often associated with policing devices they might want to evade (see Staid 2014). As well as this, I became aware this wariness could depend on the fear of expressing criticism, negativity or revealing ‘sensitive information’ against BPM, Metropoliz and other fellow squatters that could be detrimental, or even worse disclosed in front of others (i.e. during assemblies, or shared with fellow activists). Even though these concerns could not be fully addressed during the stage of interviewing, I did my best to answer the interviewees’ questions and clarify my confidentiality policy, which includes the withdrawal of consent, access to transcripts and my exclusive access to the recordings I had stored. However, the acquisition of consent (and trust) was primarily a collective and relational fact, where relational sensitivity and emotional intelligence were mutually mobilised (Gillan and Pickerill 2012). This reciprocation outdoes the realm of formal commitments and ethics policies as designed by academic institutions according to the principle of a one-on-one relationship (Hale 2006). As previously mentioned, the first

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step for obtaining ‘collective consent’ was to be radically open and self-­ reflexive about my research goals and methodologies. As well as this, I applied solidarity as a method by putting my bodily, emotional and intellectual contribution ‘on the line’ like any other activist, while being aware of the complex power and subjective dynamics I was embodying as a researcher aligned to BPM’s political project, and who had decided to squat from political and intellectual commitment, and not as a necessity related to material deprivation (Martínez 2014). On a collective level, this required me to be particularly attentive to differential practices of communication, anonymisation and narration in order not to endanger those involved in the research. For instance, when describing political actions, goals and demands, I refrained from reporting quotes and logistical details that were not manifested in public forums, while sticking to events in which I participated myself (Graeber 2009, p. 13). As a researcher, these choices mean prioritising honesty and openness above obtaining ‘juicy’ pieces of information or adopting revelatory shortcuts (e.g. recording in disguise; writing down eavesdropped conversations). As regards my anonymisation policy, I adopted different strategies according to the participants’ status, preferences and desires. On the one hand, the fact that Metropoliz’s inhabitants and BPM activists had previously participated in research-activist projects of different types (from books to video-ethnography), even in some cases having produced their own publications (see de Finis and Di Noto 2018), has made them quite familiar with the academic proceedings and the ‘publicity’ that comes with the dissemination of the research outcomes. Indeed, Metropoliz’s double configuration and openness as a dwelling site and a self-made museum reflects the BPM and Housing Rights Movements’ innovative approach to squatting, whose potentialities and demands they aim to make viral. For this reason, none of the BPM activists who live outside Metropoliz asked to be anonymised in my PhD dissertation (Grazioli 2018), nor in this manuscript. On the same page, the visual ethnographic materials in the book that pertain to communal spaces are pictures of infrastructures and the MAAM’s art pieces, open events and political mobilisations which are already available to the public. On the other hand, the legal names of Metropoliz’s inhabitants were changed. This was primarily made to avoid any harm to their legal or migratory status. Besides the fact that squatting is currently considered a criminal offence, living into a squat has been often considered by authorities as a valid motivation for refusing visa applications, alternative jail measures and

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family reunifications, just to mention some. Hence, I chose to number interviewees and report only generically descriptive markers (e.g. nationality) when transcribing the interviews and informal interactions. As regards the visual materials, I just took pictures of the details of the single housing units without photographing the dwellers’ faces. Finally, during the phase of writing, the oral and visual material interactions were blended and systematised with the other different data sets I collected that helped me to merge divergent temporal, spatial and political scales of experience and reflexivity into an intelligible narrative that could also account for the emotional, political, spur of the moment I was trying to narrate. The last stage was figuring out how to ‘squeeze’ these complex realms and relations into the format and language of academia and anthropological writing, while remaining coherent in terms of the purposefulness of my project as a contribution to the struggle of urban housing squatters in Rome.

3.4   A Research Project in, About and for Urban Squatting This chapter has discussed the methodological, ethical and political challenges I have been confronted with since I decided to commit to being an activist researcher within the Housing Rights Movement in Rome and picked Metropoliz as my primary ‘case study’. The issues I raised point to an emerging debate about the ethics (and politics) of social sciences and anthropology. Initially, I outlined the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of my activist research. I then proceeded to explain how they materialised into the application of solidarity as a method which shaped the ethnographic work I have been carrying out since late 2014. Starting from my own position, I explained how an epistemology of reciprocity translated into place-based, situated strategies of access, data collection and writing (see Routledge 1996, 2013; Hale 2006). I also underlined how a relational understanding of consent stretches and questions the boundaries established by academic notions of consent, for they imply layers of accountability that are not considered by academic conventions (Hale 2006). Lastly, this section condenses my methodological preoccupations, strategies and politics of representation and dissemination in solidarity with the Housing Rights Movements in Rome, and my goals regarding the dissemination process (Gillan and Pickerill 2012; Martínez 2014; Scheper-Hughes 1995). As a researcher and a BPM activist, I nurtured my attentiveness towards the impact of my work, the timeliness of its dissemination, and the

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mismatch between the canons of academic publishing and the willingness to make it as available as possible to my activist research constituency (Lancione 2016; Pickerill 2014). The opportunity to discuss these dilemmas with fellow-BPM activists and Metropoliz inhabitants was favoured by the fact that, as the following chapters will extensively narrate, Metropoliz developed in close relation to the practice of urban ethnography. Besides this, BPM activists and MAAM’s ‘art contributors’ are featured in books already. Space Metropoliz, edited by the ethnographers Giorgio de Finis and Fabrizio Boni (2016), narrated the rocket construction project from which the YouTube video-series Space Metropoliz and the MAAM originated. Forza Tutt* and MAAM (2015, 2017), edited by Giorgio de Finis, catalogue the art collection donated by hundreds of artists to the MAAM over the years and narrate how the self-managed museum became the ‘art barricade’ against the threat of eviction (see Chap. 6). Lastly, the edited volume R/Home (de Finis and Di Noto 2018) features contributions from the attendants of a ‘housing squats’ bus tour organised in June 2018 which concluded inside Metropoliz. The sharing of activist research experiences and expertise thus helped me to figure out the acceptable mediations that could tackle some fundamental contradictions that are specific to the academic practice in non-­ Italian, Anglophone contexts. For instance, I often interrogated myself, and therefore discussed with my comrades, about how fair it was to publish mostly in English-language scholarly arenas which are not accessible to my research constituency on economic and language grounds. These ethical-political doubts and concerns resurfaced every time I submitted papers to academic journals, contributed to edited collections, and arose even more intensely during the early stages of conceptualising this manuscript. However, our collective evaluation has been that these truisms were superseded by the benefits of spreading knowledge about Metropoliz outside of the activist and/or Italian audience. On the one hand, an ‘insider’ academic perspective could help further the connection with other engaged academics, artists, and research-activist networks that might be willing to become part of that ‘barricade of art and culture’ that is the bedrock of Metropoliz’s resistance against the threat of eviction, and possibly the main reason why it has not been executed yet, regardless of compelling legal initiatives, as the following chapters will explain. Furthermore, during these years, I had the opportunity to return the legitimation I have acquired as an ‘expert’ in this specific field by facilitating the relationship with other researchers as a gatekeeper in Metropoliz,

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then during my academic work (i.e. peer-reviewing articles, or attending conferences). Besides, I am committed to being part of larger conversation about the relationship between neoliberal academia and the necessity of contrasting the ‘gentrification’ of urban studies concerned with informality and marginality (Wacquant 2008) by taking responsibility for how academic production affects public action and trickles down in policymaking. Once again, this tallies with the ethical and political principle that a committed practice of social sciences and urban ethnography should marshal evidence from ‘the vast reservoir of vitality emanating from streets and popular districts to permeate the very infrastructure of decision-­ making and provisioning’ (Simone 2019, p. 125). This theory in action reifies in the combination of a varied set of analytical and empirical tools that aims to illuminate not only the epi-phenomenology of urban squatting for housing purposes, but its ‘sources, experiences, uses and effects’ (Kilansky and Auyero 2015, p.  2) as they manifest in the socio-spatial structure and contention of the urban space. Based on this approach, Chap. 4 mobilises different data sets, scholarly sources, institutional statistics and archival research in order to corroborate the assertion that the constitution of Rome as a squatted city (Grazioli 2018; Vasudevan 2015) is the product of two main factors. First, the vitality of Housing Rights Movements in organising around the pressing demand for affordable housing, coming from marginalised shanty-town dwellers in Rome since the demands made immediately since the Second World War. Second, their capability for updating their repertoire of action and contentious politics to tackle the exacerbation of the housing crisis in the prolonged aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This data will indisputably show that post-2008 crisis legislation concerned with coping with (or mostly, opposing) squatting for housing purposes are not just the product of real estate-friendly policymaking. They are often shaped by phony and ‘folk’ assumptions that hinder the in-depth comprehension of social phenomena and their background, and therefore obliterate an evaluation of the impact of public action in perpetuating spatialised inequalities (see Wacquant 2007, pp. 6–9). In conclusion, this methodological chapter advocates not only a shift in the paradigm of social scientific practice, but also for a paradigmatic change in the urban regime’s governmentality and action in tackling the housing crisis. In order to do so, the following chapter contextualises the history of Metropoliz in the light of Rome’s post-war and post-2008 crisis urban regime, from which the necessity for grassroots practices of urban regeneration and self-made housing dramatically stems.

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Bibliography Apoifis, N. (2016). Fieldwork in a Furnace: Anarchists, Anti-authoritarians and Militant Ethnography. Qualitative Research, 17(1), 3–19. Brighenti, A. M. (Ed.). (2013). Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between. Ashgate Publishing. Brown, G., & Pickerill, J. (2009). Space for Emotions in the Spaces of Activism. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(1), 24–35. Cellamare, C. (2019). Città Fai-Da-Te: Tra Antagonismo e Cittadinanza, Storie di Autorganizzazione Urbana. Donzelli Editore. Colectivo Situaciones. (2003, September). On the Researcher-Militant. http:// transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en.html Coppola, A. (2012). Apocalypse Town: Cronache della Fine della Civiltà Urbana. Laterza Editore. d’Albergo, E., & De Leo, D. (Eds.). (2018). Politiche Urbane per Roma: Le Sfide di una Capitale Debole. Sapienza Università Editrice. Dadusc, D., Grazioli, M., & Martínez, M. A. (2019). Introduction: Citizenship as Inhabitance? Migrant Housing Squats Versus Institutional Accommodation. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 521–539. De Carli, B., & Frediani, A. (2016). Insurgent Regeneration: Spatial Practices of Citizenship in the Rehabilitation of Inner-City São Paulo. GeoHumanities, 2(2), 331–353. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press. de Finis, G. (Ed.). (2015). Forza tutt*. La Barricata Dell’Arte. Bordeaux. de Finis, G. (2017). MAAM: Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz_Città Meticcia. Bordeaux. de Finis, G., & De Boni, F. (2016). Space Metropoliz: L’era delle migrazioni esoplanetarie. Bordeaux. de Finis, G., & Di Noto, I. (Eds.). (2018). R/Home: Diritto all’Abitare Dovere Capitale. Bordeaux Edizioni. della Porta, D. (2013). Repertoires of Contention. In D. A. Snow, D. D. Porta, B.  Klandermans, & D.  McAdam (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Publishers. Duneier, M. (1999). Sidewalk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gillan, K., & Pickerill, J. (2012). The Difficult and Hopeful Ethics of Research on, and with, Social Movements. Social Movements Studies, 11(2), 133–143. Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. AK Press. Grazioli, M. (2017). Abitare, Rigenerare, Ridefinire i Confini Urbani: il Caso delle Occupazioni Abitative a Roma. Sentieri Urbani/Urban Tracks, 22(Urban Boundaries), 78–83.

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Grazioli, M. (2018). The ‘Right to the City’ in the Post-Welfare Metropolis: Community-Building, Autonomous Infrastructures and Urban Commons in Rome’s Self-Organised Housing Squats. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Leicester. Leicester Research Archive. https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/ thesis/The_right_to_the_city_in_the_post-­welfare_metropolis_Community_ building_autonomous_infrastructures_and_urban_commons_in_Rome_s_self-­ organised_housing_squats_/10241723 Hale, C.  R. (2006). Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, 21(1), 96–120. Harvey, D. (1989). From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism. Human Geography, 71(1), 3–17. Juris, J. S. (2007). Practicing Militant Ethnography with the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona. In S.  Shukaitis, D.  Graeber, & E.  Biddle (Eds.), Constituent Imagination. Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (pp. 164–176). AK Production. Kilansky, K., & Auyero, J. (2015). Introduction. In J.  Auyero, P.  Bourgois, & N. Scheper-Hughes (Eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins (pp. 1–17). Oxford University Press. Lancione, M. (2016). The Ethnographic Novel as Activist Mode of Existence: Translating the Field with Homeless People and Beyond. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(7), 994–1015. Lancione, M. (2018). The Politics of Embodied Urban Precarity: Roma People and the Fight for Housing in Bucharest, Romania. Geoforum, 101(May 2019), 182–191. Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. University of California Press. Maestri, G. (2019). Temporary Camps, Enduring Segregation: The Contentious Politics of Roma and Migrant Housing. Palgrave Macmillan. Martínez, M. A. (2014). Some Notes About SqEK’s Activist-research Perspective. In Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK) (Ed.), Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism (pp. 17–22). Pluto Press. Mason, K., Brown, G., & Pickerill, J. (2013). Epistemologies of Participation, or, What Do Critical Human Geographers Know That’s of Any Use? Antipode, 45(2), 252–255. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. Montagna, N., & Grazioli, M. (2019). Urban Commons and Freedom of Movement: The Housing Struggles of Recently Arrived Migrants in Rome. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 577–592. Papadopoulos, D. (2014). Generation M. Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia. Teknokultura, 11(3), 637–645.

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Papadopoulos, D., & Tsianos, V. (2013). After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons. Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 178–196. Pardo, I., & Prato, G.  B. (Eds.). (2018). The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan. Pickerill, J. (2014). The Timeliness of Impact: Impacting Who, When, and for Whose Gain? Acme, 13(1), 24–26. Pickerill, J., & Chatterton, P. (2006). Notes Towards Autonomous Geographies: Creation, Resistance and Self-management as Survival Tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 30(6), 730–746. Routledge, P. (1996). Critical Geopolitics and Terrains of Resistance. Political Geography, 15(6/7), 509–531. Routledge, P. (2013). Activist Ethnography and Translocal Solidarity. In S.  Shukaitis & A.  Khasnabish (Eds.), Insurgent Encounters. Transnational Activism, Ethnography & the Political (pp. 250–268). Duke University Press. Russell, B. (2015). Beyond Activism/Academia: Militant Research and the Radical Climate and Climate Justice Movement(s). Area, 47(3), 222–229. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1995). The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 36(3), 409–440. Simone, A. (2019). Improvised Lives. Polity. Smith, G.  W. (1990). Political Activist as Ethnographer. Social Problems, 37(4), 629–648. Staid, A. (2014). I Dannati della Metropoli: Etnografie dei Migranti ai Confini della Legalità. Milieu Edizioni. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2015). Contentious Politics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Tsibiridou, F. (2018). An Ethnography of Space, Creative Dissent and Reflective Nostalgia in the City Centre of Global Istanbul. In I.  Pardo & G.  B. Prato (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography (pp. 405–426). Palgrave Macmillan. Vasudevan, A. (2015). The Makeshift City: Towards a Global Geography of Squatting. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 338–359. Wacquant, L. (2006). Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Polity. Wacquant, L. (2008). Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(1), 198–205.

CHAPTER 4

Rome, the Squatted City

Abstract  This chapter frames Rome as a self-made, squatted city governed by a composite real-estate urban regime. Drawing on the extensive literature concerning Rome’s post-Second World War development, policy analysis and ethnographic materials, it frames Rome as a metropolis where self-made urbanism, housing and real-estate speculation have for decades represented crucial fields of contention within which grassroots popular actions like squatting thrived. This legacy lays the foundation for reading the new conceptions of housing struggles, the right to the city, urban social movements and regeneration brought forward by Housing Rights Movements, and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, since the 2007 financial crisis revamped the housing one. This brings into focus the shift from social movements pursuing housing as their main goal, to the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare concerned with the right to move, settle and mobilise inside the city. Keywords  Blocchi Precari Metropolitani • Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare • Real estate • Squatted city • Urban regime

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_4

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4.1   Rome’s Urban Regime: A Historical Perspective In the monumental anthology Roma Moderna (1962), the historian Italo Insolera argued that Rome eluded modernity; in 1870, its planners gave up their prerogative to set up and implement a coherent urban vision and model of development, and instead opted for handing large pieces of the city over to real-estate speculators in exchange for financial inflows and electoral support. Besides, Insolera considered illegal white-collar construction (abusivismo) as the proxy of Rome’s urbanism. This resulted in the evident ‘randomness’ of the built city, for profit-driven speculation and white-collar housing informality were warping the cityscape, while planners failed to provide a vision of the consolidated city that would respond to the general welfare interest. As a counterpoint, Insolera urged scholars and public practitioners to radically reconsider the role of urban planning and architecture, moving from ‘sciences of aesthetics’ to ‘sciences of functionality’ focused on the distribution of essential facilities and welfare resources to the urban dwellers who need them the most. Less than 20 years later, Campos Venuti (1978) also urged planners to get rid of the real-estate influence and to infuse planning with a spirit of sobriety to further the general interest over privatised profits. Yet, 40 years later, the perspective of Rome as a city of publicly driven planning activities has dramatically declined in favour of a supposedly ‘participatory’ planning model, where in fact real-estate investors are still the only subjects empowered enough to lobby their way into formulating composite proposals and obtaining land-use permissions (Erbani 2013). Indeed, what has prevailed in Rome is a specific version of the Neoliberal Mediterranean urban model theorised by Lila Leontidou (1993), where belated and uneven industrial development and weak circuits of primary financial accumulation (understood both as manufacturing and financial services) resulted in an essentially tertiary capitalist system. The latter pivots around highly spatially intensive economic sectors such as realestate, tourism, logistics, trade, infrastructures and administrative services (see Vicari and Violante 2019). Against this backdrop, the coalition (institutionally peddled as a ‘partnership’) between institutional actors and economic agents represents the backbone of a ‘real-estate urban regime’ that primes the privatisation of urban assets and welfare resources as the main means for establishing political and financial relationships (see d’Albergo and De Leo 2018; d’Albergo and Moini 2015).

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These operations are ultimately enabled by deliberately weak public intervention, opaque policymaking and shady deliberative processes that are functional to the reproduction of systemic corruption as an integral part of the urban regime alongside legal practices and actors (Chiodelli and Gentili 2021). This pattern was partly uncovered by the Mafia Capitale trial, which regarded the widespread corruption involved in the subcontracting of the City Council’s essential facilities, including welfare services and housing shelters (Berdini and Nalbone 2011). It is yet evident that the trend of housing and welfare commodification has not been downsized by the corruption scandals. On the opposite, it has represented a ‘safe haven’ even while the economic crisis caused by the pandemic is unravelling. Pertaining to the third trimester (June–September) of 2020, Rome’s Chamber of Commerce recorded that the construction, civil engineering and real-estate sectors were regularly increasing the number of active enterprises, whilst the wholesale, retail and tourist-related segments have been shrinking both in number of records and active firms (Camera di Commercio di Roma 2020). The same can be said about in-­house (e.g. shelters and nursing homes) and non-residential welfare sources that registered a growth even by +7% in comparison to the third trimester of 2019 (ibid.), as Table 4.1 summarises. Hence, the data in Table 4.1 not only show the real-estate and welfare services’ positive performance even during the pandemic crisis, but also the extent to which they both outnumber the manufacturing sector. As the latter has been significantly resized and delocalised during the last four decades (d’Albergo and Moini 2015; Vicari and Violante 2019), it has further downsized during the third 2020 semester, thus lost further relevance as for Rome’s economy (e.g. the active metalwork industries decreased by 3.6%, whilst the car industry shrunk by 5.1%, ibid.). On the opposite, construction and real-estate sectors have been thriving throughout the post-2007 economic shocks. This is shown, for instance, by the fact that, during the early 2000s, Rome’s private housing stock has grown twice as fast as Milan’s, as 52,000 housing units were added (Erbani 2013, p. 9). This prowess was made possible relying on their partnership with the public decisionmakers in eroding the public spaces (d’Albergo and Moini 2015; d’Albergo and De Leo 2018; Erbani 2013; Sotgia and Marchini 2017). At the same time, they have taken advantage of their role of primary providers of legal housing in Rome (Gentili and Hoekstra 2018), which has paralleled with the growth of the privatised welfare services directed to those who cannot support themselves in the marketised housing sector (Grazioli 2019).

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Table 4.1  Author’s elaboration on the Chamber of Commerce’s data about the number of registered and active enterprises by economic sector in Rome in September 2020 Economic division

Registered enterprises and growth rate (June– September 2020/2019)

Constructions and real estate F 41: Buildings’ construction (Costruzione di Edifici) F 42: Civil engineering (Ingegneria Civile) F43: Specialised construction works (Lavori di Costruzione Specializzati) L68: Real-estate activities (Attività Immobiliari) Welfare services Q 86: Healthcare assistance (Assistenza sanitaria) Q 87: In-home welfare services (Servizi di Assistenza Sociale Residenziale) Q 88: Non-residential welfare services (Assistenza Sociale Non Residenziale) S 96: Other services for people (Altri Servizi alla Persona)

Active enterprises and growth rate (June– September 2020/2019)

27,398 (−1.7%)

19,622 (+0.4%)

1143 (+2.4%)

907 (+3.1%)

38,546 (+3.6%)

35,263 (+4.4%)

26,008 (+1.6%)

19,148 (+4.2%)

2539 (+3%)

2062 (+4.6%)

590 (+7.3%)

547 (+9.2%)

1048 (+5.3%)

917 (+3.7%)

19,166 (+2.4%)

16,941 (+2.9%)

Camera di Commercio di Roma (2020)

Besides, since 2008, the new Regulatory Plans have been extremely generous in conceding extra construction space to constructors in exchange for ‘primary urbanisation compensations’ (e.g. streets, public housing stock). Regardless of this largess, about 20% of Rome’s built environment is illegal (abusivo), as it has developed in the grey areas of loose regulations and selectively implemented policing (Clough Marinaro 2020). This ‘illegal city’ occupies 15,000 hectares of urban land, which is twice the extension of the ‘historic city’ centre of Rome (7400 hectares) and five times the size of the urban land devoted to public housing (3500 hectares) (Giura Longo and Cerulli 2016). This corporate informality has also emerged in the burgeoning growth of short rent platforms, as it took advantage from the substantive lack of tax and legal regulations for the

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sector1 (Lelo et al. 2019). Unsurprisingly, this has determined a further shrinkage of the available habitations’ stock for ‘stable’ residency (Brollo and Celata 2019; Gainsforth 2019). As the phenomenon is shockingly visible in the city centre (where the ratio between available tourist spots and beds in tourist accommodation is currently 4:1, see Brollo and Celata 2019), it is permeating also ‘peripheral’ areas. For instance, the Fifth Municipality (where Metropoliz is located) is the sixth by numbers of holiday listings (1200 in November 2019), whilst the average monthly revenue in the area was expected to be around 400 euros in 2019 (ibid.). Even though the rate of listed Airbnb apartments against number of tenant families is still moderate (less than 15%), it has to be ‘cleaned’ by the concentration of public housing blocks, and the still semi-central location which guarantees lower monthly revenues (around 400 euros in the Metropoliz neighbourhood and 1000 euros closer to the city centre). It is, therefore, very obvious how Rome’s urban regime has consistently enabled the discretion (if not the arbitrariness) of real-estate economic sectors and lobbies, whose modalities of accumulation are highly spatially intensive. Indeed, they do not ‘only’ influence the distribution of workforce and income, but also directly affect the distribution of resources and the patterns of social reproduction through multifarious forms of spatial (and housing) engineering. In this process, public action evaporates in order to facilitate capitalist initiatives and financial inflows, therefore allowing loose regulations and controls. Yet, the ‘folk’ as well as ‘professional’ (media and scholarly) understanding of abusivismo and illegal housing in Rome has mainly not been concerned with the planning derailments caused by real-estate speculators. They are instead applied to the blue-­ collar, working-class housing informality that has mushroomed since the post-IIWW period (and then revamped since the 2007–8 crisis) in the form of informal settlements, housing squats and self-constructed habitations that shaping the autonomous geography of the self-made, squatted city (Cellamare 2019; Vasudevan 2017; Violante 2008).

4.2   Housing Crisis and Informality in Post-crisis Rome According to the 1951 census, the informal settlements (baraccamenti) inhabited by poor urbanites ‘accommodated’ the 8.7% of the overall urban population. They were overcrowded shanty-towns concentrated in areas

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that, no matter how close they were to the historic city centre or periphery, were deprived of all the essential facilities, including sewage and access to water. Furthermore, the inhabitants of these areas were largely stigmatised by ‘regularly housed’ citizenry, scholars and even media operators, who pejoratively dubbed them the baraccati (shanty-towners) (Berlinguer and Della Seta 1960; Mudu 2014). The magnitude and persistence of the phenomenon was not merely the consequence of post-war poverty and lengthy reconstruction. It was rooted in three intertwining phenomena: (1) the Fascist purge of the city in order to pursue the ‘Great Rome’ regeneration project; (2) the planning and creation of industrial districts at the outskirts of the city centre, both during and after the Mussolini regime; (3) the mismatch between the public housing supply in the borgate2 built during or after the Fascist regime3 and the demand by poor ‘native’ Roman urbanites and internal migrants inflowing from the Italian inner areas and least developed regions (like Abruzzo and Calabria) seeking for employment in growing industries (see Insolera 1962; Villani 2012). In some cases, informal settlements were created on purpose by politically or socially marginalised urban dwellers. This was the case of the neighbourhood where Metropoliz is located, Tor Sapienza. The originally malaria-infested vacant area was ‘scouted’ by the antifascist railwayman Michele Testa when he was looking to establish a cooperative-based settlement during the Fascist regime. It was later included on official maps, connected to the consolidated city with public transportation and then appointed into post-war industrial plans for hosting agro-industrial factories as the Peroni beer factory and the Fiorucci slaughterhouse. Finally, big public housing complexes were created to house the industrial labour force working in the new industries (Pietrangeli 2014; see Chap. 4). Nevertheless, the vast majority of Rome’s informal settlements were the outcome of the unmet housing need of entire generations of adults and children who lived, worked and were schooled inside the shanty-towns. In the conclusions of the second edition of the fortunate (and insightful) sociology masterpiece Borgate di Roma (Berlinguer and Della Seta 1960), the two urbanists understood the centrality of these derelict neighbourhoods for grassroots transformative processes that would overturn the ideology of exclusion underpinning the disenfranchisement of the poor urban dwellers. These conflicts would inevitably (and even forcibly) bridge the gap in the relationship between the consolidated city and the disenfranchised borgate, since their needs could not be satisfied by ‘traditional’, representative

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politics (Berlinguer and Della Seta 1960, pp. 352–8). This ‘prophecy’ was fulfilled during the 1970s, when autonomous HRMs replaced the Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) and ‘institutional’ tenants’ unions in connecting the different struggles boiling over inside the squatted, self-made city: struggles for liveable housing, welfare and urban infrastructures (Cellamare 2019; Vasudevan 2017). Alongside this, HRMs constructed a political narrative of the everyday practices of solidarity and networking that the inhabitants of the shanty-towns were experimenting to cope with the undignified living conditions they had been enduring for decades (Armati 2015; Villani 2012). As part of their contentious politics, HRMs began to coordinate the struggle of the baraccamenti’s inhabitants and demands for decent and safe housing, alongside undertaking the first squatting of vacant public housing buildings during the early 1970s to leverage the construction and allocation of new ones. Lastly, they organised around the demands of public housing tenants for rental and utility caps based on the household’s level of poverty (Martinelli 1989; Vasudevan 2017). The conflict was so intense that, during the period leading up to the 1977–8 uprising, the Movement experienced fatal casualties such as the Autonomia Operaia (Working Class Autonomy) militant Fabrizio Ceruso, who was killed at the age of 19 on the 8 September 1974 by an unidentified police gunshot during the military eviction of a squatted public housing complex in the borgata San Basilio. As the revolt erupted, the City Council and the Italian Government agreed to abort the police operation and transfer the evictees into officially assigned council estates (Grazioli 2018; Vasudevan 2017). Following these uprisings, the first PCI mayor Luigi Petroselli implemented a massive Housing Plan and the design of the 1982 General Regulatory Plan. The combination of these two policies enables the evacuation of the baraccamenti, and the re-allocation of their inhabitants in fully equipped council estates. Thriving on these achievements in the years following this, HRMs remained active by retaining their role as propellers of grassroots mobilisations for the right to stay put in the city and universal access to welfare (Di Feliciantonio 2017; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018). In addition to this, they consolidated historic housing squats and favoured the proliferation of other types of non-housing (mainly political/cultural) squats such as the centri sociali, which became their closest political allies in the city (see Piazza 2012). Furthermore, as migration processes became more intense and visible in the city, HRMs logistically and politically supported the early initiatives

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of autonomous migrant squatting, as in the case of the former Pantanella pasta factory during the 1990s (see De Angelis 2014). Lastly, HRMs monitored the trends in the privatised housing market and publicly denounced real-estate speculators, while supporting evicted and foreclosed tenants (see Mudu 2006). This ‘karstic’ activism eventually paved the path for the rebound of the squatting for dwelling, and the innovations that HRMs applied to their consolidated repertoires of action, demands and organisational practices as the housing crisis revamped since the harbingers of the 2007–8 financial crisis. HRMs then climaxed in 2012 and 2013 with the so-called Tsunami Tours: they were simultaneous rounds of squatting of vacant buildings in different parts of the city, featuring grassroots groups as well as autonomous trade unions (see Armati 2015; Caciagli 2016). The scope of the Movements’ political ambition was not only the result of their consolidation in Rome’s political arena, yet a necessity for coping with the multifaceted composition of the housing crisis in Rome since the recession caused by the global financial crisis. Indeed, the aftermath of the 2008 crisis made the slogan ‘houses without people and people without houses’ a dramatic evidence (Gentili and Hoekstra 2018; Puccini 2016). On the one hand, widespread economic precarity caused a sharp decline in the access to the private housing market. In 2018, Rome’s Association of Builders and Realtors (Associazione dei Costruttori ed Edili di Roma e Provincia, henceforth ACER) estimated that 37,500 housing units had been vacant or unsold in Rome since the onset of the crisis, whilst 57,000 families were experiencing conditions of housing inadequacy and/or segregation. These figures were aggravated by the steady growth of foreclosures and tenant eviction cases. In 2018 alone, 73% of the overall 6113 eviction notices issued in Rome were against economically defaulting tenants, whilst other 7778 eviction requests were filed by single landlords, real-estate societies or banks that had repossessed foreclosed properties (Grazioli 2019; Sina 2018). On the other hand, applications for council housing (Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica, hereby ERP) and/or ‘housing emergency’ facilities have surged. While the number of ERP applications topped 13,500 in 2020, from 2017 to 2020 only few apartments a year were allocated (57 in 2018, 300 in 2019), either because of poor maintenance or because of the lack of staff who could process and expedite the applications. On top of these aggravated circumstances, the ERP system has been designed in order to selectively exclude and then channel marginalised, migrant and impoverished people towards the private infrastructures

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forming the ‘Humanitarian Industrial Complex’ (see Dadusc and Mudu 2020; Grazioli 2017, 2019; Lancione 2018; Mudu 2006). In the case of evictees and occupants, the system is structured around temporary centres for housing assistance managed by private enterprises contracted by the City Council. An even more segregating system of monitoring is applied to the 4000 Roma people living in ‘institutional’ camps (to be added to the 2500 living in ‘tolerated’ illegal settlements) (Maestri 2019), and the asylum seekers/refugees included in the initial reception system (see Montagna and Grazioli 2019). Lastly, about 16,000 homeless people are institutionalised within the shelters network (Grazioli 2019). Against this backdrop, it is frankly unsurprising that many housing deprived subjects have chosen either to squat vacant ERP apartments4 or even more numerously to squat private dwellings. The latter option has consolidated the number of 90 squatted buildings for habitation in Rome, occupied by roughly 13,500 people (including thousands of children). A considerable number of them have joined the HRMs such as BPM since the effects of the 2008 crisis began to unfold.

4.3   Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and the Housing Rights Movements The genealogical overview of post-crisis Rome’s urban regimes and patterns of housing deprivation illustrates how crucial housing is as an asset for the contention of the spatial, social and political resources produced within the city’s everyday fabric. Since the harbingers of the 2007–8 financial  recession, and then during its prolonged unfolding, urban social movements active in the city have had to dust off the consolidated repertoires of action, demands and organisational practices inherited from the thriving struggles of previous decades, and then redevelop them to adapt to the critical changes determined by the late neoliberal reorganisation of metropolitan space. This required new innovative campaigns of action and squatting of urban empty properties to affirm the right to inhabit the city, their oppositions to real-estate speculation and evictions, and materialise their conception of grassroots urban regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016; Grazioli 2017; see Chap. 2). However, that was not all that was needed. As these movements saw it, the situation also demanded the blending of political organisations with diverse ideological roots, legacies, histories and practices in order to maximise the potential to oppose and

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resist such a pervasive and structured urban regime. Against this backdrop, BPM represents one of the more recent, and most innovative, Housing Rights organisations in Rome’s current political arena. As a Housing Right Movement organisation, BPM is newer than other grassroots political ones acting under the collective signature Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare (Movement for the Right to Habitation). For instance, the larger and ‘older’ group, Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per La Casa (hereby CCLC), has been part of the thriving history of struggles for public housing from the late 1980s onwards. In particular, it has prioritised the squatting of vacant public properties (e.g. former schools, abandoned residencies and army barracks) as leverage for obtaining negotiation with the regional and the city council in support of stronger public action in housing and welfare provisions. Hence, CCLC retains a strong attachment to its historic heritage, and a strong focus upon council housing (Case Popolari)-related demands (see Armati 2015; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018). By contrast, BPM branched out from more institutionalised housing organisations (like ACTION5) and tenants’ unions (Asia-­ USB6) in order to experiment with innovative forms of urban, social movement unionism (see Fairbrother 2008; Gindin 2016; Martínez 2019). Indeed, BPM activists have engaged in different sets of collective actions and focused their action locally in order to build multi-scalar political coalitions and networks that would cross paths with diverse urban subjects. Besides, the strategic combination of tactical contentious politics and negotiations they mobilise aims to accomplish transformative housing policies, while acknowledging the role and weight of the different actors involved in Rome’s recent neoliberal governance. To this end, BPM activists have triggered a discussion with other housing rights organisations in order to understand, and then target, the role of real-estate speculators in the development of profit-oriented housing policies and urban planning. By this token, BPM has historically prioritised the squatting of private vacancies over public ones. Furthermore, BPM departed from ‘classic’ modalities of housing unions by conceptualising dwelling not as the ultimate goal, but as a fundamental point of departure for re-appropriating dispossessed urban resources, both material (i.e. spatial enclosures and welfare resources) and political (i.e. contesting austerity urbanism; reopening the Political Opportunity Structure obstructed by real-estate lobbying) (Bosi and Zamponi 2015; della Porta and Mattoni 2014). In order to do this, BPM have drawn on the thriving legacy brought forward by

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‘older’ movements in order to frame housing squats as catalysts for insurgent politics for the ‘right to the city’ (Mudu 2014; Nur and Sethman 2017). As one of BPM’s activists and founders argues: Social trade-unionism goes out from the workplace and manages to produce in the city and its neighbourhoods a shift that is utterly necessary during these times. […] There are those who call what we are doing social confederation, others call it other names, but the bottom line is that we are currently living in an historical phase when trade unionism as we used to know it will transform, at least from the standpoint of social conflict, into something that does not exist yet […] Inside this effort there is no space for hegemonic or co-optation modalities that would impair this autonomous process of social coalition and experimentation. Working to broaden spaces of dialogue and conflict is what we have imagined to be the function of the BPM. We are not in love with the political brand, but we are with the idea that underlies it. […] For instance, the issue of basic income is articulated using the re-appropriation of housing as re-appropriation of income. Putting a roof over one’s head, and so solving the blackmail of paying rent and bills, is a way of giving more value to the precarious incomes that characterise many of those who get closer to the BPM experience. [Paolo di Vetta, activist, 25 January 2016]

Aligning itself to this logic (and practice) of social movement unionism, BPM rejects the traditional chains of representation guaranteed by institutionalised trade unions and political parties. On the one hand, this pertains to a more general critique of the co-optation of social movements’ radical demands into the moderation imposed by the mainstream political agenda and consensus seeking (Armati 2015; Caciagli 2016; Mudu 2014; Nur and Sethman 2017). On the other hand, BPM has consolidated a durable alliance with grassroots trade unions such as the S.I.-Cobas, a grassroots organisation which mainly unionises precarious, migrant workers employed in the tertiary sector (especially logistics and tourism), and who are often housing squatters because of their poor and unreliable incomes (see Massarelli 2014). Furthermore, BPM borrows practices and languages traditionally associated with trade unions like street blockades and cat-­ strikes in their process of mobilisation. This orientation stirred the tone of BPM’s first public appearance during the social strike called by autonomous trade unions, associations and extra-parliamentarian political parties in November 2007. On this occasion, the activists and 30 housing-­ deprived families carried out the first squatting action of an unfinished

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(and abandoned) residential building in Bufalotta, a developing neighbourhood at the north-eastern borders of the GRA ring road and close to one of the biggest European shopping malls, Porta di Roma: During the month of November 2007, a few days after the first squat was opened in via Volontè, in the Bufalotta zone, a march was organised by a social block that actually carried out a blockade of the street in order to take part in the rally. It introduced itself to the city as the ‘precarious metropolitan bloc’. […] During the following months, to develop this conflictual bloc’s experience, we thought we could not enclose it in such a small, contingent dynamic. Rather, we wanted to convey the idea that it was a reproducible, copyright-free experience. Therefore, passing from the singular ‘precarious metropolitan bloc’ to the plural noun ‘Blocchi Precari Metropolitani’ has been a natural development. The experience of BPM was then reproduced many times, and the squats affiliated with this political assemblage have increased in number. [Paolo di Vetta, activist, 25 January 2016]

As Paolo argues, squatting represents the proxy for a city-scale unionist strategy that, through its own replication, has affirmed the activists and squatters in the city as visible, politically vocal subjects. As the HRMs’ experiments have become refined and durable, they have also claimed credit as ‘law-breaking legislators’ (Mudu and Aureli 2017). Their demands for multi-scalar housing policies pivot around three main principles that could effectively tackle the widespread housing crisis while curbing real-estate clout: first, privileging the economically and environmentally sustainable recuperation and reconversion of urban vacancies into permanent housing solutions; second, the redistribution of housing resources beyond formal welfare boundaries, modulating them according to the complexity of the current housing crisis stratification; third, the recognition of the potential of housing squats as propellers of the urban commons that prefigure an alternative, more sustainable way of inhabiting the city. The squatting of the former Fiorucci slaughterhouse in March 2009 tallies precisely with this logic whereby, as Chap. 5 illustrates, the former industrial wreck is exemplary not only for its successful grassroots upcycling and regeneration, but also for its resistance against the threats of eviction moved by the proprietor, who is one of the most prominent Italian construction tycoons.

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In the pursuit of extending support for the squatters’ cause and protecting the squats from the constant threats of eviction, BPM has promoted alliances and mobilisations on different scales, starting from neighbourhood-based activism to national campaigns like Abitare nella Crisi (Habitation in the Crisis, currently inactive) and Vogliamo Tutto (‘We want everything’), a coalition of different grassroots organisations based in Southern Italian cities that struggle for basic income, universal healthcare and labour rights (see Chap. 7). On a city scale, the success of the Tsunami Tours was so evident that, even after the 2012–3 ones, it was reproduced by ‘independent’ squatters and settlers who replicated the HRMs’ targets (and in some cases organisational practices), profiting from the abundance of empty buildings all over the city. Hence, the possibilities for replicating squatting practices in the context of Rome explains how the numbers of buildings squatted for residential purposes in the metropolitan areas have remained relatively stable despite recurring evictions and the likelihood of underestimations and analytical biases (e.g. not including informal settlements and urban camps in the count; see Montagna and Grazioli 2019). In addition, the prefigurative politics they embody delineate the rational underpinning of the post-‘Tsunami Tours’ governance of the housing crisis that HRMs and squats like Metropoliz have to navigate daily in order to act and resist.

4.4   The Contested Governance of the Squatted City Following the 2012–3 Tsunami Tours, a copious production of laws, policies and protocols concerned with the escalation of squatting have been implemented from 2014 onwards by the actors involved in the governance of Rome in different capacities (State, region, City Council and local municipalities). These measures were not only poorly coordinated among the different institutional actors, but they often nullified each other, as they responded to different logics, agendas and electoral pursuits. For instance, the Democrats governing the Region generally displayed a greater propensity towards negotiation with urban social movements and a more tolerant orientation towards the squatters, whilst the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-Star Movement) which has led the city council since 2015 has put forward a rigid pro-law line, and offered little space for institutional intermediation. As these policies have stratified, they

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have determined contradictory orientations and outputs, which ultimately resulted in a substantial paralysis of the public actions that should have tackled the housing crisis. If anything, they have created more emergencies by feeding the downward spiral of evictions. Besides, proximity institutions like local municipalities are directly affected by this normative dissonance, since they are the frontline of the demands for local welfare and intermediation with higher-rank institutions, although they have no formal power or resources for autonomously managing housing and welfare resources. Generally, the policies formulated after the Tsunami Tours have acknowledged the structural roots of the housing crisis. Nevertheless, they mostly point to creating a hostile environment against squatters, instead of acknowledging their motivations, and exemplarity, for rethinking the top-­ down modalities of housing and urban regeneration policies. One exception to this approach was represented by the ‘Extraordinary Plan for the Housing Emergency’ deliberated by the Lazio Region in January 2014 and then voted on in March 2016. As its premise, the plan acknowledged the local government’s limitations as the primary cause of the rampaging housing and squatting crisis. It then earmarked 197 million euros for the recuperation of vacant, public real estate and the renovation of council housing stock. In addition to this, it included a list of squats fit for recuperation and conversion to council estates through the partnership between the public administration and the squatters. Lastly, the plan recognised the activist groups and tenant unions as institutional stakeholders in the design and implementation of the plan (e.g. conducting a census for the allocation of the council houses to the eligible squatters). As the Deliberation was saluted by HRMs as a breakthrough in the struggle to legitimise the movements’ demands (see Fig. 4.1), it was yet soon invalidated by ensuing measures driven by a ‘neoliberally penal’ (Dikeç 2007) methodology, even if only through administrative shortcuts. This drift was exemplified by the Article 5 of the 2014 Housing Plan, approved in March 2014 by the then Democratic Party (PD)/Centre Right Government. This article was designed to be an innovative tool for conducting the ‘struggle against the illegal squatting of buildings’ without resorting to the enforcement of penal law. Indeed, the article intervenes on what are common administrative levels as it forbids by default of the legitimation to record someone’s residency into a squatted building or public housing unit. Explicitly, the article makes no exception even in case of squatting out of necessity, nor for children or ill people. The article

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Fig. 4.1  The HRMs’ manifesto celebrating the approval of the Lazio Region’s Deliberation’s implementation plan in 2016. (Source: Blocchi Precari Metropolitani Facebook Page)

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bears thus two main implications. First of all, people are stripped of civil rights such as voting, and lose access to social welfare rights and services (including healthcare and education for children). Second, this measure heavily affects migrants’ statuses, because a registered address is a prerequisite for obtaining visas and applying for their renewal. Ostensibly, the article aims not only at punishing existing squatters, but at discouraging potential future ones to act. This administrative version of the squatters’ penalisation has paved the path for a stream of measures implemented at the scale of Rome’s city council until 2020. Since 2014, Rome has undergone three administrative phases: the last part of the Democratic administration led by Ignazio Marino, who resigned after allegations of embezzlement in October 2015; the ‘interregnum’ of the governmental delegate Tronca (November 2015–June 2016); the election as Rome’s mayor of the Movimento Cinque Stelle’s representative Virginia Raggi (June 2016–time of writing). Starting with the governmental delegate, Tronca, Rome’s administrators have grappled with lists and schedules of priority evictions of housing squats. In spite of their differences, these plans adopted as a crucial criterion the eventual presence of a lawsuit, or the impeding request for financial compensation made by the squats’ owners against local (or even national) authorities that did not evict their locations, as in the case of Metropoliz.7 In addition to this, four squats and one informal settlement have been forcibly evicted from 2017 onwards: Colle Monfortani (January 2017); Via Quintavalle and Piazza Indipendenza (August 2017); and the former Penicillina Leo (December 2018); Cardinal Capranica (July 2019). The evictees were screened for eventual temporary housing relocation using census and evaluation protocols implemented by local municipalities. Lastly, housing rights activists were largely targeted by repressive measures including refined policing devices such as the ‘special surveillances’ (see Chap. 7). What this overview displays is that the production of laws and policies at multiple governmental levels occurring in post-crisis, post-Tsunami Tours Rome, prevalently converged towards the reinforcement of real-­ estate entitlement, instead of acknowledging the structural roots of the housing crisis and its counter-responses. To this purpose, they pointed towards the disruption of housing squats’ replicability and centrality in the political arena. This occurred although even real-estate developers seem to recognise the depth of the gap between the housing demand and the existing (mainly private) housing stock offer. As the trend seems to change with the new Housing Plan law approved by the Lazio region at the end

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of February 2020, the main outcome of the stratifying legislation (and Article 5 of the 2014 Housing Plan in particular) is still the further limiting of social welfare state for the poorest, and the enforcement of the Roman variant of the European neoliberal penal state (Dikeç 2007). The latter intensifies social and penal policymaking that constructs a penal common sense (Peck 2003) based on discursive regimes that socialise within urban society a specific vision of the city and its problems. This commonsensical politics supports the criminalisation of the poor and political dissent, alongside the surveillance of populations deemed problematic for the maintenance of law and order (see Wacquant 2001). Ultimately, Rome’s governmental actors did not abide by the wise advice to reinstate a strong public hold on housing planning and policies. Indeed, they have chosen instead to keep legitimising and supporting the reproduction of real-estate modalities of spatial dispossession and accumulation, whilst public housing and welfare resources continue to be heavily under-financed under the imperatives of austerity, and the ideology of the ‘efficient partnership’ between the private and public sectors. In actual fact, what keeps the Squatted City together is its autonomy and capability to mobilise its broader networks to solicit public actions where self-organisation cannot suffice. This is for instance the case of the relation with local municipalities, that are constantly solicited by HRMs as intermediators in the evictions’ controversies, as well as facilitators for the squatters’ access of the squatters to fundamental welfare facilities such as schools and healthcare that have arisen since Article 5 became effective in 2014 (see Fig.  4.2). From an institutional perspective, this undeniably burdens local institutions that are already undermined by their being under-resourced, under-staffed and unequipped of formal jurisdiction on the housing issue (see Brodkin 2008; Lipsky 1980). Against this background, it feels even more paradoxical that public finances would be ‘invested’ to perform repressive actions (such as mass trials against activists, eviction plans and widespread surveillance) that refute the socio-­ economic underpinnings of housing informality and poverty, and that the authenticity of the housing crisis would be questioned (see Chap. 7). In conclusion, if we are to evaluate the ‘achievements’ of this legislative stratification, it is indisputable that, regardless of their aim to discourage prospective squatters and enforce law and order, they have so far consistently failed to downsize the phenomenon and render it invisible. On the contrary, they have exacerbated political polarisation and social

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Fig. 4.2  The occupation of the Central Registration Office in via Petroselli (Rome) by HRMs to protest against the approval of Article 5 of the 2014 National Housing Plan (January 2015)

turmoil in the public sphere, whereby the mobilisations promoted by HRMs, the counter-campaigns enacted by right-wing politicians, and the making of eviction into a public spectacle have grown in number and intensity over the years (see Chap. 7). Furthermore, and paraphrasing Abdoumaliq Simone (2019, pp. 2–3) writing about the hectic everydayness of suburban Algiers, the proliferation of possibilities, alterations and adjustments arising in the sociological and political density of the daily life of housing squats make their ‘routines’ and organisational rites (see Chaps. 2 and 6) basically impossible to police, render invisible and tone down. The following chapters account for Metropoliz’s field of possibility and action, starting from the subjective, and situated, background that have preceded the entrance of the prospective squatters and BPM activist in the abandoned Fiorucci factory at the end of March 2009.

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Notes 1. At the time of writing (December 2020), all the attempts to regulate short rental activities (at least in fiscal terms) have been pushed back at the city and national level after an intense lobbying activity by the platforms’ lobbyists who claimed that it would be detrimental for Rome’s tourism sector. 2. At the time of writing (December 2020), all the attempts to regulate short rental activities (at least in fiscal terms) have been pushed back at the city and national level after an intense lobbying activity by the platforms’ lobbyists who claimed that it would be detrimental for Rome’s tourism sector. 3. During the 1930s, the Fascist regime expedited the construction of the borgate popolarissime e rapidissime (very popular and quickly built borgate), built with low-quality materials and poor infrastructures in order to house the poorest urban inhabitants (Villani 2012; Santoro 2015). 4. According to the provisional calculations made by the Lazio Region while approving a new ‘Housing Emergency Law’ in February 2020, around 10,000 apartments are currently squatted by ‘irregular’ tenants. 5. ACTION – Diritti in Movimento (Rights on the Move) is a housing rights organisation created in early 2000 by the militants from a previous housing organisation (DAC). Their effort is towards combining more ‘traditional’ housing demands with a more rounded approach concerned with the right to inhabit the city and post-crisis urbanism (see Grazioli 2017; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; Nur and Sethman 2017). 6. Asia-USB is the tenants’ branch of the trade union Unione Sindacale di Base. It is unusual in having numerous squatters of public housing flats among its members, as well as one housing squat which was occupied during the 2013 Tsunami Tour. 7. The owner of the land of the former Fiorucci slaughterhouse, the construction tycoon Ca.Sa Srl (Salini-Caporlingua), has sued and obtained from the Italian Minister of the Interior a compensation verdict of 27.9 million in July 2018 (see Chaps. 7 and 8).

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Vicari, P., & Violante, A. (2019). Ancora Un’Eccezione? La Crisi Fiscale della Capitale tra Neoliberismo e Presunto Declino. In A. Coppola & G. Punziano (Eds.), Roma in Transizione: Governo, Strategie, Metabolismi e Quadri di Vita di una Metropoli (Vol. 1, pp. 167–182). Planum Publisher. Villani, L. (2012). Le borgate del Fascismo: Storia Urbana, Politica e Sociale della Periferia Romana. Ledizioni. Violante, A. (2008). La Metropoli Spezzata: Sviluppo Urbano di una Città Mediterranea. Franco Angeli Editore. Wacquant, L. (2001). The Penalization of Poverty and the Rise of Neo-liberalism. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 9, 401–412. Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Polity.

CHAPTER 5

Occupy Metropoliz

Abstract  This chapter delves into the historical, subjective and political factors that led to the occupation of the former Fiorucci salami factory in March 2009. The first part reconstructs the self-made, and industrial history of Tor Sapienza, whilst the second one is concerned with the demographics of the squatters who populated Metropoliz from 2009 onwards. It describes how they got in touch with Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and converged in the exceptional moment of squatting, when the first group entered the abandoned salami factory with the activists’ support. Besides, the chapter frames squatting not as an event, but as a process of space and communitymaking that unfolds from the exceptional moment of cracking in into everyday life, as the integration of different ‘generations’ of squatters suggests. Keywords  Demographics • Fiorucci • Metropoliz • Squatters • Tor Sapienza

5.1   Metropoliz and Tor Sapienza, a History of Self-Made Habitation The former Fiorucci industrial plant, now broadly known as Metropoliz La Città Meticcia (The Mestizo City), is the epitome of the connection between the right to stay put in the city (Grazioli and Caciagli 2017a) and autonomous urban regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016). It also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_5

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embodies one of the fiercest challenges to the neoliberal capitalist discourse that interweaves vacancy and non-productivity. In fact, the reconversion of the industrial ruins into a site of habitation (and its own museum; see Fig.  5.1) manifests the HRMs’ assumption that the fate of empty urban interstices is not necessarily to be abandoned, demolished or reconverted for commodified uses (see Coppola 2012). On the contrary, they can be collectively transformed and become autonomous infrastructures where alternative spatial and productive paradigms are affirmed. These spaces conceive productivity as the fruition of the right to inhabit the city with dignity, starting with the inequalities suffered by disenfranchised urbanites, instead of support for capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of the hegemonic urban regime (Annunziata 2014; Aureli and Mudu 2017; Berger 2006; Brighenti 2013; De Carli and Frediani 2016). As for this modality of urban contention through spatial transformation, the

Fig. 5.1  Kids looking at a book presentation from the rooftops of the factory (September 2020)

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story of Tor Sapienza’s foundation, development and late neoliberal transition represents a distinctive example. Nowadays, Tor Sapienza represents one of those former urban fringes that sprawls from the ‘consolidated’ city centre, and whose unevenness stems from the dissenting planning agendas that have stratified different (and often contradictory) (re)productive functions—rural, industrial and service-related (Leonardi and Morri 2017, p. 139). In fact, in the same way as Metropoliz, Tor Sapienza was not the product of a sanctioned effort of regenerating what used to be an abandoned, rural malaria-ridden area. The neighbourhood was created from scratch on the impulse of the socialist railway worker Michele Testa, who was ‘shipped out’ to patrol the train track passing through the country instead of being exiled as many leftist activists who were hostile against the regime. He saw the potential for creating a settlement and a granary that would operate according to cooperative, socialist ideals. In order to achieve this, Testa contacted the few ‘institutional’ actors present in the area (a doctor, a priest and a primary school teacher) to translate these principles into an actual plan and to seek help in the purchase of the small pieces of land from the local wealthy landowners who were not using them. Lastly, Testa and his associates took out an 800,000-lira (the former Italian currency) loan to build the first 25 housing units where the future farmworkers and cooperative members of Cooperativa Tor Sapienza per l’edilizia popolare Rurale (Tor Sapienza Cooperative for Rural Public Housing) would live. The new self-constructed settlement was finally inaugurated on 20 May 1923. It was named ‘Tor Sapienza’ (Knowledge Tower) after the hostel for pilgrims and students created in the seventeenth century by the Cardinal Pantagati, and blown up at the end of the Second World War by the retreating German army who had transformed it into an ammunition warehouse (Mattei 2013). The neighbourhood thrived well beyond the declining fortunes of its founder, who died in 1944 after being condemned to a 15 years exile and incarceration for his persisting ‘hostile sentiments’ towards Benito Mussolini’s regime (Vannozzi 2011). Despite the ideological incompatibility, the fascist government acknowledged the development potentialities of the new self-made neighbourhood. In 1933, Tor Sapienza was included in the official maps and bus routes, whilst the city government started the building of public facilities such as the former Arnaldo Mussolini School, now named after Gioacchino Gesmundo. Then Tor Sapienza was included in the 1941 special laws and in the later regulatory plan that established the new industrial and manufacturing district of

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Rome in the former Roman countryside (The Agro Romano). The project was intended to support the development of the burgeoning manufacturing sector, which, according to sectoral research conducted between the late 1920s and 1930s by the City Council and the Chamber of Commerce, was intended to be mainly located in the expanding east quadrant of the city (Villani 2012). The history of Tor Sapienza as an industrial district was also characterised by the frictions produced by the conflict between the ‘archaic’, aristocratic estate regime living off private income, and the project envisioned by planners and entrepreneurs, which entailed expropriating and reconverting rural land in order to settle and ‘zone’ profitable manufacturing areas (Cederna 2006; Leonardi and Morri 2017). This resulted in belated and uneven industrial development, as well as in a botchy residential profile. In fact, Tor Sapienza had been theoretically appointed in the 1941 framework law as one of the new industrial districts (n. 346, 6 February 1941, Norme per la creazione e per l’esercizio della nuova zona industriale di Roma) because of its ideal geographical, morphological, and land configuration. Besides this, another favourable factor was the abundance of vacant land where developing borgate that could accommodate the prospective industrial labour force close to their workplaces. In practice, during the early 1960s the conflict about the actual portion of land to be occupied from the burgeoning industries was still ongoing, to the point that in 1962 the expected area was reduced to one-third of what had been established by the original 1940s law (Pietrangeli 2014). In parallel, the planning and erection of new public housing blocks was slowed down to the point that it coincided, during the 1970s, with the development of the food sector and electronic sector. Indeed, from the 1960s to the 1970s, the intersection between Tor Sapienza and Tor Cervara became dotted by industrial plants of varying sizes, including the beer company Peroni and the Fiorucci slaughterhouse, which moved from the Ostiense area to the East quadrant of the city (Goni Mazzitelli 2014). At the same time, the new ‘Giorgio Morandi’ public housing blocks were inaugurated to accommodate the new industrial workers (many of whom were internal migrants from nearby and Southern regions), and the shanty-towners who were living in the baraccamenti (see Chap. 4) (Pallottini and Modigliani 1997). Nevertheless, the decline of the Tor Sapienza industrial district began, coinciding with the sequence of global crises (starting with the 1973 Oil Crisis), and the post-Fordist transition from the paradigm of industrial, on-site production to the

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prevalence of service-based, globally distributed, financialised production. Consequently, many industrial sites were progressively discontinued, converted into logistics hubs and/or abandoned while waiting for conversion into different productive uses. This was the case with the Fiorucci slaughterhouse, whose abandoned 19,000-square-metre space was sold in 2003 to the engineering tycoon Pietro Salini and his corporation Ca.Sa. Srl for the price of 6.85 million euros in order to implement an ambitious redevelopment plan. Meanwhile, as the industrial sites started to decline, the public authorities started to obliterate Tor Sapienza (and the peripheral borgate in general) from welfare and planning efforts, a pattern which is especially visible in the degradation of the Giorgio Morandi council housing complexes (Puccini 2016). Besides this, social conflicts were sharpened by the complex coexistence of different forms of makeshift housing which started to populate the area, and that conflated with severe social marginality (see Esposito and Chiodelli 2020). These forms of informality are a consistent number of squatted public housing apartments, other housing squats and the Roma camp on Via Salviati, which represent the more visible (and politically controversial) concentration of marginalised dwellers (Maestri 2019). These tensions have cemented in the population of Tor Sapienza the feeling of abandonment and lack of institutional trust that has underpinned confrontational events such as the revolt against the migrant reception centre mentioned in Chap. 1. Against this backdrop, in 2009 the company Ca.Sa. Srl was still waiting for the ratification by the City Council of the general regulatory plan’s revision which would authorise the change of use and extension of the buildable area, when on 29 March a completely different pathway of insurgent urban regeneration began with the occupation of what would become Metropoliz (see Fig. 5.2).

5.2   ‘Who Are You? How Did You Get Here?’ The composition of the 50-plus households who chose to stay and live in Metropoliz from 2009 onwards reflects the intersectional composition of the housing crisis described in Chap. 4. The largest communities are South American (Peruvian and Ecuadorian), Maghrebi (Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian), Habesha (Ethiopian and Eritreans), Romanian Romani and Sudanese, who share a history of housing precarity in Rome. The majority of them were socialised into the BPM when they faced evictions as tenants in the private rented sector. Nevertheless, among the migrant group, a

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Fig. 5.2  Metropoliz ‘Mestizo Autonomous Zone’ banner (November 2014)

large subgroup is formed of asylum seekers, refugees and former inhabitants of the so-called Roma Camps (see Maestri 2019) who were forcibly channelled into what Dadusc and Mudu (2020) define as the ‘Humanitarian Industrial Complex’. The latter, in Rome, corresponds to the translation of the persisting logic of ‘emergency’ and ‘exceptionalism’ into a flourishing sector of services’ economy which professionalises mostly non-profit activities to subsidise welfare services on behalf of the State (Maestri 2016; Grazioli 2019). Against these coercive forms of supported housing, since the 1990s these inhabitants have explored forms of ‘migrant squatting’ (Dadusc et  al. 2019; Montagna and Grazioli 2019; see Chap. 4). This

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legacy has then facilitated the access to pre-existing squats and activist infrastructures for more recent migrants, as Interviewee 1, a Sudanese refugee, recalls: After we reached the coast of Sicily by boat, in order to survive, we were taken to the reception centre at Caltanissetta. We spent two months there waiting for our papers to be processed, and then my adventure began […] After applying for a visa I went to Siracusa to get my ID card, and I went from there directly to Rome because I had some friends here who had arrived before me and that where staying in via di Scorticabove.1 […] At that time, the people living in via di Scorticabove all had legally recognised addresses, therefore there could not be more than 120 people in that centre. Firstly some friends and I spent one month at the Selam Palace,2 then I moved to Scorticabove to be with my friends, taking the place of some people who left to do seasonal work in the countryside in the South. Via di Scorticabove was not the same as other reception centres. I also had applied to be allocated a place in another centre, but I was told I should wait for a few months, so I decided to settle there. While living in Scorticabove, I started going to school. I learned the language, then I decided to attend a Hotel and Catering School sponsored by the City Council’s ‘Integra’ Programme. During the course I met a guy and after some time he mentioned he had an aunt who had been in Rome for a long time and who had joined the squatting movement together with Action […] He told me his aunt explained to him what to do and where to go, and he also joined the struggle after he left the reception centre and moved into the Regina Elena housing squat. After school, we would often go to his place, and I had the chance to see how he was living. Yes, he was living in a squatted building, but he had his own place, his own room, his own life. Then I would go back home, look back and see how I was living; in my room we were four to five people, with our luggage stored under the bunk beds, so I was asking myself why should I live like that? I liked how he was living so I made him explain to me how to get in touch with the Housing Rights Movements, how the whole process worked. I also started asking around and then I was introduced to another movement, Asia-USB, so I went to the front office in via Capraia and I went there with my cousin, but eventually I completed the path all by my own. Then the day came in 2009 when we all occupied Metropoliz together, and from that moment onwards I began an entirely new life. (Interviewee 1, May 2020)3

As Interviewee 1 relates, his first experience of housing squats was during one of the stages of migration management and reception in the late

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2000s (Montagna and Grazioli 2019). It occurred in the interaction with other migrants who had directly experienced, or were indirectly familiar with, the migrant squatting scene which flourished from the 1990s onwards (see Chap. 4). The indefinite, persisting temporariness that generates path dependency is the main similarity between the migrants’ reception system and the camp infrastructures designed to house the Roma ethnic community under the inaccurate pretext of their ‘innate’ preference for segregated forms of ‘nomadic settlement’ (Maestri 2016, 2019). Furthermore, both these systems are characterised by structural instability, saturation and subordination to policy drifts and changing political sentiments. Thus, they determine for migrants and Roma settlers what Caciagli (2019) pointedly describes as a sort of ‘back and forth’ pilgrimage from one temporary housing arrangement to the next. What distinguishes the two groups, though, is the differential familiarity with squatting practice in Rome; the Roma people did not use to have a tradition in this regard (Maestri 2019). Regardless, their gradual approach towards BPM and Metropoliz occurred before and after the spectacularised eviction of the camp Casilino 700, one of the largest Roma camps in Europe (ibid.), which was located in a ditch close to the military airport of via di Centocelle: I have been basically living in the streets for years before squatting! I had to leave my wife and my older son in Romania with her parents as I could not provide them a decent accommodation. I also lived in a camp; I was evicted from the Casilino 700 camp! Then I got to know the Popica Association, which was working with Roma families and Metropoliz. We have known each other for years so far [speaking of an activist] and that is how I got to know about the housing squats. Then I brought my wife to Italy when she was pregnant, and we squatted together. Then I had to go on holiday [he means in jail] for quite a long period two days after we squatted… But I guess that is another part of the story. (Interviewee 2, November 2015) I have been living here in Metropoliz for seven years now. Before, I used to live at the Casilino [700], I spent a year and a half there, then we were evicted. For one day and night we slept rough in a park. Yet some of us had become friends with the Popica guys who were friends with BPM. So that is how 29 families of us arrived at the 911 [the street number before Metropoliz] where there was just one empty, small building. We built up the walls and the rooms and we stayed there until we were evicted because they had to build the car shop there […]. I arrived in Italy very young, I took a bus and arrived in Naples. I lived there for two years, then I moved to Rome and

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here I am. I have not had the time to properly learn Italian and figure out exactly how to do things properly since I came here; even though I understand everything, but I cannot do everything on my own. That is why, for us, the Popica volunteers were just like friends that would help us with everything, from enrolling the kids in school to getting to know all the others. Honestly, living in the camp was awful, here [in Metropoliz] we live as human beings. [At the camp] it was nothing but living in a metal shack with one bed and three kids, it was simply overwhelming. Here it is home for me, we live in the same way as everyone else, there it was all closed and secluded. Here I have my own friends, school, my kids attend school courses, and they are happy now. My older kid enrolled in the vocational hotel school to become a cook, the other one wants to be a hairstylist, the younger one a mechanic. Before they were unhappy, they had nobody to talk to, even though we were a lot of families [in the camp] we were isolated […]. On top of that, I would have never been able to afford or rent a place even if I wanted to leave. I would have had to choose between paying for rent or buying food, books, clothes for me and my children instead. (Interviewee 3, January 2020)

What emerges from the two previous interviews is that the Roma community living in the camps internalised the xenophobic biases which created their institutional segregation, as well as their difficulties in accessing both public and private rented housing. In fact, Roma families often report their difficulties in accessing the private rental market, not only because of their precarious incomes, but because landlords often refuse them as tenants, arguing that they might disrupt their properties or cause unrest within the neighbourhood. This dread is partly justified by the spike in riots in response to the allocation of council housing to Roma families that occurred during Spring 2019 in the Casal Bruciato and Torre Maura neighbourhoods, organised by far right groups under the argument that Roma families would ‘steal’ limited housing resources from more ‘deserving’ Italian people.4 However, this argument is refuted by the Italian inhabitants of Metropoliz, whose biographies display how the housing competition among poor urbanites (the so-called Guerra tra Poveri) is exploited for electoral purposes, while it conceals the systemic nature of the inequalities affecting growing cohorts of the urban precariat. In Rome, the latter is largely formed by the people who dwell in the peripheries and are stuck in the trap of precarity, austerity urbanism and permanent livelihood shrinkage (Fumagalli and Morini 2013; Peck 2012).

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I started living in Tor Sapienza around 2004. The reason was that work-­ related commuting was costly time- and money-wise. Consider that, as a freelance artist, I was often working for free, so I thought it would have been better for me and my then wife to go and live there to make my family and work life more bearable […] and I lived in Tor Sapienza until I left my house in 2015 and moved to Metropoliz, this is roughly how it went down […] When I entered I was enthusiastic, I chose a space [in the same building as the Roma people] that no one else wanted because a woman had died there and the others were too superstitious to touch it but I was not, I have never been choosy, actually I consider myself a quite resilient person […] I was in the situation where I had to downsize my life expectations a lot and to find a space where I could live and carry on my artistic work. My previous house was way oversized, I thought I would have children with my wife, but this did not happen, at the same time the fact of making art for free became entrenched in my routines. My wife chose to leave and at that point, with my great surprise, Metropoliz’s assembly told me that, if I wanted to, I could move there. They knew me very well since I had been volunteering in the MAAM for the past few years and I was very active in the Giorgio Morandi community centre. So, I moved there, having thought that I would never do that, as concerned as I was with preserving my individual liberty, yet eventually I decided to go for it. And think that I entered when Article 5 [of the 2014 Housing Plan, see Chapter 4] was already in effect and Metropoliz was on top on the evictions list, so it was already drastic in terms of the surrounding context. (Interviewee 4, April 2020)

5.3   Squatting, Becom(mon)ing Community The previous interviews’ excerpts corroborate what was discussed in Chap. 1 regarding the understanding of Città Meticcia and mestizo citizenship borne by BPM activists and Metropoliz’s inhabitants. In fact, their sense of collectivity does not stem from an alleged sameness, but from the intersection of their different trajectories of approach with BPM and HRMs in general, both in subjective and temporal terms. Regarding the temporal layer, three ‘generations’ of Metropoliz inhabitants can be identified. The first ‘generation’ of Metropoliziani is the group who entered the former salami factory on 27 March 2009, while the second ‘generation’ is formed of the Roma families who joined Metropoliz at two different stages. Lastly, the third group is formed by individuals and households who moved in Metropoliz at different times as they were evicted from other squats, tenancies, or because they lacked alternative housing

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arrangements. The first encounter between the Roma families evicted from the Casilino 700 camp and the ‘first’ occupants of Metropoliz occurred in late 2009, when they squatted the then vacant area located at street number 911 (besides Metropoliz, the 913). Then the third group is usually formed by people related to the inhabitants for kinship, friendship, political and/or artistic acquaintance (like in the case of Interviewee 4). Each group transferred, and shared, their knowledge and skills to those arriving later, dwelling upon the experience cumulated by those in Metropoliz from day one: When we arrived in Metropoliz there was...nothing! The only functioning bathrooms were in the guardian’s house close to the entrance… The only other habitable place was the yellow house... then nothing else! We were 150 families, but many left when they saw the place. Only three Italian families decided to stay! The others fled and went to occupy vacant apartments in Tor Vergata, Ponte di Nona… After the shock we started arranging the place… and it is still a work in progress. Everyone is making their own place. A Roma house is different from an Eritrean and a Moroccan one. Yes, building is still ongoing. (Interviewee 5, June 2015) When I first saw the factory, I was not expecting what I saw. I had seen other housing squats before, and none were like Metropoliz. They were mostly fit for residential use, there were actual rooms or spaces where people could store their belongings. Metropoliz was different, it was a huge factory and there was no actual building except for a very small one, the yellow house, whilst the remainder of the area was the factory space. We did a first tour when we entered, we were a lot of people, yet many who saw the state of play decided to leave. Yet I was one of those people who had already experienced the struggle of living with many people in one room, so I told myself “This is my space, this is where I have arrived for a reason, it should be my fate and I am not going anywhere”, so I decided to stay. (Interviewee 6, May 2020)

From different perspective, both interviewees (5 and 6) referred to the processual nature of homemaking activated since they entered in Metropoliz, and which is still ongoing. For those who chose to stay, the repertoire of organisational practices borne by the BPM activists became a fundamental asset not only for establishing a communal methodology of living in common, but first and foremost for planning and distributing spaces according to equitable criteria. For instance, in housing squats it is

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common practice to allocate dwelling units according to the households’ size; fast-tracking people with special needs or households with underage children in spaces already served by bathrooms and running water (Caciagli 2020; Grazioli 2018). In Metropoliz, this redistributive process was even more challenging, whereby only two spaces (the yellow house and the guardian’s container) were even remotely habitable, whilst the remainder was a huge industrial site that was still to be mapped, planned, decontaminated and transformed. Interviewee 3 pointed out that the same difficulties were later faced by the Roma families who moved into the 911 after being evicted, while Interviewee 4 renovated a space abandoned for a long time. In all cases, the encounters, transmission and commoning of skills and knowledge were enabled by the BPM activists, whose identification (and legitimacy) is at odds with the problematic distinction between ‘squatters’ and ‘activists’ that can be observed in different types of squatting (see Chap. 1). In Metropoliz, BPM and also the CCLC, the ‘activists’ are not identified according to a ‘given’ political status or hierarchy; they are the figures of reference inside the housing squat who realise a multiplicity of tasks (from coordinating the cleaning of communal areas to attending the weekly meetings of the Movimento per il Dirtto all’Abitare). This legitimation by daily engagement is particularly evident in BPM that, as Chap. 4 reconstructed, is a way more recent political organisation than CCLC, meaning they cannot count on the same multigenerational hard core of militants who were socialised within the same group and by a common ‘ideological’ matrix. The BPM group who led the squatting of Metropoliz was composed of activists who had differing ideological traditions (or none), differing grades of political experience (e.g. inside collectives, grassroots unions, students’ groups, territorial networks), familiarity and/ or participation in the squatting scene (mainly social centres), in Rome or in other cities and countries. Their main commonality was the political socialisation inside the housing struggles because they needed a place to live. In this sense, the later addition of activists like me who did not have a housing need but joined out of political solidarity is something that came later in respect to what the activists themselves define as ‘social activism’ (Caciagli 2020; Grazioli 2018; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018). This heterogeneity allowed a stratification of the actions inside Metropoliz in two main ways. As the first group of activists was made up of those who met while being part of other HRMs (e.g. Action), they had an archive of knowledge

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and practices that allowed them to find the place, accompany the squatting action, and activate ‘external’ solidarity networks (e.g. other housing squats and HRMs) for supporting the squatters’ initial necessities while figuring out ‘internal’ capacities (e.g. who was able of doing electricity tasks, who was more versed on coordinating crowdfunding and childcare). The pooling of resources was fundamental for supporting basic needs (e.g. providing food and blankets) as well as for accomplishing more ‘sophisticated’ tasks (e.g. engineering, mapping and planning). Furthermore, it anticipated the politics of encounter that would have been crucial for the formation of Metropoliz’s double configuration. It implied embracing different subjectivities, sets of knowledge, skills and conception of everydayness to figure out to settle, stay put and live in common with dignity. This openness also favoured the encounter, and then alliance, with a community like the Roma one, whose collective identity was founded on kinship, ethnicity and the seclusion in the same camp. This is to say that, initially, their collective self-consciousness was quite far from perceiving of being part of the broader housing crisis in Rome (Maestri 2019) as Gianluca, Popica volunteer and now a BPM activist, recalls: I was coming from other political experiences, like student collectives and social centres. Nevertheless, we [as Popica association] started thinking about what kind of solutions we could find with the Roma families, and we came up to the idea that squatting could be a good one. In the same period, we happened to see a poster in via dei Castani saying “If you want to join the housing struggle, ask for information here”. So, one day, two activists from Popica, J, a representative of the Roma families, and I went to the info point in via dei Castani, in the Centocelle neighbourhood. There we met a BPM activist who not only liked the idea [of the Roma families becoming squatters], but immediately drove us to visit this abandoned salami factory which had been occupied few days before. We went for a tour and we met other activists to whom we explained our idea of promoting a Roma housing squat and they were like: “Yes, we can do it”. […] The first public appearance all together was during the 2009 Mayday Parade in Porta Maggiore, where the whole Roma community of Casilino showed up with a banner ‘We are Roma, not nomads, we want houses!’. Later, we occupied the former Heineken factory at the same time as the eviction of the [Casilino] camp by the Folgore military squads […] During this first phase, and after the first eviction of the camp, the public authorities told us not to mix the ‘Roma problem’ with the housing emergency, as they were not alike. For us it meant obviously the opposite thing: if we want to solve the problem, we

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need to join forces. We managed to open a negotiation; the families moved back to the camp under the assurance there would not be another eviction, and for the very first time the city council provided them with essential utilities like electricity and water […]. Nevertheless, in November 2009 we were once again in the same situation, we occupied the Heineken factory again and then a very violent eviction occurred. We did not manage to resist this time, and the families were literally left sleeping rough in the streets. At that point, the situation had gone public, there were newspaper articles about that and even Amnesty International opened an international petition on the subject […] As the families were stranded in the streets, a small number of them were ‘absorbed’ by public shelters, whilst the majority moved close to Metropoliz, at the 911 […] We have worked really hard to favour the inclusion of the Roma into a community that was pre-existing, one that had formed into a previous pathway of struggle. It was also difficult because the Roma group was large and cohesive, with life and work styles of its own […]. In the warehouse in the 911 the families built houses with the cooperation of the activists and the comrade architects who were already active in Metropoliz, and also with some of the inhabitants who more proactively cooperated in the process of space and community building. This is to say that, back in the day, it was not automatic or idyllic; we had to establish internal rules of reciprocity to make it work […]. Lastly, on the 13th August 2011, the scenario changed again, as the 911 settlement was evicted to allow the construction of a car dealership. Most of the families moved into the 913, whilst a small number were relocated by the City Council into a reception facility in the Morena neighbourhood, where they still live. […] There we remobilised the process that today might be less visible because it is way easier nowadays, but that essentially meant bringing together [the Roma] families united by kinship into a group united by a previous struggle pathway. (Gianluca, April 2020)

The interview highlights two elements of distinction about the subjectivity and function of the activists during the different stages of Metropoliz making. First, the fact that the BPM group was ‘glued’ together by common needs rather than ideological purity eased the participation of various subjects sharing the decent ‘housing goals’, even though coming from different trajectories (e.g. the Roma Camps) and even activist affiliations (as in the case of Popica). Second, activism emerges not as top-down, patronising solidarity (Dadusc et al. 2019), but as the horizontal sharing of spaces, resources, knowledge and networks (see Papadopoulos 2018; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013) that is then transferred from the ‘first generation’ of inhabitants to the following ones. Hence, in Metropoliz,

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the ‘activist’ word do not ‘simply’ designate those who are more politically engaged inside BPM and the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare, nor those who coordinated the squatting action, facilitate the internal assemblies and keep the other squatters posted about the ongoing mobilisations. It designates the people who, from the moment of cracking in the factory, took in their own hands the matter of implementing those organisational rites (see Chap. 6) that make the squat’s quotidian in common, as well as its extraordinary resistance.

5.4   From Exceptionality to Eurhythmisation The previous chapters have provided the theoretical, methodological and contextual framework for understanding the constitution of Rome as a self-made city, where makeshift housing has played a fundamental, polarising role. It has been exploited as a source of affirmation and accumulation by the homeowners’ and real-estate bloc, whilst the poorer urbanites have realised it to protest the lack of public, decent housing. The peculiar configuration of Rome’s real-estate regime and the post-financial crisis austerity-­oriented reorganisation have produced new subjectivities who struggle to support themselves in the commodified housing market (e.g. precarious workers). Some of them are deliberately excluded from the access to either private, or public, housing as they are channelled into the indefinitely temporary, yet consistently lucrative industrialised welfare system (as in the case of the first reception centre for early migrants, the ‘institutional’ Roma camps and the post-eviction shelters). The fluid, open, non-ideological configuration of the Precarious Metropolitan Bloc thus favoured the encounter among different urban subjects experiencing the housing deprivation from completely different angles and trajectories. Besides, it has also facilitated the integration of the Città Meticcia into Tor Sapienza, as the revivification of its self-made history became a proxy for opening to the squat to the creation of new territorial relations and alliances, and later to the conception of the MAAM (see Chaps. 6 and 7). In addition to this, the collective pooling of resources supported the imaginative effort required to mould a dilapidated former factory not only into a shelter, but into a place of possibility where different life, housing trajectories and expectations could converge. It also delineated a model of activism that is not based on an ideological ‘status’, but on the recognition of the daily, bodily commitment to improving the squat’s life, from

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macro-­organisational scales to everyday social reproduction. This accounts for the largely migrant and female composition of BPM activists, which stands in contrast to the ‘professionalisation’, ‘whiteness’ and patronising attitude towards migrant activism that often emerges within contemporary social movements, antiracist ones included (see Dadusc et al. 2019; Dadusc and Mudu 2020; hooks 1986). The same openness, and intersectionality, underlies the process through which the Roma community displaced from the Casilino 700 made not only a physical movement from one place (the camp) to the other (the 911, then the 913), but a subjective one. They realised not to be an exception or an anomaly, yet an integral part of a bigger picture where they could coalesce with others to reclaim their right to housing. This highlights that grassroots solidarity and commoning cannot be presumed nor orchestrated; they inevitably stem from mutual recognition and reciprocation. In the case of Metropoliz, making the space has played a fundamental role in activating this process. The rich testimonies of the inhabitants and activists thus represent great contributions to the political debates concerned with how urban social movements could pragmatically reconcile the frictions coming from various experiences of dispossession, exploitation and inequality in order to effectively re-appropriate the resources for living with dignity inside the city, especially when the pandemic crisis is adding up to the prolonged aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis (see Chaps. 1 and 8). They also speak to the literature concerned with contemporary urban squatting, which has just recently started to gauge the political salience of spaces like Metropoliz for the whole city scale (see Nur and Sethman 2017; SqEK 2013; 2014) instead of debasing their ontology to deprivation-based containers (see Prujit 2013; see also Chap. 1). In fact, what the interviews highlighted is that the condition of necessity was exactly what fuelled the squatters’ determination to stay put (Grazioli and Caciagli 2018) and figure out how to collectively transform the salami factory (see Fig. 5.3) into a space where the social reproduction interrupted by housing precarity could resume. Yet, the ‘ordinariness’ of Metropoliz everydayness has nothing to do with the routines of ‘mainstream’ social reproduction, in the same way as the model of ‘common’ housing it delineates has nothing to do with the marketised idea of habitation prevailing in Rome. This is where the notions of eurhythmisation and organisational rites (Grazioli 2018) come into play.

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Fig. 5.3  The factory’s outline coming from the Prenestina street (May 2017)

Notes 1. Via di Scorticabove is a former reception centre that was mostly inhabited by the Sudanese community previously living in the squatted Hotel Africa. In 2017, the City Council rescinded the contract with the cooperative organisation which was managing the centre after its involvement in the Mafia Capitale scandal. Despite numerous requests, the City Council refused to appoint the Sudanese refugees as the building’s guardians and issued an eviction order during the summer of 2018. After 2 months of a protest encampment in front of the building, the inhabitants were finally evicted by riot police and bulldozers. The former Scorticabove community is currently being hosted in different housing squats, especially in the Prenestina and Tiburtina area (see Montagna and Grazioli 2019). 2. Selam Palace (named after the Amharic word for ‘peace’) is one of the largest migrant squats in Rome. Located in the Eastern quadrant of the city, it

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has been occupied in 2006 after the eviction of the previously largest housing squat in Rome, the so-called Hotel Africa, inhabited mainly by refugees and asylum seekers (see Chap. 4). Nowadays, more than 1000 people live in the building. 3. All the interviews dated from March to May 2020 have been remotely recorded in compliance with the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown regulations. 4. A live Twitter thread by the author recollects the contexts of the events  ­occurring in Casal Bruciato and later in Torre Maura from April to  late ­ summer 2019: https://twitter.com/Marghe_cantiere/status/ 1115259181316157445. It is worth underlining that both the neighbourhoods have a similar profile to Tor Sapienza in terms of their location in the Eastern quadrant of the city and for very poor socio-­economic indicators.

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De Finis, G. (2015). Il Primo Museo Abitato della Luna. In G. De Finis (Ed.), Forza Tutt*: La Barricata dell’Arte (pp. 7–10). Bordeaux. Esposito, E., & Chiodelli, F. (2020). Juggling the Formal and the Informal: The Regulatory Environment of the Illegal Access to Public Housing in Naples. Geoforum, 113, 50–59. Fumagalli, A., & Morini, C. (2013). Cognitive Bio-Capitalism, Social Reproduction and the Precarity Trap: Why Not Basic Income? Knowledge Cultures, 1(4), 106–126. Goni Mazzitelli, A. (2014, November 16). Perché Tor Sapienza. Retrieved from https://comune-­info.net/perche-­tor-­sapienza/ Grazioli, M. (2017). From Citizens to Citadins: Rethinking Right to the City inside Housing Squats in Rome, Italy. Citizenship Studies, 21(4), 393–408. Grazioli, M. (2018). The ‘Right to the City’ in the Post-Welfare Metropolis: Community-Building, Autonomous Infrastructures and Urban Commons in Rome’s Self-Organised Housing Squats. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Leicester. Leicester Research Archive. https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/ thesis/The_right_to_the_city_in_the_post-­welfare_metropolis_Community_ building_autonomous_infrastructures_and_urban_commons_in_Rome_s_self-­ organised_housing_squats_/10241723 Grazioli, M. (2019). Tutti a Casa. In AA.VV (Ed.), Povera Roma: Sguardi, Carezze e Graffi (pp. 52–56) Left. Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2017a). The Right to (Stay Put In) the City: Il caso di Porto Fluviale a Roma. U3 I Quaderni, 13(Maggio_Agosto), 79–85. Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2017b). Ricomporre e Ribaltare la Precarietà, Occupare e Resistere alla Dispossessione: Il Caso delle Occupazioni Abitative a Roma. In Infoaut (Ed.), Città: Spazi abbandonati, Autogestione (pp. 160–166). Infoaut.org. Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2018). Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights Movements and the Re-Appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’ in Rome, Italy. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 29(4), 697–711. hooks, b. (1986). Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women. Feminist Review, 23, 125–138. Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Bloomsbury Academic. Leonardi, S., & Morri, R. (2017). Un Puzzle Composito di Spazi Marginali. In M.  De Filpo, G.  De Vecchis, & S.  Leonardi (Eds.), Geografie Disuguali (pp. 137–154). Carocci Editore. Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. University of California Press.

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Maestri, G. (2016). From Nomads to Squatters: Towards a Deterritorialisation of Roma Exceptionalism Through Assemblage Thinking. In M. Lancione (Ed.), Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics (pp. 227–249). Routledge. Maestri, G. (2019). Temporary Camps, Enduring Segregation: The Contentious Politics of Roma and Migrant Housing. Palgrave Macmillan. Mattei, R. (2013, June 3). Ecco chi era Michele Testa: La Poliedrica Figura del Fondatore di Tor Sapienza. Retrieved from http://www.abitarearoma.net/ ecco-­chi-­era-­michele-­testa/ Montagna, N., & Grazioli, M. (2019). Urban Commons and Freedom of Movement: The Housing Struggles of Recently Arrived Migrants in Rome. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 577–592. Nur, N., & Sethman, A. (2017). Migration and Mobilization for the Right to Housing in Rome. New Urban Frontiers? In P.  Mudu & S.  Chattopadhyay (Eds.), Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy (pp. 78–92). Routledge. Pallottini, R., & Modigliani, D. (1997). Le esperienze dei programmi complessi negli spazi locali delle periferie romane. INU. Papadopoulos, D. (2018). Experimental Politics. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More Than Social Movements. Duke University Press. Papadopoulos, D., & Tsianos, V. (2013). After Citizenship: Autonomy of Migration, Organisational Ontology and Mobile Commons. Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 178–196. Peck, J. (2012). Austerity Urbanism. City, 16(6), 626–655. Pietrangeli, G. (2014). La Zona Industriale di Tor Sapienza: Trasformazioni Produttive e Politiche Urbanistiche a Roma nel Secondo Dopoguerra. Contemporanea, 2(aprile-giugno), 219–249. Prujit, H. (2013). The Logic of Urban Squatting. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1), 19–45. Puccini, E. (2016). Verso una Politica della Casa. Dall’Emergenza Abitativa Romana ad un Nuovo Modello Nazionale. Ediesse. Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK). (2013). Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles. Minor Compositions. Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEK) (Eds.). (2014). The Squatters’ Movement in Europe. Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism. Pluto Press. Vannozzi, S. (2011, February 27). Nessun Profeta è Ben Accetto in Patria: Michele Testa da Cercemaggiore… A Tor Sapienza. Retrieved from https://stefanovannozzi.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/nessun-­profeta-­e-­ben-­accetto-­in-­patria/ Villani, L. (2012). Le borgate del Fascismo: Storia Urbana, Politica e Sociale della Periferia Romana. Ledizioni.

CHAPTER 6

The Commoning and Eurhythmisation of the Città Meticcia

Abstract  This chapter describes the quotidian of the Città Meticcia through the organisational rites that attune the different rhythms of living in common (eurhythmisation) and constitute the framework of Metropoliz’s urban commons: the communal care of infrastructures of resistance; assembly-based decision making; the commoning of social reproduction. This  assemblage of practices is drawn from the political archive of Housing Rights Movements and then adapted to function in relation to the mestizo composition of housing squats. Against this background, these organisational rites are scrutinised for the configurations of activism and space they produce. Keyword  Assembly • Barricade • Commoning • Eurhythmisation • Organisational rites

6.1   The Organisational Rites of Housing Squats Every day there is something new to out in the building, something new that you must do. Without being aware of it, while you do these things you become a point of reference. There is an Arabic saying that I believe to be true which says ‘the servant of the people is their governor’. I believe it in the good sense, not in the form of power. But still you become a point of reference. People do not go searching for those who have their heads in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_6

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politics when they need to address ‘condo-related’ things, they come seeking you. This is what being an activist means here. (Interviewee 7, August 2015)

In Metropoliz, everyday social reproduction, spatial transformation and activism cannot be disentangled. An exceptional imaginative effort thrives because of the turbulence triggered by the act of squatting. The latter propels a process of spatial and relational regeneration that creates and multiplies new autonomous infrastructures, where different models of urban life can be experimented with (Larkin 2013; Papadopoulos 2018). In fact, the way in which the space is organised, redistributed and collectively cared for from the moment of occupation onwards materialises a completely different model of social reproduction, inhabitance and use of space that disrupts the nuclear, property-based notions of ‘home’ and ‘household’ (see Chap. 2). This also demands the uprooting of the conceptualisation of the socio-spatial division between the public and private spheres, as the latter indicates a dimension where the use of space, relations and behaviours is often deemed uncontested. On the contrary, the equitable distribution of space and facilities is arranged according to two tenets. The first is the principle of collectively deliberating the methodology for allocating dwelling and communal spaces, first and foremost the assembly room. The second is expediting the accommodation of households with the more pressing needs (e.g. providing the elderly and people with children priority access to bathroom facilities and running water), and then progressively responding to the others’ less pressing requests as well as desires (e.g. being neighbours with a specific person). Here in Metropoliz you did not get allocated a room or a space, no, it was up to you to decide the place you like, and then fix it. But as you said, it took a lot of labour, and some said ‘No, it is too expensive or impossible to refurbish here’, and they would go looking for another place to squat that was cheaper and easier to fix. Indeed, here is the thing in Metropoliz that is different from all the other squats. In other places, spaces were somewhat ready before and people were given them, and they can have a bath and a shower after some time… Here no, we have built with our own hands the house of our dreams. That is the nice thing, besides the things that you had to do, the feeling, the sentiment you would put in it. For instance, if my husband had to do a job, I would notice because he would ask me: ‘S, do you like this?’, and then I would say ‘Yes, no, do it this way’, I would try to help while I was cooking and looking after our kids, who were toddlers at the time, and in

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the meanwhile he would do a wall, then another little wall as I said… My children, my little ones would offer to help their Daddy as well, that is the difference from all the other squats. Here in Metropoliz we have this heart, we do not only evaluate the economic value of each house, what we value is the meaning you give to it, the love you have used in order to build your own house. […] Of course, we have found some pieces here that we have used, especially for the external part of the house. For instance, inside my house there is the case of electric parts, the general one for the whole industrial plant. We have plenty of these things, and we have left that one, those fuses [pointing to the wall] (see Fig. 6.1)… We have left them as a reminder for us of what our house used to be before we got here, and how our house began to take shape. (Interviewee 8, May 2016) Concerning the construction of my housing space, at the time I was doing an internship provided by the training course I had attended [at the reception centre]. Besides this, I had an indentured part-time job, so working on the house was slow for me. In 2009, we found a block which was always empty at the 911, so some other people and I used it temporarily as a storage space while we were restructuring, before the arrival of the Roma families. (Interviewee 1, May 2020) In the 911, we built the walls and made separate rooms from scratch inside that space. […] When we moved to ‘the 913’ [Metropoliz] we decided with the other families to take an empty building close to the new museum. Even in that building there were no separate rooms and it was all deteriorated but we started fixing it, then we rebuilt the walls and then constructed bathrooms and toilets. After a while I chose to move here in this container that had no roof. Yet here I managed to make two separate rooms for my four children out of here, here the kitchen and the bathroom […]. My husband and I refurbished very slowly, one little piece day after day when we could scrape together the money. Even when we had no roof, and it was raining inside, we were happy because we felt safe and as if we had all the time to take it slowly. (Interviewee 9, January 2020)

These snapshots taken from three different squatting temporalities (the first entry into Metropoliz in March 2009; the transformation in the making of space; the Roma families’ arrival and then movement from the 911 to the 913) delineate the purpose of the organisational rites, and the meaning of eurhythmisation (Grazioli 2017a, 2018), outlined theoretically in Chap. 2. The three fundamental organisational rites are as follows: assembly-based decision making; collective care for communal spaces and infrastructures of resistance; community-based social reproduction. Their

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Fig. 6.1  The original fuses of the industrial plant left on Interviewee 8’s house’s wall (May 2016)

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incorporation into Metropoliz’s peculiar routines (and in housing squats in general) is needed to support the process of daily living and managing internal frictions, while creating a safe space where people become part of the city (Dadusc et al. 2019). Additionally, these organisational rites need to be flexible enough to cope with the mutating circumstances of the squats’ social composition, urban and political ecology, while holding fast to non-negotiable ethical and political coordinates such as non-­ discrimination and pluralistic decision making (Gibson-Graham 2006; Hodkinson 2012). In the case of Metropoliz, this means constantly harmonising spatial transformation with the different temporalities spanning the rhythms of daily life, as the following excerpt points to when referring to the differential ‘phases’ of the squat: [T]he squat goes through phases, phases of time that affect your way of thinking and living, for better or for worse. You have the first stage, when people get to know each other, and then what happens after the group of people is defined, selected to live in the place. And believe me, it is really difficult to put many different cultures together… It is way too difficult. This is a societal model; I think it is a model in any case. I have always told you: if you brought the same people, the same inhabitants in a different setting and building, they would live a different life from what happens here. Because it is open, everything is in common… In a ‘regular’ building the context is different, you are not confronted with accepting so many differences coming from habits, cultures etc. It is something you must learn here, and about which you must take responsibility in the first person. And those who live well here are those who have understood the other […] What is true for sure is that you could spend basically all your time dealing with what happens in here. Trying to resolve conflicts, fixing things for people. It is compelling, chaotic, sometimes you feel suffocated, without privacy and you just want to escape. But, in a weird way, it becomes the centre of your life, sometimes the only thing you manage to think about. (Interviewee 7, August 2015)

6.2   Communal Spaces and Barricades as Sites of Encounter As the threat of immediate eviction is provisionally forestalled, the squatters and the activists proceed to map, locate and then distribute foreseeable dwelling units and communal spaces, which coexist in a constant osmosis from the early stage of the occupation (Caciagli 2019; Grazioli

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2017b). On the one hand, housing units are the ‘personal spaces’ that are allocated according to the dimensions and needs of the squatting households (Caciagli 2019, p. 11). On the other hand, the initial fundamental communal facilities to be established are the assembly space, the barricades and the picketing lines. The last two are the devices meant for avoiding police interventions and stopping people from seeing inside the squat. The care of these areas and facilities is considered a collective responsibility, that is, the participation in the ‘regular’ activities they involve (e.g. picketing shifts, regular cleaning, periodic refurbishment) as well as for ‘extraordinary’ contingencies (e.g. if there is a risk of police intervention, or if some component of the ‘physical barricade’ like locks is broken and must be replaced). These barricade-related operations are essentially applicable to all the Housing Rights Movements’ squats, as they belong to their archive of organisational practices. The innovative element brought forward by Metropoliz’s peculiar double configuration is the likewise double understanding that also barricade can be understood both as a material device of resistance made of different components (doors, points of observation, visible picketing) and as a site of encounter (Grazioli 2018; Yaka and Karayali 2017). The latter does not defend the squat from other people’s gaze; on the opposite, it defends the squat through visibility, as one of Metropoliz’s dwellers explains in reference to the MAAM: The museum is something that makes me, us, happy, and you know why? Because people come here and while they visit the MAAM they watch us, they see us. If they leave and stop coming, it is a threat for us. This is the reason why, each Friday, I come down and help clean the museum area for the Saturday opening. When the museum is open, when people come here and see us, it is an element of safety for us. (Interviewee 10, February 2020)

In both the conceptions above, the barricades and the other acts connected to the defence of the squat are educational sites of resistance (Caciagli 2019). First of all, the spatial proximity they generate solicits social and emotional relations of solidarity (Massey 2004; Routledge 2017), while they make visible that the squatters actively care about staying put in the place where they had settled (Caciagli 2019; Grazioli and Caciagli 2017; Milburn 2012). Moreover, they ‘educate’ the squatters to translate their urgencies and contingencies into political behaviours (Nicholls 2009), thus fostering the squatters’ self-perception as a collective subject that is spatially (inside the squat) and temporally (as part of the

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thriving legacy of Housing Rights Movements in Rome) related (Armati 2015; Caciagli 2016). Against this background, the materialities of barricades and picketing require the fundamental act of donating one’s time and care to protect and watch the squat and, therefore, the regimes of living, politics and urban commons that are articulated inside its perimeter (Collier and Lakoff 2005; Fournier 2002; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006). Against this background, the infrastructures of resistance are emotionally perceived as sites of encounter and care that allow people to maintain control over personal and collective homes and safe spaces (Caciagli 2016, 2019; O’Dochartaigh and Bosi 2010). This, in consequence, results in the collective scrutiny (and, if appropriate, reprimand) of the individual behaviours towards. I learnt this at my own expense during the first picket shift I had been allocated to in January 2015, shortly after moving in a housing squat for the first time (Grazioli 2018). While I was doing the night watch, my picketing companion offered me a glass of cold beer, which I accepted and toasted them. One squatter passed by while taking out the rubbish and stopped to tell us that it was an ‘old rule’ set up in the ‘old squatting times’ that people should not drink booze, or smoke weed, during the rotation. Even though I was positive that my clarity of mind had not been affected, I apologised and made sure not to drink beer on my own watch again. For me, this episode was the first occasion to reflect on the affective dimension of material infrastructures as selfless care and of homemaking as a use rather than an economic exchange value. This perception was then amplified by the neat affirmation of the MAAM as a ‘barricade of art’ (Di Vetta 2015; Grazioli 2017b). In fact, the museum’s creation and existence depends on the artists’ willingness to donate their art pieces and performances (see Chap. 7), in the same way as the effectiveness of the barricades in defending the housing squats depends on the inhabitants’ persistence in donating their time and skills to keep them active. Metropoliz thus stresses the function of the barricade as not merely a ‘push-out’, control device, but as the epitome of forms of resistance composed of plurality, visibility and openness. On the one hand, the ‘barricade of art’ (see Fig. 6.2) is made of an open-source, creative ‘software’ of arts and relations that works according to the ‘hardware’ of non-negotiable ethical and political coordinates (Gibson-Graham 2006; Hodkinson 2012). The latter are the Città Meticcia’s values (e.g. antiracism and antifascism) and organisational rites (e.g. all the relevant decisions are discussed in the assembly arena). Besides, the selflessness underpinning the barricade, inside the Museum, is transposed in the logic of gift, since no

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Fig. 6.2  The Barricade of Art at the entrance of the MAAM (January 2015)

piece of art ‘exposed’ inside the MAAM is going to be remunerated, nor supposed to produce any ‘direct’ revenue for the artist (such as exhibit caches). On the other hand, once these principles are accepted, they guarantee that the various components of the ‘barricade of art’ are valorised and taken care of by dwellers, activists, artists and MAAM’s supporters as pieces in the jigsaw of the urban commons. One additional peculiarity of the Città Meticcia is in fact the mestiza composition not only of the inhabitants, but of the subjects that do not inhabit that space, yet take care of it and affirm their complicity in the barricade of arts and relations that constitutes probably the primary reason why Metropoliz has not been evicted, despite the public and legal pressure exerted by the owner (and construction tycoon) Pietro Salini. This point is made by the anthropologist and MAAM’s ‘art director’, Giorgio de Finis, as he reflects on how to effectively defend the wholeness of the Città Meticcia:

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Metropoliz already had its doors and walls to defend and delimit it. For us, the challenge was to metaphorically break the closure epitomised by that wall, to transform it into a place of encounter where a bypass between parts of the city that usually do not meet or talk could take place. These pieces would be united by sharing the same will of rebellion and potential to imagine an alternative city that is already in Metropoliz […] The MAAM is an open device with a few rules of engagement. Everyone is welcome if they accept that donating their art to Metropoliz implies endorsing the right of Metropoliz’ inhabitants to live and stay put where they are. So, they subscribe to being a brick in a barricade of art, to be part of a collective piece of art which embodies the essence of a safe space, a sanctuary that resonates of the function of medieval cathedrals … Everyone brings their own contribution to a super-object on an urban scale which is formed according to the same logic of gift. Whoever subscribes to these principles can participate in the MAAM in the most different artistic shapes, while they acknowledge its entirely political nature as a urban device. Another unconventional aspect [in comparison to ‘formal’ museums] is that artists have to accept that their projects will be exposed to outdoors environmental conditions, meaning they are exposed to wind, humidity, rain, animals and so on, hence to inevitable deterioration. So the artist needs not only to recant the logic of preservation, and accept the fact that their piece of art might eventually deteriorate. They also embrace the possibility of coming back and restoring their art piece to renew their gift as something new, or simply to let it become a barely visible part of the factory’s transformation. (Giorgio de Finis, January 2020)

6.3   The Assembly as the Site of Pluralistic, Consensus-Based Decision Making Borrowing from the lexicon pertaining to the rites’ domain (see Lefebvre 2004), the assembly room (sala assemblee; see Fig.  6.3) represents the most ‘sacred’ space in housing squats because it is where the assembly, the moment of deliberative democracy, takes place (della Porta 2005; Hardt and Negri 2017). If the majority of communal and personal spaces might be repurposed and tweaked over time, the assembly room is the only space in housing squats that cannot be reconverted permanently to other uses (e.g. becoming a dwelling unit) or radically altered without the larger consensus, although it can be occupied for multiple, temporary activities: preparing protest materials before rallies; hosting public events and political meetings, the squatters’ personal parties (e.g. birthdays or baby

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Fig. 6.3  A kid playing in the assembly room; chairs prepared for a book presentation during the first MAAM Saturday opening after the Covid-19 lockdown (September 2016–June 2020)

showers) and collective religious celebrations (e.g. the end of the Ramadan fast) and so on (see Martínez 2014). In fact, the most important function of the assembly room is to be the junction of all the crucial deliberations that are made according to a consensus-based, non-discriminatory, non-­ hierarchical deliberative methodology. The latter is applied indistinctively to the discussion of ‘mundane’ matters (such as the location of noisy home appliances in the communal corridors) as well as ‘urgent’ matters (e.g. actions to be undertaken when the risk of eviction is rekindled) (Grazioli 2018). In my experience, the level of care in the maintenance of the assembly room is one of the more reliable indicators of the level of (or lack of) eurhythmisation inside the squat. Hence, in the same way as in the case of barricading infrastructures, if an assembly room is shabby, dirty and dusty, it means it has not been used for a while. This in turn indicates that the squatters are not reconvening on a regular basis, and therefore that the process of collective decision making is not functioning properly. Conversely, the regular use and upkeep of the assembly room is a good sign of the squatters’ autonomy. The latter is conceived as the bundle of everyday activities and relational modalities that foster the creation of political, affective and solidarity bonds (Kokkinidis 2015a; Caciagli 2019). Hence, the assembly room is an inherently relational space where the squatters’ willingness not to give up on commoning, and the reciprocation with BPM activists, is crystallised (see Kokkinidis 2015a, b). By the same token, assemblies are not convened in ‘any’ space (e.g. the corridor) but in the assembly room, unless ‘special’ circumstances require it (e.g. keeping social distance during the pandemic;

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see Chaps. 1 and 8). The salience of the assembly organisational rites as a pillar of housing squats and grassroots social movements in general (see della Porta 2015; Hardt and Negri 2017) results in the fact that the decisions made during the assemblies shall be respected and not be subverted by all parties involved, including the activists facilitating the discussion. And this applies also to decisions that feel unreasonable or impractical, as I happened discuss with another BPM activist collaterally to an interview during the Covid-19 lockdown period: ME: As an activist, it constantly occurs to me how many times, in assemblies, the methodology of decision trumps the matter itself. It could then the case that ‘good’ decisions are taken, but it could be also the case that decisions that we [as BPM activists] might consider as stupid are taken, and we just have to go with them. Other BPM: I know! For instance, in Metropoliz, there has been a long, and still-ongoing, debate around the best place where storing second-hand materials that could be recycled. We [as activists] proposed to designate a separate warehouse for that purpose. Yet the assembly decided not to do it. I do not know why, the same activities you would have done in the warehouse are the ones that are currently done in other areas. [laughs] This is just an example of how, sometimes, the debates leads to decisions that you may not understand, yet you must accept even if you think they are pointless, or they are very far from your way of thinking about things. Just think about the fact that Roma families have traded larger spaces for the opportunity to be all together in the same building. That would not have been my preference, but as an activist you have no other option than to acknowledge and facilitate it. (April 2020)

This conversation brings forward that pluralism is quite often the opposite of unanimity, especially between groups of inhabitants and BPM activists who ‘moderate’ the decision-making process alongside the internal ‘board’ of the squatters, the ‘comitato’ (Grazioli 2018; Caciagli 2019).1 In fact, the assembly mechanism is not designed to further homogeneity, yet to create the best conditions for everyone to participate in the process of deciding, and therefore to be active subjects in the squat’s life rather than passive observers (Caciagli 2019, p. 8). By this token, the nonparticipation to assemblies is considered as a cue of conflict, or worst, disengagement towards the fellow squatters and squat’s problems. Once a decision is made (e.g. tweaking the water pipes; creating new rooms; expanding/

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swapping housing units), the internal comitato personally guarantees they are realised according to what was decided. This is yet not the only function acted by the comitato under the assembly’s mandate. In fact, its components are usually politically active and participate in the BPM and Housing Rights Movements’ periodic meetings. If the assembly is thus a pillar of the HRMs’ archive and grammar, it has also been significantly ‘adjusted’ to the mestizo composition of housing squats like Metropoliz, as they have to adapt to a twofold necessity. First, if the 1970s squatters used to be relatively homogeneous (see Berlinguer and Della Seta 1960; Daolio 1974), post-1990s migrant squats (see Chap. 4) and current housing squatters present a significant ethnic, class, migratory, language variety. Hence, the assembly rite has to take into consideration issues such as the eventual language barrier (i.e. using Italian as the common idiom, yet ensuring live translation for those squatters who may not understand nor speak it well). In Metropoliz, this process is further complicated by the fact that two intersecting, yet distinct assemblies coexist and inform collective decisions. The general assembly gathers all the inhabitants and BPM activists to address the squat’s problems, housing issues and the HRMs’ political situation, whilst the so-called social assembly gathers some dwellers, BPM activists and MAAM regulars who contribute to the planning of the museum’s activities, meetings, art projects and even scholarly interventions on a regular basis (Mudu 2014). It could be said that the social assembly is the fine tuner buffer of the frictions that arise in the eurhythmisation of different subjectivities and visions of the factory’s space, as the following interactions sharply suggest: I clearly remember that first [general] assembly during which I made the proposal of the Space Metropoliz rocket project.2 I was positive they would have thrown me a shoe thinking I was totally nuts, but with my great surprise they accepted. After that first assembly, even when the MAAM kicked in, the assembly has always been the point of reference for Metropoliz as a whole. The assembly has been the starting point of the museum, where all the conflicts about the cleavage between individual and collective, art-not art, the existence of an inhabited Metropoliz and a museum space have been addressed, where the ‘Metropoliz Lab’ [the social assembly] group was created, where the differences over intentions and roles of inhabitants, activists, artists, scholars and so on have been debated […] Factually speaking, the

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assembly is the moment when artists would come to submit their projects, which would be gauged according to their exchange value or popularity, as would happen in the case of a ‘regular museum’s’ panel. The evaluation expressed by the social assembly would pertain to the intended meaning and function of the proposed art piece, to its coherence with the political and practical reasons shaping Metropoliz’s space. If an art project is approved according to these principles, it is taken as something that values the gift as well as the difference. Many of Metropoliz’s art pieces can be provocative or even obscure, yet they point to the same logic and principles. (Giorgio de Finis, January 2020) Inhabitant 1: I have just had a quarrel with this idiot... I kicked him out, or I wish I had. But I told him to get out, to leave, I told him, believe me, and he has left, hopefully he will not come back and I do not give a shit about what he was planning to do and whether he was the star of tomorrow [premiering an event at the MAAM], excuse my French but I am so pissed!...Yes, he was an exhibitor. He came here, so snobbish, and started giving orders about how to install his art piece, and then what he wanted to eat, and how he was going to be accommodated, and this and that. Never seen him in the social assembly, I swear. Who does he think he is? And who does he think we are, his chaperones? We may be extra-­ terrestrials,3 but we do not owe him a thing, actually the opposite, we are letting him in our home, he has to be here by our rules and respect us. Inhabitant 2: For once I agree with you, X, I have to say. You know I always strive to treat the artists and visitors politely and to consider they are not used to where they are, but sometimes it is too much. With the kitchen it happens so often! These people that come here and stare the food we cook as if it was shit and ask for customised dishes. We are volunteer cooks, not a restaurant! Eat the zighnì, you can have the cous-cous, the arroz con pollo,4 the Peruvian potatoes. Otherwise starve if do not like them! Inhabitant 3: But you know, Margarita [My nickname in Spanish], those who piss me off the most are not even these food snobs, but those whose conversations I overhear when they dine, I cannot help it. With their mouths full they talk about this place as the MAAM… The Museum, you know, not Metropoliz! As if we did not exist, as if we were indentured waiters and waitresses and hostesses and stewards hired to take care of the place, as if we did not inhabit it. And indeed, if they see the dogs running around and the kids running around they sometimes have this look of pity, and contempt, as if they were in a zoo where they incidentally meet the poor, if you see what I mean. Sometimes I just bite my tongue, sometimes I cannot take it and I have to say something. This is Metropoliz, not

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the MAAM museum, it was our home before the museum even existed and will be even if it ceases to exist! And believe me, sometimes I cannot stand it.5 My first art piece in Metropoliz was the playroom (see Fig. 6.4). I almost immediately established an emotional connection with the factory space, even though I had no familiarity with social centres and squatted spaces at all, let alone housing squats. At the time I was conducting an isolated life, very focused on my own job, and I was doing art in formally deputed, institutional environments. Yet, even though a place like this was not in my area of expertise, I immediately felt comfortable, I did not have any negative or judgemental reactions. I interrogated myself later about why I did not feel shocked, even though I was not an activist, or an artist who had engaged with political themes before. My answer is that the factory was a vibrant, speaking space, which has its own history, alongside clearly delineated features that make it much more stimulating than conventional museum spaces. Those are quite impersonal and abstract, they make the connection to reality an issue because they feel very neutral. So, when I started painting the playroom’s sketch over the pictures I had previously taken, I instinctively drew a big colour spot which was pouring on the floor. That was my starting point […]. Overall, the playroom piece took me a month. I was working in a sort of ‘bubble’ where people would not be allowed to enter. The exception was a kid, A., who would often spend time with me. I would rather not spend time with anyone until I finished the playroom work. When it was over, he

Fig. 6.4  The playroom and the stairs painted by Veronica Montanino (January 2015–August 2020)

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kids were the first to see it, and there we started bonding […] Nevertheless, the real relationship [with Metropoliz’s inhabitants] was established during my third art intervention in Metropoliz, back in 2013. I was decorating the stairs of the building inhabited by the Roma families (see Fig. 6.4). There, I was the opposite of insulated, I was very exposed because obviously people would walk the stairs back and forth, all day long. At that point, I chose to team-work with all of them as for the spray-painting part. I had to invent this relationship, which was not in pursuit of any ‘artsy’ ambition. It was just necessary in order to be there working on the stairs of their home around the clock. At the beginning, some were irked, other were curious as to the reason why I was getting in their way eight hours per day mounting stencils, putting colour, removing colours. Fundamentally, they were asking me why I would treat an old wall and some rickety stairs as the most precious thing in the world. My answer was to involve them in the art piece. I gave them specific tasks for different teams and let them free to make choices as to how to mix colours and shapes. Me, the same person who had never organised a single workshop in my whole art career! Yet it was really nice and it has created a real, tight bond that still persists, especially with those who were kids then, who are for sure less engaged by the urgencies of everyday life and more used to letting themselves go with imagination. (Veronica Montanino, artist, April 2020)

6.4   The Commoning of Social Reproduction If you struggle, you cannot be sinful, because you are doing that for your children’s safety. I could not bear going back to a [Roma] camp where you live in the constant fear that police will come and throw you on the streets. Here, we talk through everything that happens in the assembly and live it together. Metropoliz’s kids often listen to the assemblies and when we speak about Salini [the factory’s owner] and the eviction they worry so much, they have grown up here in a certain way. My children have the common habits of every other children [she means those who do not live in squatted habitations], and habits of their own they got while living here since they were little. […] Here, we are people from all countries, and our children spend all their time together, we walk them to school, then we watch them play football [on the Metropoliz football field]… Among the parents, we do not have time to fight about our children because we are very busy with them, we all do childcare together, my children are probably one of the few things I have not had a single argument about with anyone yet. (Interviewee 11, February 2020)

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I consider myself experienced in collective situations. For instance, when I used to work in a theatre in Milan I would sleep there. To be honest, maybe it was more due to my workaholism then to an actual desire to live there. However, in Tor Bella Monaca and Tor Sapienza [neighbourhoods] I did local activism, so I perceive myself as a person used to being with others. However, it is also true that, once the activities were over, I would go back to my apartment, to my own house. In Metropoliz, in a housing squat, this is not possible. You engage with others in reaching goals and milestones every day. Also, you have to be sensitive to the mood of the place, you have to always pay attention and take care of other people’s feelings. (Interviewee 3, April 2020)

The previous interviews frame the practical, and affective, dimensions of the commoning of social reproduction taking place inside Metropoliz, which is surely at odds with the ‘conventional’ understanding of carework as a private, or privatised (i.e. commodified) matter that each household should sort out by themselves (see Chap. 2; Grazioli 2018). The emancipatory potential of the commoning of social reproduction thus emerges strongly in relation to the gendered aspect of parenting and caregiving, as women and single ‘breadwinners’ can rely on collective forces for reconciling care with the struggle to make ends meet (Serra 2015; Mudu and Aureli 2016). The action of social reproduction extends from the domain of everyday, ‘mundane’ duties to a completely different notion, and experience, of life-and-death-related events. For instance, the birth of a new child is eventful for all the squatters, who activate their circular moral economies to retrieve all the possible supplies for the new-born (e.g. second-­hand strollers and clothes) and help the new parent(s) if needed. In so doing, they combine the religious and secular rituals connected to their diverse cultural, ethnic and national traditions with the organisational rites and modalities assimilated during the experience of squatting. This process is even more weighty in the occasion of dramatic events such as the mass boat drownings in the Mediterranean Sea during Spring and Summer 2015, as written down in my field diary: 26 April 2015. The Habesha community inside the occupations has organised a public vigil in Repubblica Square (see Fig. 6.5) to stand against the Islamic State that had allegedly beheaded 30 Habesha migrants in Libya when they refused to disavow their faith as Coptic Christians. The news reached the Habesha community in Italy through a YouTube video that later was circulated on Whatsapp and other social media platforms. The

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Fig. 6.5  The vigil organised by the Habesha squatter community to mourn the migrants killed by the Islamic State (26 April 2015) event has profoundly shaken the broad community living in the squats. It is apparent how the organisational skills and political networks which have accumulated during the years since the squat was established has enabled the community to organise this vigil. The sound system and the loudspeakers used in Piazza della Repubblica were lent by BPM. Their social networks were also deployed to promote the rally beyond the word-of-mouth channels connecting the Eritrean and Ethiopian community in Rome. Also, the activists have helped the community representatives to go to the Questura6 and ask for formal permission for the rally. Besides, I was asked to speaking during the Ethiopian community broadcast ‘La voce di Roma’ (The Voice of Rome), on Radio Onda Rossa.7 (Fieldnotes, April 2015)

Few weeks after this protest, the Habesha squatter community was shaken by another tragedy, when the brother of one squatter living in the Tiburtina 770 housing squat (Grazioli 2018) disappeared during the wrecking of a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. Once again, the squatters’

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community’s organisational machine was mobilised to help the relatives to organise a week-long vigil (Grazioli 2018). My participant observation allowed to reflect on two aspects of social reproduction as a fundamental organisational rite for the squat’s existence, by no means less relevant than barricades and assemblies. First of all, daily commoning ‘trains’ the squatters’ consciousness about the political implications of events they would have otherwise dealt with in private and probably silently, as in the case of a grief due to a tragically ended attempt to migrate. Besides, in the same way as the assembly and barricade, radical infrastructures of social reproduction work to support the squatters during ‘ordinary’ as well as unforeseen circumstances. I saw this process at work in July 2015, few months after I settled in Rome and entered Metropoliz, when the South American community first, and then all the squatters, mobilised to help a mother to attend her son’s funeral in Peru. At the end of June, Michel Angelo, the 20-year-old only child of a young single mother and prominent member of Metropoliz and the Squatted 4 Star Hotel (Quattro Stelle Occupato)8 South American community, was killed point blank during a gunfight between gang members back in Peru, to where he had recently decided to return in order to explore his employment opportunities. The bad news circulated rapidly inside Metropoliz, 4 Stelle and all the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare housing squats. Once the boy’s death was confirmed, it was evident that his mother was not financially equipped to afford a last-minute flight to Peru, to take part in her son’s funeral. The South American community of Metropoliz then mobilised to prepare the so-called gran pollada, a typical crowdfunding party, that very weekend. Once again, BPM activists were involved in the organisation and promotion of the event. They cooperated in the design and distribution of the promotional materials (e.g. leaflets and posters) through BPM and CCLC social networks (see Fig. 6.6), as well as in the hotspots frequented by the South American communities living in Rome, like Colosseo and the Termini Train Station. Metropoliz’s inhabitants also persuaded singers and dancers who were popular in the South American leisure circles to perform for free in order to make the event even more attractive. This effort resulted in the gran pollada managing to fundraise enough not only to allow G to fly to Peru two days later and attend the funeral, but also to contribute to the funeral’s financial arrangements (Grazioli 2018).

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Fig. 6.6  The poster of the crowdfunding Pollada organised at Metropoliz in July 2015. (Source: Metropoliz Facebook page)

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Notes 1. The ‘comitato’ is a partially elected group of squatters who is chosen, or volunteers to, coordinate the squat’s internal and external activities, such as supervising maintenance works, cleaning, and attending the periodic Housing Rights Movements’ assemblies to keep all the squatters posted about relevant struggles (Grazioli 2018; Caciagli 2019). The terminology derives from the 1970s archive of the Housing Rights Struggles, whereby the word ‘comitato’ was used to designate grassroots groups which political and solidarity activities in specific neighbourhoods (e.g. the Comitato Autonomo della Magliana and the Comitato di Agitazione Borghese-CAB) (Marcelloni 1974). 2. He refers to the 2011 web-documentary from which the MAAM project was initiated (see Chap. 7). 3. The speaker refers to one of Metropoliz’s inhabitants inside jokes about the shooting of the space rocket documentary, and the fact that the vast majority of them are migrants (see Chaps. 5 and 7). 4. The speaker is listing Eritrean, Ethiopic, Maghrebi and Peruvian dishes that are reflexive of the squatters’ origin (see Chap. 5). 5. This informal conversation was transcribed with the consent of the speakers (three Metropoliz inhabitants) during an informal interaction occurred in May 2015. 6. The Questura is the local office of the public security forces where the requests for legally sanctioned rallies or demonstrations are filed. 7. Radio Onda Rossa is the most important Leftist autonomous radio station in Rome. It aired for the first time on 24 May 1977 on the impulse of a group of militants affiliated to the Working Class Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia) who were rooted in the San Lorenzo neighbourhood. Ever since, it has streaming broadcasts hosted by different grassroots groups and militants struggling in Rome’s metropolitan area and beyond, HRMs included (Radio Onda Rossa 2008). 8. The ‘4 Stelle Occupato’ is a former 4 Star Hotel that is situated in Via Prenestina 944 (two bus stops away from Metropoliz). It was squatted by BPM on 6 December 2012, during the first Tsunami Tour (Armati 2015). Nowadays it houses roughly 500 people (140 of whom are minors), distributed into 140 households (Grazioli 2017a, b; Montagna and Grazioli 2019).

Bibliography Armati, C. (2015). La Scintilla: Dalla Valle alla Metropoli, Una Storia Antagonista della Lotta Per La Casa. Fandango Editore. Berlinguer, G., & Della Seta, P. (1960). Borgate di Roma. Editori Riuniti.

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Caciagli, C. (2016). La Questione Abitativa a Roma: Politiche di Emergenza e Azioni Collettive. Working Papers Rivista Online Di Urban@it, 2(Ottobre), 1–12. Caciagli, C. (2019). Housing Squats as ‘Educational Sites of Resistance’: The Process of Movement Social Base Formation in the Struggle for the House. Antipode, 51(3), 730–749. Collier, S. J., & Lakoff, A. (2005). On Regimes of Living. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (pp. 22–39). Blackwell. Dadusc, D., Grazioli, M., & Martínez, M. A. (2019). Introduction: Citizenship as Inhabitance? Migrant Housing Squats Versus Institutional Accommodation. Citizenship Studies, 23(6), 521–539. Daolio, A. (1974). Le Lotte per la Casa in Italia: Milano, Torino, Roma, Napoli. Feltrinelli. della Porta, D. (2005). Deliberation in Movement: Why and How to Study Deliberative Democracy and Social Movements. Acta Politica, 40, 336–350. Di Vetta, P. (2015). L’Arte Del Conflitto. In G. De Finis (Ed.), Forza Tutt*: La Barricata dell’Arte (pp. 30–31). Bordeaux. Federici, S. (2010). Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation. In C. Hughes, S. Peace, & K. Van Meter (Eds.), Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (pp. 283–294). AK Press. Fournier, V. (2002). Utopianism and the Cultivation of Possibilities: Grassroots Movements of Hope. In M.  Parker (Ed.), Utopia and Organization (pp. 189–216). Blackwell Publishing. Gibson-Graham, J.  K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press. Grazioli, M. (2017a). From Citizens to Citadins: Rethinking Right to the City inside Housing Squats in Rome, Italy. Citizenship Studies, 21(4), 393–408. Grazioli, M. (2017b). Abitare, Rigenerare, Ridefinire i Confini Urbani: il Caso delle Occupazioni Abitative a Roma. Sentieri Urbani/Urban Tracks, 22(Urban Boundaries), 78–83. Grazioli, M. (2018). The ‘Right to the City’ in the Post-welfare Metropolis: Community-building, Autonomous Infrastructures and Urban Commons in Rome’s Self-Organised Housing Squats. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Leicester. Leicester Research Archive. https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/ thesis/The_right_to_the_city_in_the_post-­welfare_metropolis_Community_ building_autonomous_infrastructures_and_urban_commons_in_Rome_s_self-­ organised_housing_squats_/10241723 Grazioli, M., & Caciagli, C. (2017). The Right to (Stay Put In) the City: Il caso di Porto Fluviale a Roma. U3 I Quaderni, 13(Maggio_Agosto), 79–85. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford University Press.

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Serra, F. (2015, October 31). Reproducing the Struggle: A New Feminist Perspective on the Concept of Social Reproduction. Viewpoint Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/reproducing-­the-­struggle-­ a-­new-­feminist-­perspective-­on-­the-­concept-­of-­social-­reproduction/ Yaka, O., & Karayali, S. (2017). Emergent Infrastructures: Solidarity, Spontaneity and Encounter at Istanbul’s Gezi Park Uprising. In G. Brown, A. Feigenbaum, F.  Frenzel, & P.  McCurdy (Eds.), Protest Camps in International Context. Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance (pp. 53–70). Policy Press.

CHAPTER 7

The Politics and Urban Commons of Metropoliz and the MAAM

Abstract  The chapter reconstructs the process that led to the self-made museum experiment, and how Metropoliz’s double configuration is a proxy of the innovations that Housing Rights Movements have been applying to their strategic politics and tactical negotiations pertaining to housing policies, the right to the city and grassroots urban regeneration. A reflection about the configuration of social activism emerging inside Housing Rights Movements introduces the sequence of encounters that led to the inauguration of Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of the Metropoliz (the MAAM) project in 2012. The political value of encounters is then scaled up in relation to the temporary experience inside the institutional MACRO museum. Its decline is then gauged in the relation to the challenge that the Città Meticcia poses to the cultural, political, spatial dominance of the real-estate urban regime through the re-­ appropriation, grassroots regeneration and repurposing of urban vacancies. Keywords  MAAM • Museum • Social activism • Urban regeneration • Urban commons

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_7

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7.1   The Multi-scalar Politics of the Città Meticcia The previous chapter showed Metropoliz’s fascinating and rich social reproductive and organisational rites as they have been unfolding since the Città Meticcia has become more stable (i.e. the threat of immediate eviction was removed). The notion of eurhythmisation was employed to frame the process of attuning the squatters’ ‘driven’ as well as its ‘compelling’ rhythms (Grazioli 2018; Lefebvre 2004), and their ability to collectively pool resources to cope with everyday activities (see Fig.  7.1) as well as unforeseen circumstances. It also indicated the BPM activists’ adaptivity in transmitting the HRMs’ toolbox of organisational and political practices, while adapting their proceedings to the needs, desires and subjectivity of the squatters’ composition. This plasticity has been clearly emerging since emerged since Spring 2020, when the squatters, and the larger BPM’s community, were confronted with the socio-economic, and health, impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and first lockdown. First, the squatters pooled resources not to leave alone those who were struggling to make ends meet as their precarious jobs were curtailed or terminated, while catering for the material necessities of those quarantined. Besides, the availability of large,

Fig. 7.1  Metropoliz’s inhabitants cleaning the area before the football field while recycling wooden scrapes (September 2016)

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open-air facilities such as the football field, the Museum and the internal courtyards allowed the children to get some fresh air and maintain their sociabilities while safely social distancing. Third, the role of the activists emerged as the subjects who would mobilise their networks to facilitate the squatters’ access to emergency welfare provisions (such as food banks and vouchers), as well as to healthcare formation about how to cope with Covid-19  in collective settings such as housing squats (see Chaps. 1 and 8). The constant exchange of knowledge, solidarity and resources encouraged by the activists yet plays a crucial role not only in tactically coping with extraordinary circumstances like a pandemic. As discussed in Chap. 6, the organisational rites’ adaptiveness represents a strategic resource for constructing a relational barricade that operates not only as a defensive device. It also works inwards as it deconstructs those negative self-perceptions (Mattiucci 2017), and the dread of being surrounded by a hostile and stigmatising urban environment (Avallone and Torre 2016), that might lead the squatters to reduce as much as they can their ‘unnecessary’ interactions with what is outside Metropoliz, especially given its rich mestizo urbanity. In fact, the inhabitants of the Città Meticcia are surely not oblivious, nor unexperienced, about the controversial nature of squatting and self-made habitation, especially when realised by migrants and ethnic minorities (like Roma) who, by doing so, actively refute not only to accept sub-standard housing, but a subaltern position inside the urban society (Marra 2012; Mudu 2006). The MAAM is protecting us. I mean that those people that come and visit the MAAM can see how things are for real. They can tell those who misjudge Metropoliz, to those who believe that bad people are living in here, that this is not true. They can tell how we live, that we are decent people. The MAAM helps enormously when it comes down to showing outside what Metropoliz is and who lives in here. (Interview 12, May 2020)

Put in this perspective, the MAAM represents for Metropoliz’s inhabitants a powerful antidote against the self-secluding ‘squat effect’ (Grazioli 2018, p. 157), in terms of both self-perception and received stigma. In fact, the validation received by the self-made museum fuels a collective sense of pride and legitimacy (Nicholls 2016, p. 301). The inhabitants are also aware of the value of the MAAM as a catalyst of solidarity, a tool for changing public perceptions (De Carli and Frediani 2016, p. 348), and a leverage in the negotiation with the main actors of the urban regime. On

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an emotional, affective level, the opportunities that are embedded in the spaces of Metropoliz and MAAM nurture forms of activism and reciprocation that exemplify what Nicholls define as making a ‘place in itself’ rather than ‘for itself’, often using the MAAM as a point of departure (Nicholls 2009, p.  80) for processes of subjective and spatial transformation that would be ‘unfeasible’ or ‘non-credible’ in different settings and circumstances (Veronica Montanino, interview, April 2020; De Carli and Frediani 2016). This is to stress that Metropoliz’s urban commons do not only aim at the satisfaction of the needs, desires and ambition of the squatters. They foster ‘localised solidarities and regional attributes are viewed as a means of feeding larger political struggles’ (ibid.), especially those that contest the dominance of real-estate interests and spatial dispossession (Grazioli and Caciagli 2018; see also Chap. 4). As discussed in the previous chapters, this means finding effective ways of opposing the effects of housing poverty and dispossession, (Gargiulo 2020), as well as the political, discursive and spatial regime that the real-­ estate primacy articulates inside the urban fabric, such as describing the squatters as threats to law and order, or trying to libel the activists’ as manipulative, socially dangerous agitators (Grazioli 2018, 2019). Within this city-scale challenge, Metropoliz has gained a paradigmatic value not only for the richness of the urban commons it has originated, but also in relation to the bargaining power of the former factory’s area, the engineering tycoon Pietro Salini. Being the head of the largest Italian engineering corporation (previously Ca.Sa., now WeBuild), Salini has been often involved in the realisation of major works of construction inside the perimeter of Rome, including the third metro line (Metro C), and the linking road connecting the Via Prenestina and the GRA ring road. In the light of this patent power imbalance, the coalition between the squatters, BPM activists, and the HRMs’ social-political networks is even more important to sustain that effort at nurturing what BPM activists define ‘social activism’, and that is understood to currently be the major elements of distinction of the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare. ‘Social Activism’ identifies that larger corpus of activists whose political conscientisation and emancipatory actions have been not driven by ideological or political dispositions, as Chap. 5 has extensively addressed. It was rather triggered by the decision to squat out of necessity, and then from the individual resolution to proactively contribute to making the squat’s organisational rites effective and participating in the Movements’ decision-making processes. The distinctiveness of social activism is

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particularly important to thinking about the prevalently migrant composition of housing squatters, whereby it confronts the long-standing political and scholarly debate about the tensions arising between the autonomous initiatives of migrants and dispossessed urbanites, and the engagement of ‘native’, non-migrant people (Dadusc et al. 2019; García and Jørgensen 2019). Besides, since even the more ‘experienced’ activists are squatters themselves (see Chap. 4), the distinction between ‘squatter’ and ‘activist’ is not an ontological one. It boils down to the political, practical and emotional credit that some squatters acquire through their daily commitments (Grazioli and Caciagli 2017), and whose intensity trumps the weightiness of established ‘figures’ and supposed leadership roles, as the next interview elucidates: [Among activists], Your recognition as an activist is not a matter of hierarchy nor a consequence of power. The differential importance [among activists] depends upon the growth you experience as an activist, on the credibility you manage to achieve. […] You know, most social activists do not have a strong prior political consciousness. And so, in these situations, they act as they can, they move as they can, relying on someone else’s ideas for the general political frame, they execute and endorse someone else’s ideas. […] And so the main debate always seems to occur between the same heads that keep thinking and thinking, but that is not actually true. You have political and practical debates, they seem separated by they cannot exist with each other. And you know it, this is why I cannot agree or get along 100 per cent with your mindset [Author’s note: he considers me a ‘political’ activist]. In my case, it [his engagement] depends on the fact that I developed my consciousness and activism here. I had beliefs before, but I became truly passionate about politics after arriving here in Italy. At the end of the day, as an activist you have to put who you are and what you can do on the line. (Interviewee 13, September 2015)

This excerpt alludes to two ‘core elements’ of social activism inside housing squats, that are the participation in the internal comitato (see Chap. 6), and the involvement in the HRMs’ and BPM’s political elaboration. Inside the Città Meticcia, social activism also takes the form of taking part in the MAAM’s proceedings and social assembly on a regular basis. As these activities are extremely demanding time and emotionally wise, the perseverance of the social activists’ presence can often be intermittent and conditioned by differential levels of engagement (Nicholls 2009), if not ephemeral. Different factors can in fact undermine someone’s ability, or

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willingness, to sustain this kind of effort (e.g. family status and care work; one’s type of employment; health conditions; a legal or migratory status that could be jeopardised if convicted, or worst, arrested, during contentious political actions). Nevertheless, the non-ideological nature of the squatters’ activism is exactly what makes possible the processual formation of the mutable, mestiza collective identity (see Anzaldúa 1987; Massey 2004) of the Città Meticcia (Grazioli 2017a), through spatial transformations (Grazioli 2017a, b, 2018) and multi-scalar solidarities (Nicholls 2009). This spatial, and relational, conceptualisation activism frames the fortunate series of encounters that paved the path for creating the MAAM since the 2011 Space Metropoliz project.

7.2   From Space Metropoliz to the MAAM: The Barricade of Art of the Mestizo City As anticipated in the previous chapter, the development of the Città Meticcia’s radical infrastructure from a housing shelter to a hub of various urban commons is intermingled with the militant, and itinerant, practice of anthropology. In fact, the collective of urban trekkers and ethnographers, Stalkercollective, ‘discovered’ that the former Fiorucci slaughterhouse was inhabited during an urban trekking session on the Via Prenestina in 2009, shortly after Metropoliz had been occupied. In 2011, one of that group, the anthropologist Giorgio de Finis, decided to come back with the video maker Fabrizio Boni to propose a peculiar art project: the construction of an ‘upcycled’  (Coppola 2012) space rocket (see Fig.  7.2) using the materials lying unused inside the factory. This object was meant to represent a trip to a radical heterotopia where the urban ‘aliens’ could be emancipated from the constraints, and hostility, of the surrounding cityscape (Avallone and Torre 2016; Grazioli 2018). To the surprise of the proposers, the idea was accepted. During the shooting, not only the inhabitants and BPM activists were engaged, but a large number of artists, intellectuals and even astrophysicists and former astronauts who put their knowledge and skills in service to the realisation of the rocket. While this venture was documented in the web series Space Metropoliz,1 the persistence of the space-themed artefacts (the rocket, the telescope, wall decorations) paved the path for outlining MAAM, as Giorgio de Finis explains:

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Fig. 7.2  The Space Metropoliz rocket (May 2015) Materially speaking, it took one year to build what was meant to be a collective piece of art. This full year has led us to multiply our efforts to get the project started and going, whereas elsewhere we would have probably concluded in a few weeks. […] We invited astrophysicists, even the [former] astronaut [Umberto] Guidoni to meet the ‘Metropoliziani’ [the people who live in Metropoliz]. Then we started painting moon-themed walls, then the artist [Gian Maria] Tosatti came and built the telescope on the tower so we could observe the moon. So that was the first time we did something

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together with the inhabitants. […] The spatial tweaks were almost unintentional. Space Metropoliz did not have the goal of transforming the factory space. For us it was a purely speculative project, which was conceptualising another place where a better world could be possible […]. Then, when the project was terminated, Metropoliz asked us to stay, and I accepted […]. To do the Museum, we started from the small collection that was left from the web-doc, what I called the relics of the space construction site. We used those to build something new. If you think about it, it is as if the rocket was an hourglass which took off towards the sky, flipped back and landed in Metropoliz, which is therefore the moon. The MAAM is therefore the museum of the moon, the elsewhere, whilst the other is each one of us. The MAAM is the museum that valorises differences up to their singularities, a museum which is political without falling in the trap of being identitarian. (Giorgio de Finis, January 2020)

Eventually, the MAAM was ‘officially’ inaugurated in 2012. The museum can be accessed on Saturdays, when visitors are encouraged to take a guided tour with the MAAM regulars who have been designated as ‘guides’ by the social assembly. They can also have lunch at the canteen ‘Cucina Meticcia’ (mestizo cookery) where the inhabitants cook. During the weekly as well as the special openings, different types of initiatives take place, from live art performances and concerts to book presentations and political assemblies. The latter mainly focus on the themes of real-estate speculation, insurgent urban regeneration, and the role of the arts within this process. Furthermore, diverse activities are also directed towards nurturing Metropoliz children and teenagers, such as hip-hop laboratories, movie screenings, and football tournaments. The latter are an important activity for Metropoliz and the MAAM, which has hosted the diverse ‘inter-squats’ football tournament, and also the national antiracist tournament ‘Mediterraneo Antirazzista’ (Antiracist Mediterranean Sea) (see Fig. 7.3). Lastly, Metropoliz has also hosted different research groups and academic collectives, such as the Pidgin City (affiliated to the University of Roma Tre), a visit in September 2011 by the Development Planning Unit of University College London, and the Squatting Europe Kollective meeting in May 2014 (Grazioli 2017a, 2018). Some of these interactions were also narrated in the two ‘art catalogues’ published in 2015 and 2017, which drew together around 500 MAAM art pieces which were then present inside the factory, alongside texts written by activists and squatters (e.g. Di Vetta 2015; Di Noto 2017). However, these catalogues are outdated now, as the number, position and quality of

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Fig. 7.3  Team supporters during the 2015 Mediterraneo Antirazzista played at the Metropoliz football field (May 2015)

the art pieces changes on an almost weekly basis. In fact, as already addressed in Chap. 5, art pieces can deteriorate due to environmental factors, be moved, or added with a great frequency, generating the feeling that the factory is alive and continuously changing. It is necessary to stress that this material was not there at the beginning, but has been the product of a continuous negotiation made possible by the first group who decided to endorse the project, and then by the people who participate in the social assembly (see Chap. 6). The main agents of the MAAM project have thus been the inhabitants, BPM activists, artists and anthropologists, who were united by the common aim of adding a further layer to Metropoliz’s resistance against Salini’s corporation and the threat of eviction. However, coming from differing class, ethnic, gender and housing positions, they all express different perspectives concerning the meaning of the museum, the nature of the frictions stemming from them, and even about its subjective functions:

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For us [inhabitants], the MAAM has been a matter of cooperation. We worked on something that made us open to a lot of people, [let us] get to know artists and especially the people who come to visit the museum. For me, the museum is about opening ourselves to people, meeting, showing to people what we are about. I used to think I knew nothing about art. Yet when I realised the Museum was famous, when I started attending meeting and conferences, I got to understand what art is. I also got that I have myself an artistic side, that everyone has some sort of arts and crafts inside of them. For instance, I am quite well-versed at tailoring. I have that craft, but I did not know it was art! If we had not made the MAAM, I would not have managed to figure out these things, many of us would not have figured out that the skills they have are so valuable. (Interview 14, Inhabitant, May 2020) In retrospect, if I look at the factory today it immediately occurs to me how fit it is an urban museum. Yet it did not occur to me back in the days, at most I would have thought about a sort of social centre, but together with Giorgio [De Finis] we have managed to aim high. Which is right, if you think that the factory is already a museum in itself, with all the industrial machines, the whole industrial archaeological structure. So, it was very fitting, but not at all easy. At the beginning, you live a project like this as something that is drawing you quickly in a direction you do not know if you are ready to take yet. […] And then, all of a sudden, there were all these artists, researchers, architects, lots of people hanging around with whom to talk and start the [MAAM] process, to make sure it worked the way we wanted. And this is a type of organising and planning which is very different from what you usually do in a housing squat. It has not been easy, but we chose to go for it because we acknowledged how important it could be for defending Metropoliz. (Maria, BPM activist, April 2020) Even though I do not consider myself a political artist, I had my own ideas about the fact that habitation is a human peculiarity that has nothing to do with private property, because it is a fundamental right. This conviction came from my previous studies. […] Besides, I feel that artists and activists have a common ground in creativity, because they both devise a different vision of the city and its sociabilities, and they aim to make visible what is not visible yet. Although I felt there was this common ground, the relation between us [the artists] and the activists has not been easy at all, actually it is still conflicted sometimes. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but rather a vital one if the conflict leads to working even more specifically on equality and difference, two dimensions that must be together […]. The main lines of contrast? For instance, the impact of art, what it is supposed to be and whether it could and should be assessed […]. Whether the art system is inherently hyper-bourgeois. […] Finally, the conflict between the market and symbolic value of an art piece, which often becomes a matter of dogmatic perspectives. (Veronica Montanino, artist, April 2020)

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7.3   The Urban Commons of Metropoliz in the Squatted City The previous sections illustrated the progression of events and encounters that have driven the MAAM’s experimentation. On the one hand, the eurhythmisation in Metropoliz of subjects (artists, academics, urban anthropologists) who were neither activists nor housing squatters, yet came to have a say in the process of spatial transformation of the factory, requires an ‘explosive patience’ to handle frictions and contradictory energies (Di Vetta 2015, p. 30). On the other hand, those who have believed in the MAAM’s project first have been challenged with the eurhythmisation of the overflow of the museum’s energy into the housing infrastructures. To achieve this purpose, they have conceptualised and managed each encounter as a potential brick of shared knowledge, cooperation and reciprocity in the relational barricade they have put up since day one. Yet the MAAM’s role is not limited just to the Città Meticcia’s constituency, nor to the community of the HRMs. As it evolved and gained notoriety, it has become a point of reference for the Tor Sapienza neighbourhood, and a hub for different political networks who share a common vision about the ‘right to the city’, and what practices are required to achieve it. In fact, the Città Meticcia’s double configuration speaks to the confrontational satisfaction of fundamental necessities (such as having shelter), as well as to those progressive politics which advocate the fruition of various aspects of everyday life, from freedom of movement to free access to culture and the arts. Hence the ongoing evolution of Metropoliz’s infrastructure makes it a cultural super-object and, in the words of the philosopher Marc Augé, a ‘super-place’ that subverts conventional dichotomies about centre and periphery, public and private, legal and illegal (Di Noto 2017, p.  316). Furthermore, Metropoliz contributes to countering narratives and practices of post-industrial gentrification that, from the city centre to former peripheries like Tor Sapienza, keep furthering patterns of gentrification and residential segregation (Annunziata and Lees 2016; Annunziata and Alonso-Rivas 2018). In this perspective, Metropoliz exemplifies a grassroots alternative to the top-down redevelopment of former Fordist infrastructures into commodified spaces, especially considering they often become museums and cultural facilities. The fittest parallel in this case is with the destination of the former municipal slaughterhouse located in the central (and previously industrial) Testaccio neighbourhood, in Southern

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Rome, and whose pavilions have become exhibition spaces and the headquarters of the Architecture school of the University Roma Tre (see Annunziata and Lees 2016; Ranaldi 2014). Comparing the two trajectories, it emerges how the double configuration of the Città Meticcia does not only affirm a fundamental necessity like housing; it associates these struggles with a radical, material critique of planning and arts as drivers of gentrification and residential exclusion (La Cecla 2020; Marchini and Sotgia 2017; Martínez 2015; Teatro Valle 2015). According to this logic, Metropoliz’s and MAAM’s strategy to contest estate speculation is not just to stay put in Tor Sapienza, but to proliferate the Città Meticcia’s commons into the ‘city cathedrals’ (Di Vetta 2017), as they are understood according to a double reference. The first one alludes to the fact that Housing Rights Movements have historically resorted to entering churches to look for shelter against, or after, evictions.2 Secondly, it touches on the identification of commodified, privatised urban pieces as places that symbolise the untouchable sacredness of private property over collective use. The irruption of Metropoliz’s in one of these ‘profane’ cathedrals was substantiated by the 2018 appointment of Giorgio de Finis as the pro-tempore director of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Arts (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, hereby MACRO). As the nomination was endorsed by the former Deputy Mayor (and councillor for culture) Luca Bergamo, it ignited a long controversy on local as well as national outlets and social media, where politicians, journalists and art influencers debated about the political fitness to appoint someone whose only museum ‘management’ experience was inside an ‘illicitly’ occupied place. The following selection of post-nomination newspapers titles and blog entries furthered this argument by making full use of the anti-squatting rhetoric repertoire: Cultural illegality wins also in arts: at the MACRO in Rome the art director cannot be found, and nothing new can be seen on the horizon. (Gabriele Simongini, Il Tempo, 4 August 2017) Rome’s MACRO: the new director Giorgio De Finis, the Pink Floyd exhibition and other surreal things. In Rome, the MACRO Museum is currently subjected to real cultural tortures by the Cinque Stelle administration led by Virginia Raggi. Nowadays it is a ghostly defunded museum; tomorrow, it will become a location for blockbuster exhibitions; the day after tomorrow it will be given to an art director who emerged through doing exhibitions in a Roma camp. Amen. (Massimiliano Tonelli, Art Tribune, 15 October 2017)

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Rome, the MACRO becomes the artists’ kindergarten: Giorgio de Finis is the new director. (Laura Larcan, Il Messaggero, 21 December 2017) Rome’s inhabitants allowed in the city’s museums (virtually for free): And the MACRO welcomes the ‘squatter’ critic. Giorgio de Finis leaves the MAAM in a squatted building and moves to via Nizza: ‘It will be an atelier open to everyone’. (Carlo Alberto Bucci, Repubblica Roma, 22 December 2017) And so the Cinque Stelle occupied the MACRO. The Museum becomes a social centre: here is the surreal project for reviving this Roman museum. (Angelo Cresci, Il Giornale, 29 December 2017) The MACRO is the first regime’s museum of the ‘Yellow-Green’ Italy3 […] You pretend to make museums accessible to those who never had the opportunity to get into one, yet on a higher scale you are downgrading an entire city, an entire system, you are mortifying the credibility of a whole generation, alongside the unique brand which is Rome. (Massimiliano Tonelli, Art Tribune, 29 September 2018)

Despite the violent criticism, the so-called MACRO Asilo (kindergarten) thrived for two years. As a first act, the access was made free and the opening times were extended to offer the Museum as a public space to the city, thus removing the veneer of elitism entrenched in ticket and ‘big’ exhibition-based access. Second, and according to a similar logic to the MAAM, established as well as emerging artists were called to exhibit, populate the art labs and organise workshops. Once again, the only ‘rules of engagement’ were to accept equality between different artistic expressions, be open-minded towards the encounters with other peers and the visitors, and possibly the willingness to contribute to a broader conversation about grassroots urban transformations. The latter was articulated also through a series of keynote addresses featured by prominent critical urbanists and philosophers like David Harvey (December 2018), Jacques Rancière (March 2019), Saskia Sassen (September 2019) and Chantal Mouffe (October 2019). In addition, on 17 October 2018 the Macro hosted 10 roundtables and 100 interventions dedicated to Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and how it could be actualised to champion the public city over the privatised one. This critical approach to the museum and urban regeneration was fuelled not only by De Finis’ experience, yet by the constant presence of BPM and activists from other groups in the Macro as participants and promoters of diverse initiatives, thus fuelling the osmotic relation between the MAAM and the MACRO across different scales of the city.

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For instance, in March 2019, the MACRO hosted a ‘marathon’ of events dedicated to the MAAM’s seventh birthday on the same day as the court hearing of the trial against the BPM activists for stealing electricity. As the artistic and political intervention scaled up beyond the MAAM-­Macro alliance, it culminated in October 2019  in the threeweeks initiative named ‘Stati Generali//Prove Tecniche di Rivoluzione’ (‘General States//Technical Tests of Revolution’, see Fig. 7.4). During the month, a room in the museum was dedicated to hosting visual materials, banners and public assemblies of different housing squats (e.g. 4 Stelle Occupato, Province and Casal Boccone), grassroots groups and local coalitions (e.g. the online media ‘La Voce delle Lotte’, the Rete Roma Sud and the Tiburtina network which was defending the local Aguzzano Park) and social centres (e.g. Acrobax and Esc Atelier). Eventually, the radical change that had irrupted in the MACRO has been counter-reformed by the non-­ confirmation of Giorgio de Finis for another two-year mandate after December 2019. Although the City Council tried not to raise clamour over this choice as if it were a consuetudinary turnover, it was read by Metropoliz’s inhabitants and us BPM activists as an attempt to discontinue the progressive legitimisation of a radical vision of the city and its uses at the core of Rome. It was also a proof of how challenging is the existence (and resistance) of The Città Meticcia for the real-estate regime since the pre-crisis heyday ended.

Fig. 7.4  Metropoliz’s assembly at the MACRO during the ‘Stati Generali// Prove Tecniche di Rivoluzione’ (5 October 2019)

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7.4   Grassroots Urban Regeneration and the ‘Right to the City’ The Housing Rights Movements, or Movements for the Right to Habitation as we call them nowadays, have historically had an important function in the development of social struggles in this country. Since the Sixties, they have been a vital part of social movements, and have brought a salient contribution both in qualitative and in quantitative terms, as they have resulted in lots of activists, especially those from a working-class background. They come from struggles that originate from a need, and then discovered a larger, more interesting dynamic. The qualitative contribution has thrived when larger movements were developing, for instance the working class struggles of 1969, or the students’, youngsters’ movements of the 1977, which had a tight relation with the housing struggle here in Rome, but not only then. I also think that, during these past few years, HRMs still have an important function, again in quantitative as in qualitative terms. I think it is worth repeating this point because often housing struggles are observed only from the standpoint of the numeric phenomena they produce, whereby they can generate an immediate response and mobilising, which of necessity involves very big numbers. Yet, nowadays, the challenge lies in the durability of these struggles in the light of the persistent lack of public housing and welfare policies. This situation is stimulating HRMs to reflect about what it means to struggle for housing without having council estates as an objective that can be pursued, and achieved, as in the case of the previous cycles of struggle. The ability to respond and carry on with reappropriation practices will then be the product of the new phase of the Habitation Movements. Our overall contribution has been, then, to deal with the internal challenge of providing viable responses, while dealing with the radical institutional choice to cut welfare, to choose private ownership and to elect real-estate agents and homeowners as their baseline constituency. This means ­marginalising a lot of urban dwellers, that could yet choose to mobilise with us. This possibility requires the capability to speak to this complex social composition instead of leaving it in the hands of right-wing groups that manipulate social problems, the rage of people and urban degradation to stir up xenophobia, for instance. Here is one of the new challenges that HRMs are confronted with nowadays, which is the issue of migration. The mestizo composition is not just a feature of the housing movements; it can be observed also in the logistics sector, in the farm working sector, where migrant frontlines lead struggles for their rights. This element makes social struggles evolve in a more comprehensive direction. It includes freedom of movement, the opposition against the drift towards securitisation, the protest against the attempt to deny a registered address to those who are not

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affluent enough to survive in the city without fighting for what they need. This is the vision that frames our modality of doing spatial reappropriation, our concept of urban regeneration, the way we resist against evictions. (Paolo di Vetta, BPM, January 2016)

This long extract of an interview with one of the founders of BPM goes to the heart of the political tenets underpinning the occupation of Metropoliz, and the way in which its insurgent regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016) has been accruing. On the one hand, the spatial transformation of the former slaughterhouse went with a continuous redefinition of its dwelling, militant, cultural community. As their encounter nurtured a plurality of different urban commons, openness emerged neither as an abstract principle nor as a strategic deliberation (The Free Association 2011). It stands out as the core of a politics of connectivity (Amin 2002; Massey 2004) that prefigures the Squatted City (Vasudevan 2015, 2017) as a different model of urbanity, like the MACRO Asilo experiment suggests. Besides, Metropoliz’s politics add up to the HRMs’ repertoire of ways to re-appropriate the urban centrality that are crucial for realising the ‘right to the city’ (Grazioli 2017b; Lefebvre 1996). Such re-appropriation requires also the disruption of the hierarchical dichotomy between city and peripheral areas (ibid.). In this sense, the connection of ‘the highest point of the city (the museums, the flagship of contemporary global cities, starchitects) and its supposedly lower point (the urban periphery, that housing emergency that many, myself included, have never acknowledged in its proportion and shape)’ (Giorgio de Finis, January 2020) respond to the same logic that feeds the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare’s contentious politics. Together with other occupations like Porto Fluviale (Grazioli and Caciagli 2017), Metropoliz exemplifies how insurgent urban regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016) can be a multiplicator of the urban commons and a barrier against the voracity of the real-estate urban regime. In this sense, the struggle for Metropoliz’s right to stay put in the city (Grazioli 2017a; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018) against Salini’s threat of eviction bears a triple meaning: (1) the defence of the Città Meticcia’s commons; (2) the re-conceptualisation of urban redevelopment and housing policies in the direction of economical, environmental and social sustainability; (3) the redefinition of the city’s geographies and resources according to their use-value instead of their nominal exchange value, thus unhinging the debate about the urban commons from the trap of their

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property, enfranchisement and management (Montagna and Grazioli 2019). These distinctive elements add up to the participation of Metropoliz to the confrontational politics of the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare. They also give a multi-scalar dimension to the infrastructures of solidarity that are activated to support those who remain homeless after being evicted, like in the case of the Casilino 700 Roma community (see Chap. 5), and later with those removed from the Colle Monfortani and Piazza Indipendenza housing squats (Grazioli 2018). This puts in perspective also the reaction against the spatial, subjective and political surplus generated by the Città Meticcia firstly in Tor Sapienza, and then scaled up inside the city until the MACRO Asilo. In fact, the seemingly disproportionate reaction against the open museum project unearths the extension of the real-estate influence at the core of governmentality, and therefore the necessity to read housing in relation to broader urban dynamics to re-appropriate the right to the city. In fact, the dispute against the perceived legitimisation of Metropoliz through the Macro calls for a re-conceptualisation of the notion of the ‘real-estate regime’ (see Chap. 4) in the current post-crises transition. Far from being just a ‘governmental’ device, it operates as a multi-scalar machine that extracts surplus value from cities through the valorisation of multiple dispositifs (Foucault 1976) and spatialities (Harvey 1982) that contribute to the reification of neoliberal post-industrial economies (Bertuzzi 2017), as well as to the affirmation of specific cultural values and symbolic orders (Bobbio and Guala 2002; McCracken 1986). In this sense, Metropoliz’s defiant presence in the city is also important to counter the strategy used by the real-estate urban regime to undermine the agency, and legitimacy, of housing activists and urban squatters. Chapter 4 already illustrated how the national government has chosen to strip housing squatters of their welfare and citizenship rights to discourage prospective ones through Article 5 of the 2014 National Housing Plan. Furthermore, the real-estate urban regime has pursued the repression, and delegitimisation, of the HRMs’ most visible speakers not only in the communication, but also in the judicial arena. At the core of the strategy there is the argument that the housing crisis is fabricated by the activists for ideological reasons, and that the squatters’ participation in the HRMs is made under the duress caused by their condition of housing deprivation. This derogatory framework has substantiated, in 2016, the request to subject two of the speakers of BPM and CCLC, Paolo Di Vetta and Luca Fagiano, to the so-called special surveillance. The measures

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imposed for two years by the state attorney included the prohibition to leave the metropolitan area of Rome, the night curfew, and the obligation to bring with them every time they left their houses a small ‘red book’ (see Fig. 7.5) that would identify them as ‘socially dangerous’ subject (Grazioli 2018). Although these measures were revoked in 2018 after a vocal public and legal campaign, the framework that jeopardises the existence of housing squats and BPM still lasts. The conclusive Chap. 8 will draw some provisional remarks pertaining to the nature, and durability, of Metropoliz (and the housing squats’ commons) also in the light of the ongoing (December 2020) pandemic crisis.

Fig. 7.5  The red book of special surveillance handed in October 2016 to the Housing Rights Movements’ activists Luca Fagiano and Paolo di Vetta (Source: Blocchi Precari Metropolitani Facebook page)

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Notes 1. The full documentary was released in 2014 and is available here: https:// www.youtube.com/user/SpaceMetropoliz (subtitled in English). 2. The occupation of churches and cathedrals has been part of the Housing Rights Movements’ repertoire since the 1970s. It has then been revived by the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare since the 2012–3 Tsunami Tours (Armati 2015), and with more intensity after the summer 2018 evictions of Via Quintavalle and Piazza Indipendenza with the six months urban encampment of the evictees in front of the cloister of the Santi Apostoli church, located in the city centre in front of the Prefect’s office (Grazioli 2018). 3. Tonelli’s reference is to the 2018–9 national government coalition formed by the Movimento Cinque Stelle and the right-wing party Lega-Noi Con Salvini.

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CHAPTER 8

Without Metropoliz, This Ain’t My City!

Abstract  This chapter wraps up the main empirical and theoretical findings presented in the book. Besides, it offers hindsight in the actions that Metropoliz and BPM activists enacted to cope with the sanitary and economic repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic to discuss the effectiveness of the Città Meticcia’s organisational rites. As these elements pertain to the problematic nature, and durability, of the urban commons, they are also mobilised to discuss a relational understanding of the commons in alternative to the burgeoning debates about their ontology, purpose and institutionalisation. Moreover, the chapter lines up the general elements of reflection that can be harvested by transdisciplinary scholarship for future research on the subject matter. The book is closed by the petition written by inhabitants and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani to ask for the solidarity of the Città Meticcia’s allies in stopping the foreseeable eviction procedures. Keywords  Commons • Conclusion • Eviction • Pandemic • Petition

8.1   Understanding Metropoliz in the Squatted City The book has fleshed out the story of Metropoliz, the Città Meticcia, by contextualising it within the history of self-made habitation and HRMs in Rome. It began by outlining in the introductory Chaps. 1 and 2 a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8_8

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theoretical scaffolding concerned with the definition of housing and squatting, commons and ‘right to the city’. These theories, in the best tradition of engaged anthropology and ethnography, have been ‘deployed in the service of description’ (Graeber 2009, p. 509), amended and developed when they have seemed inappropriate for addressing the particular epistemological significance of the case outlined. By drawing on a number of critical scholarly perspectives concerned with debates about housing, right to the city and the commons, I proposed the theorisation of ‘housing squats’ as a lens for reading the specificity of Metropoliz, and the situatedness of HRMs’ contentious politics in Rome, in relation to broader processes of post-crisis neoliberal urbanisation. The latter, in Mediterranean cities, have corresponded to the development of innovative urban social movements and forms of squatting (see Leontidou 1993, 2010; Stavrides 2010, 2016). In addition, this study has deployed the framework of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ and proposed a relational approach to the theorisation of the urban commons in the light of the empirical inputs offered by the unique experience of The Città Meticcia. In Chap. 3, I combined this theoretical approach with the methodological framework, where I put my activist ethnographic approach in a dialectical relationship with the burgeoning debates about the contemporary values, and ethics, of anthropology as a committed, inherently subjective and socially responsible discipline (see Graeber 2009; Schepher-Hughes 1995). In so doing, I have advanced the argument for activist ethnography as a situated methodology which can conjugate militant praxis with a aknowledge production that looks to different arenas to pursue goals during the process of dissemination (Wacquant 2007, 2008). The latter range from furthering the collective knowledge about Metropoliz’s and housing squats’ political values, to trying to encourage a radical change in the policymakers’ orientations (see Chap. 3). Chapter 4 then proposed the definition of ‘real-estate urban regime’ as a lens for understanding and interpreting why the historical dearth of public, affordable accommodation has not found a consistent correspondence in the processes of planning and policymaking deployed in Rome since the Second World War. As this gap resulted in the consolidation of HRMs, which emerged as propellers of popular mobilisations in Rome’s political arena, it was important to outline the innovations of the current housing squatting movement in relation to four macro-aspects:

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1. the intersectionality of the post-2007–8 housing crisis, and therefore the mestiza composition of the urban dwellers addressing HRMs to solve their condition of deprivation 2. framing real-estate developers not only as economic agents, but as political actors that are actively impairing the realisation of a sustained public housing, and vacancies’ recuperation, plan 3. the connection between austerity urbanism and the weaponisation of welfare provisions against ‘undesirable’, undisciplined urban dwellers, as exemplified by Article 5 of the National Housing Plan 4. the redefinition of the concept of ‘council estates’ from newly constructed elements to regenerated urban vacancies that could reconcile the demand for a larger (and rapidly accessible) housing stock with environmental, and economic, sustainability This contextualisation was key to introducing the empirical part of the book, where the voices Metropoliz’s inhabitants, BPM activists and MAAM’s allies reconstruct how the salami factory is being made into an exemplary case in favour of insurgent regeneration (De Carli and Frediani 2016), and a hub of manifold urban commons (Bresnihan and Byrne 2014). Chapter 5 paralleled this effort with the story of Tor Sapienza, first construed and planned as a makeshift neighbourhood and later co-opted in institutional planning (and mapping) for its potential. Furthermore, the chapter outlined the diverse trajectories of settlement and movement that led a very different group of people to the common decision to walk in the factory area on 27 March 2009, and to start a process of homemaking that inevitably clashed with Salini’s ambitious projects of commercial reconversion. In this case, emphasis was placed on the substantial presence of asylum seekers, refugees and Roma families, for it emerged as a collective withdrawal, or expulsion, from the humanitarian industrial complex (Dadusc and Mudu 2020) of fostered housing and forced camp accommodation (Maestri 2019). In addition to this, existential and working precarity emerged as the primary cause of housing instability for the various composition of migrants, as well as Italian urban dwellers that decided to approach BPM and then squat the factory, since they could not access council estates or support themselves in the tenure or rental market any longer. Narrowing down to the ways in which the Roma families expelled from the Casilino 700 camp were embedded in Metropoliz, the role and subjectivity of BPM activist-squatters emerged in Chap. 6 as at odds with the stereotype of the ideologically driven, white and privileged militant trumping migrants’ autonomy in solidarity movements (see Dadusc et al. 2019).

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They rather emerged as the people validated by the larger group for their daily, bodily commitment to the squat’s organisational rites. The latter were framed since Chap. 2 as those organisational practices that were pooled from the consolidated archive of HRMs, yet innovated in order to offer to the activist-squatters some fundamental coordinates that could facilitate the eurhythmisation of different everyday experiences, while supporting them whenever unpredictable (e.g. sudden police interventions) as well as predictable (e.g. threats of eviction) circumstances kicked in. They are the barricades as sites of encounter; the communal planning, and care, of spaces; the assembly as the time, and space, of horizontal decision making; the commonality of social reproduction. As these organisational rites are common to the vast majority of housing squats ‘affiliated’ to the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare (see Caciagli 2020; Grazioli and Caciagli 2017), they have been further complexified inside Metropoliz to embrace the Città Meticcia’s double configuration of space as a dwelling and museum space. For instance, inside Metropoliz, the barricade takes the shape of a ‘traditional’ hardware of resistance, and the software of arts and encounters (see Fig.  8.1) that constitutes the artistic  barricade of

Fig. 8.1  Laundry and moon-themed paintings in the ‘Roma’ block (October 2020)

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Metropoliz, which in turn nurtures and protects them as a hub of the urban commons. As these organisational rites constitute the underpinnings for the squatters’ commoning, they are also what feeds the Città Meticcia’s collective identity and legitimacy (Nicholls 2016) beyond the formal attribute of citizenship (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). In fact, its placeness is affirmed through the multi-scalar solidarities (Nicholls 2009; Grazioli and Caciagli 2018) and politics (Grazioli 2017a, b, 2018) that the BPM activists and inhabitants have succeeded to configure, like that Chap. 7 described. Specifically, the openness and visibility that the MAAM furthers makes it a ‘place in itself’ rather than ‘for itself’ (Nicholls 2009), where manifold encounters and experiments can take place, and where the squatters can tell their own stories in their own terms, be it while walking with MAAM’s visitors on a regular Saturday, or narrating their story through different means that reach out to different audiences, from the Space Metropoliz web-doc to manifold academic publications, this book included. Such unique, transformative placeness has thus become the driving force of the collective consciousness of being an important part of the Squatted City (Cellamare 2019; Vasudevan 2017). Unquestionably, the advancement of Metropoliz’s experiment is an exemplary advocate for the necessity, and potentiality, of a different model of habitation and welfare that reconciles social, economic, environmental sustainability, and that thus radically contradicts the one furthered by the currently dominant real-­ estate urban regime. This also gives a different perspective to the identification of the squatters, and activists, as socially dangerous subjects, for they demonstrate that a different model of mestiza, self-made urbanity is possible. Yet its replicability should not be assumed at all, nor romanticised as essentially positive and unproblematic. In this perspective, I stand by David Graeber’s description of his own work, that ‘[t]his chapter is not really a conclusion. In a way, writing conclusions for a work of ethnography is always a questionable undertaking’ (Graeber 2009, p. 509). In fact, it would be factually inaccurate to concoct a conclusive word for an experience that is still ongoing, and where things change on a daily basis. Yet I hope I succeeded to convey the complexity of the process that led to the configuration of Metropoliz as it is now, and that unfolded in a constant spatial and relational osmosis that imbricates not just the inhabitants and the city, but the trans-scalar, intersubjective, bizarre ‘community’ that has chosen to be the social barricade of the Città Meticcia. To this purpose, in this book, I have tried to make

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the most of the unconditional access, mutual trust and intimacy that has allowed me to ask certain questions and elicit such thoughtful responses in return. Inevitably, the fact that I am myself a BPM activist has led me to highlight the reflections, concerns and debates that agitate the militant milieu that I am part of, as well as the specific discussions I had with my fellow-activists during the process of writing. I would thus like to conclude this book with some inevitably provisional reflections about how Metropoliz’s role, organisational rites and commons have functioned during the pandemic crisis, and what they tell us about the problematic legacy, and durability, of the urban commons (Grazioli 2018). In fact, this book is not only the description of an exceptional attempt to resist the pernicious pervasiveness of neoliberal urbanisation. It is also the ethnography of an extraordinary experiment of persistence within a city, and an urban regime, whose contradictions are entrenched in the growth of that Squatted City, and which are deepening as diverse systemic crises progress. This is visible in the policymakers’ obstinacy in refusing to envision long-term housing responses regardless of the short-term demand and therefore their ineffectiveness in coping with unforeseen circumstances like the one determined by the Covid-19 outbreak. As Chap. 1 outlined, the pandemic crisis is deepening pre-existing income and housing inequalities; besides, existing welfare provisions have proven totally inadequate in duration, and scope, to deal with the ‘new’ poverties produced by the first and second lockdowns. This, and the provisional figures released at the time of writing (December 2020; see Chiaro 2020; Sina 2020) inevitably suggests that a new wave of evictions, foreclosures and impoverishment is in sight, as we already witnessed in the aftermath of the financial 2007–8 crisis (see Chap. 1). Against this alarming scenario, HRMs and grassroots solidarity networks in Rome have been a fundamental social security protection for those who had been already excluded from the access to welfare (i.e. through Article 5 of the National Housing Plan), and/or are struggling to make ends meet. Focusing on Metropoliz in the empirical Chaps. 6 and 7, the well-oiled organisational rites and networks developed by BPM activists, as well as the Città Meticcia’s double configuration, have made it possible to deploy intertwining actions in response to the pandemic. First, as the lockdown started, the BPM activists participated in mobilisations protesting the City Council’s failure to provide sufficient social protections to the people whose incomes had defaulted (e.g. not providing timely and numerous enough food vouchers). At the same time, they had facilitated the

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squatters’ access to food banks and benefits, while keeping contacts with the local municipalities to activate social, health and school services for specific cases (e.g. allocating a physician to someone who had not an assigned family doctor because of Article 5; providing a computer or tablet to families who had any to ensure kids could attend remote schooling). Besides, BPM encouraged the squatters to undertake a grassroots health training with the NGO Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) about how to sanitise spaces and ensure individual and collective hygiene during the pandemic. This set of actions thus validates the effectiveness of the commons of HRMs and Metropoliz in terms of mobilising resources, networks and knowledge to cope even with these extraordinary circumstances. This is undeniably empowering for those who believe in the ‘resilience’ of grassroots organising for coping with crises caused by capitalist greed and the State’s inaction. Yet, they speak even more about the urgency to radically change the current paradigm of cityness, as its economic and ideological tenets are structurally unreformable and unfit to ensure collective welfare (Grazioli 2018; Lazzarato 2012; Vasudevan 2017).

8.2   For a Theory of Housing Squats as Urban Commons These concluding remarks have tried to highlight the role of the Città Meticcia inside the post-crisis city of Rome, drawing upon the evidence offered by the activist ethnographic inquiry I started in late 2014 and also offering some provisional considerations about the Squatted City’s plasticity amidst the ongoing pandemic period. In fact, while inequalities intensify, the multi-scalar politics for the right to the city deployed by Metropoliz create new spaces of solidarity, turning obstacles into opportunities for demands and policymaking, as they dwell upon consolidated political archives and more recent experiences drawn from the global wave of contestation of austerity urbanism (della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Martínez and Cattaneo 2014; Uitermark and Nicholls 2014). Besides, the empirical evidence discussed in this book offers an additional perspective on the problematic ontology of the commons, their ‘production’ and fruition. Seen from the perspective of Metropoliz, the urban commons are all those autonomous operations and infrastructures that compose the right to the city as we understand it in terms of a plurality of rights. Metropoliz is thus an urban commons from which manifold urban commons (Bresnihan and Byrne 2014) depart and proliferate on different scales of the urban

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political, from the internally oriented pooling of resources, to neighbourhood-­based activism, arriving to the organisation of national and even transnational campaigns and mobilisations (Grazioli 2017a, b; Grazioli and Caciagli 2017). This exceptional capacity stems from the activist-squatters’ capacity to mobilise different types of resources, as well as from the interplay between urbanisation, housing informality and social movement formations that has characterised Rome’s development and planning since the Second World War (Cellamare 2019). That is, self-made urbanism (Chiodelli and Grazioli in press) interacts with institutional planning in the form of the alternation of ‘routinization without regularization’ (Smart 2001 in Aureli and Mudu 2017, p. 510), institutional co-optation (as in the case of Tor Sapienza, see Chap. 5) or forcible elimination. The latter is epitomised by violent, spectacularised evictions, as happened in 2017 with the refugees’ housing squat of Piazza Indipendenza (Grazioli 2018). On the institutional side, the alternation of these dissonant approaches is dictated by the necessity to reconcile the extraction of profit with the preservation of a basic level of consensus (Clough Marinaro 2020; Esposito and Chiodelli 2020). On the autonomous side, the indefinite persistence of supposedly temporary urban arrangements (Simone 2018) triggers encounters and incremental processes of spatial and subjective transformation that fundamentally question the ‘partition of the sensible’ (Aureli and  Mudu 2017, p.  512) and the discursive regimes that shape the political and policy arena. In Metropoliz, this question is visible through the transformation of an industrial relict into a liveable, dignifying residential space, as well as in the fading of the usual distinction between private and public spaces. In the book I have repeatedly stressed the mutual, collective adjustment of households’ spaces in the functioning of the communal care of collective spaces and infrastructures. Besides, the MAAM as a museum is patently alien to the conventional notions and proceedings of cultural institutions. This brings us to the reflection that the Metropoliz case study stimulates about the ontology and purpose of the urban commons. Are they ‘only’ finite, decommodified urban assets, or are they transforming resources that champion a different vision of urbanity and urban citizenship (Nur and Sethman 2017)? The answer I propose in this book departs from mainstream academic debates concerned with the ownership of the commons (see Ostrom 1990). It also moves away from the debates about the institutionalisation of the commons, identified as those essential resources that should be decommodified and subjected to the State’s control (as proposed by the

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Italian referendum about public water, see Mattei 2007, 2011; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). On the other hand, I argue that an extensive understanding of the commons should encompass all those resources that have been commodified and selectively enclosed according to their market value (as it is apparent in the case of the elites’ access to arts), and that have though been repossessed for open access and collective flourishing. Another implication for the academic (and political) reflection is that the commons are not ‘ontologically’ naturally given entities. Rather, they are the product of a complex collective process that needs to be nurtured through daily actions and affective relations not to be dispersed. I assert that organisational rites (assembly-based decision making; collective care of communal space and infrastructures of resistance; the commoning of social reproduction) are the framework to Metropoliz’s, and HRMs-­ related housing squats’ multi-scalar politics and production of commons. As these efforts are intertwined with the transformation and repurposing of urban interstitial spatialities, they become a thought-provoking field of observation, and not only for anthropologists and ethnographers. They are proxies for those urban, planning and geography scholars concerned with the contemporary challenges of envisioning, planning and developing more just urban spaces. For instance, they speak to the debates about how planners can sustain the rising request for public low-income housing, instead of furthering gentrification and housing seclusion processes through top-down urban redevelopment (La Cecla 2020; Wacquant 2008). In this sense, insurgent regeneration suggests that the repurposing and upcycling (Coppola 2012) of different urban vacancies represents a rapid, ecologically, economically and socially sustainable alternative to the traditional model of council estates that segregates impoverished urbanites whilst enhancing real-estate economies (Sotgia and Marchini 2017). Besides, this way of realising and circulating the commons within contested urban cityscapes represents a decisive encouragement to widen the scope of the scholarship engaged with finding the main thrust that connects the post-crisis, post-neoliberal configurations of social urban movements that have been emerging globally since the post-2007 crisis aftermath unfolded (della Porta and Mattoni 2014; Uitermark and Nicholls 2014). The in-depth analysis of Metropoliz and BPM’s politics highlights that such radical experiments of spatial repossession and regeneration materialise a disruptive challenge for real-estate profitability and profit-oriented urban regimes. Hence, the affirmation of a diverse vision of housing, urban development and citizenship cannot be established

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simply by demonstrating how rational and desirable it would be. It must be achieved piece by piece through a practice of contention that cannot be gauged in the light of the amount of violence it deploys in the case of exceptional, eventful moments, like the rioting during a demonstration, or the active resistance to the eviction of the housing squats occupied after the Tsunami Tours (see also Armati 2015; Grazioli 2018). In the same way, it cannot be evaluated using anthropological and sociological commonplaces that arbitrarily attribute violence to specific subjectivities and political practices (Graeber 2009, 2011). In fact, the description of Rome’s multifaceted urban regime demonstrates that sovereignty is nothing but neutral to real-estate interests, as it adjusts to the formal (and even illegal) tenets of its affirmation. Against this background, even citizenship and welfare are mobilised to select and allocate the operations that are necessary for the accumulation of profit through spatial dispossession and social labour (see also Harvey 1989, 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019). To this purpose, multi-scalar urban governance resorts not only to authoritative sovereignty, but to the co-­ optation of radical practices and terminologies so to legitimise capitalist operations of re-enclosure and privatisation (as it clearly emerges in the controversies concerned with the exploitation of natural resources and climate change, or the ineffectiveness of the Italian referendum concerning water as commons) (della Porta and Piazza 2008; Mattei 2007, 2011). As these changeable ontologies of governmentality and capitalism (Rossi 2013) jeopardise the effectiveness, autonomy and durability of the commons, urban social movements are confronted with the dilemma of how to avoid co-optation without becoming irrelevant in affecting policy actions and narratives (see Bourgois 2003). In this sense, the strategic combination of negotiation and contention enables the Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare to keep together a greater level of autonomy, whilst engaging with the institutional responsibilities for strategising sustained public policies (Grazioli 2018; Santoro 2015). Of course, it is not my intention to claim that this piece of anthropology can offer a panacea for the persistence, and magnitude, of the ongoing housing crisis. It is also far from being a comprehensive summary of the activist-squatters’ complex biographies, nor of self-made housing in Rome, for I have focused on Metropoliz’s unique, non-replicable characteristics (Bourgois 2003; Graeber 2009; Maestri 2019). Besides, the ‘staying put’ of housing squats in Rome brings forward multiple directions for future research that can necessarily only be touched upon in this manuscript.

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These include the following: the relation and comparability of Metropoliz with the other housing squats affiliated (or not) to BPM and HRMs; the street-level policymaking (Brodkin 2008; Lipsky 1980) enacted by squatters, activists and local municipalities to tackle the depletion of the welfare state; the mestizo cityness in relation to the daily negotiation of gender relations, ethnicity, religious and cultural habits; the specific impact of border management upon migrant squatting (Dadusc et al. 2019); the discussion of different forms of squatting, and housing informality, present in Rome beyond the HRM-related ones like Metropoliz. That said, I believe that there is no more appropriate ending to this text than the petition ‘Without Metropoliz this ain’t my city’1 hosted on Change.org, written by us BPM activists, Metropoliz’s inhabitants and the MAAM crew. Since it was presented in September 2020 during the #savemetropoliz event (see Fig. 8.2), it has been made viral to urge the public authorities, and the Salini Impregilo corporation, to stop the eviction procedures. This is a story to be continued, on paper and above all, in the streets.

Fig. 8.2  Visitors to the ‘Moon Garden’ during the #SaveMetropoliz event (19 September 2020)

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The entanglement of relations, the cultural exchange and the social experimentation that have been going on for over ten years in the former slaughterhouse Fiorucci, in 913 Prenestina street, and that have transformed the factory into Metropoliz – our Città Meticcia – cannot be sacrificed in the name, and on behalf, of private property. For this reason, we resolutely call on those who, during these years, have supported and passed through this experience in their different capacities to collectively cooperate in blocking the eviction machine, which is fuelled by the cold, bureaucratic engine of private compensation. We cannot help but ask ourselves how the former Salini Impregilo corporation (now We Build) could claim contentious rights over this piece of land, which was renovated by a group of inhabitants who come from three different continents. We cannot but ask ourselves how Salini can compete for this land with the kids who were born here, with the Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere’s (hereafter MAAM) barricade of art, which is in an osmotic, complex relationship with the residents and the activists who daily engage in nurturing its infrastructure. And how can Rome give up on such an experiment, which is also acknowledged and appreciated, without becoming poorer, culturally speaking? How could Rome try and erase a space which, during the pandemic emergency, has guaranteed social cohesion, grassroots welfare and healthcare, continuity of schooling to dozens of pupils, fully autonomously and without any kind of institutional support? We believe that this piece of city, and Rome’s history, fits inside global transformations, as much as inside those that characterise this metropolis. It fits into the becoming mestiz@ of a society which moves and rethinks former urban vacancies, empty and seemingly non-productive spaces as common, and precious ones, outside of the logic of prospective speculation and estate. The latter would have been the fate of the former Fiorucci factory as well, since Salini was planning to build another residential and commercial complex. Yet, in 2009, a new path started, and it was carried out amid plenty of difficulties, but with a lot of courage, determination and fantasy. This path has transformed an industrial relict into a Città Meticcia that cannot easily be replicated, yet it is necessary to think about this city as a lively space which can be regenerated, starting from the needs of the people who inhabit it daily, and not as a conquered land for real-estate speculation. Too many times local institutions have evoked, yet not actualised, a change of gear in this direction. At this point, we believe a radical move is needed by the City Council and the Lazio Region, alongside the institutions designated for the protection of commons, in the direction of acknowledging the needs of local communities, and an idea of urban regeneration that should be a dignifying tool, and not a spearhead of profit and gentrification. The gift, and commitment, of many people has made Metropoliz into what it looks like nowadays. Against this backdrop, even the owner ought to

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reconsider his requests for being compensated by the State because of the non-executed eviction. This situation cannot be resolved with a forcible showdown; it must be dealt with by deploying the collective intelligence of a city that can assess the salience of its places’ destiny, thus rejecting the dogma of private property as an untouchable good that trumps every right. We also demand that the Salini Corporation undertake the only possible high-profile action: giving up on property rights over these few hectares that would not surely affect their enormous estate, but that would rather leave this common to the use of those who inhabit it, of those of who have been designing, crossing and changing it completely, to those who love to lose themselves, and grow up, inside it. It is imperative that the property, and the institutions, take a step back over the top-down projects that would happen in a neighbourhood already consumed by real-estate speculation. They need to take a step back from the latest attempt to make private property trump each other fundamental right. They need to make a step back to make a step forward towards a city which has suffered because of real-estate rapaciousness, and the violence of the ongoing crises. WITHOUT METROPOLIZ, THIS AIN’T MY CITY!

Note 1. The petition to support the campaign is available at the following link: https://www.change.org/p/ministro-­della-­cultura-­senza-­metropoliz-­non­%C3%A8-­la-­mia-­citt%C3%A0

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Index1

A Abusivismo, 7, 56, 59 Activism/activist, 3, 5, 7, 10–14, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 41–51, 62, 64–68, 70–72, 81, 85, 88–94, 100, 103, 106, 108–110, 112, 114–116, 124–128, 130–133, 135–137, 139, 147–150, 152, 155, 156 social activist/activism, 90, 123, 126, 127 Anthropology, 12, 14, 42, 49, 128, 146, 154 See also Graeber, David Article 5, see National Housing Plan Assembly assembly room, 100, 107, 108 decision making, 13, 14, 30, 101, 108, 109, 153 Associazione dei Costruttori ed Edili di Roma (ACER), 62 See also Real estate Asylum seekers, 63, 84, 96n2, 147

ATER, see Lazio (Region) Austerity urbanism, 22, 64, 87, 147, 151 See also Welfare B Baraccamenti, see Shanty-towns Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM), 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 33, 42, 44–50, 63–67, 69, 72, 83, 86, 88–94, 108–110, 115, 116, 118n8, 124, 126–128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138–140, 147, 149–151, 153, 155 Di Vetta, Paolo, 65, 66, 133, 134, 138, 139 (see also Housing Squats; Metropoliz; Tsunami Tours) Precarious Metropolitan Bloc (see Squatting) See also Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPR); Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC); Housing Squats; Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Grazioli, Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70849-8

161

162 

INDEX

C Caciagli, Carlotta, see Resistance Città Meticcia, 5–8, 10–14, 88, 93, 105, 106, 124–128, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148–151, 156 See also Mestizo/Mestiza; Metropoliz Commoning Urban commons, 10–13, 19–33, 66, 106, 146, 147, 149–157 See also Commons; Enclosure; Dispossession; Organisational rites; Social reproduction; Urban commons Commons, 10–13, 19–33, 66, 106, 146, 147, 149–152 Contentious politics, 11, 13, 21, 27, 44, 51, 61, 64, 138, 146 See also Della Porta, D.; Mattoni, A.; Tilly, C.; Tarrow, S. Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC), 7, 64, 90, 116, 139 See also Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM); Housing Squats; Housing Rights Movements; Tsunami Tours Council housing, see Public housing Crisis outbreak, 150 pandemic, 5, 7, 57, 94, 150 2007 financial crisis, 5, 13, 21 D Dadusc, D., 11, 25, 26, 30, 33n1, 46, 47, 63, 84, 92, 94, 103, 127, 147, 155 Humanitarian Industrial Complex, 63, 147 Dadusc, M., 22, 84, 94 Humanitarian Industrial Complex, 22, 84

De Carli, B., 5, 13, 14, 26, 30, 32, 46, 60, 63, 66, 68, 79, 100, 125, 126, 130, 135, 137–141, 147, 153, 156 See also Urban Regeneration Della Porta, D., 8, 10, 21, 24, 31, 43, 64, 107, 109, 151, 153, 154 Dispossession, 8, 11, 21, 27, 28, 31, 33n1, 71, 94, 126, 154 E Edilizia Residenziale Pubblica (ERP), see Public housing Enclosure, 20, 28, 31, 33n1, 64 Ethics, see Ethnography Ethnography, 12, 43, 45–49, 146 activist ethnography, 41, 42, 44, 146 ethics, 146 positionality, 47 (see also Methodology) Eurhythmisation, 13, 93–95, 124, 133, 148 See also Lefebvre, Henry; Organisational Rites; Quotidian Everyday life, 13, 24, 28, 29, 43, 45, 113, 133 See also Eurhythmisation; Lefebvre, Henry; Organisational Rites; Quotidian Eviction, 5, 6, 13, 32, 50, 61–63, 66–68, 70–72, 83, 86, 88, 91, 92, 95n1, 96n2, 103, 108, 113, 124, 131, 134, 138, 148, 150, 152, 154–157 petition, 92 F Financial crisis, 62 2007–8 financial crisis, 25, 62 (see also Austerity urbanism)

 INDEX 

Foreclosures, 5, 6, 13, 62, 150 Frediani, A., 5, 13, 14, 26, 32, 46, 60, 63, 68, 79, 100, 125, 137–141, 147, 153, 156 See also Regeneration G Graeber, David, 33, 48, 146, 149, 154 H Harvey, David, 20, 27, 29, 31, 43, 46, 135, 139, 154 See also Enclosure; Urban Commons Housing Rights Movements (HRM), 44, 67 Housing squats, 8, 12, 14, 19–33, 44, 50, 59, 61, 65, 66, 70, 72, 73n6, 83, 85, 86, 89–91, 95n1, 96n2, 99–103, 105, 107, 109, 114–116, 125, 127, 132, 136, 139, 140, 146, 148, 151–157 See also Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM); Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC); Housing Rights Movements; Informality; Squatting Humanitarian Industrial Complex, 63, 84, 147 See also Dadusc, D.; Dadusc, M.; Mudu, P., Welfare I Informality, 12, 23–26, 31, 32, 51, 56, 59–63, 71, 83, 152, 155 See also Abusivismo; Baraccamenti; Housing Squats; Informal Settlements; Real-estate; Shanty-towns

163

Informal settlements, 30, 59, 60, 67, 70 See also Baraccamenti; Roma; Shanty-towns Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari (IACP), see Lazio (Region); Tor Sapienza, Public Housing L Lazio (Region), 68–70, 73n4, 156 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 11, 26, 27, 29, 32, 107, 124, 135, 138, 146 Eurhythmia, 29 rhythm(s), 29, 124 rites, 29, 107 See also Organisational rites Leontidou, Lila, 21–23, 30, 56, 146 neoliberal mediterranean cities, 22 (see also Squatting; Urban Social Movements) M Mafia Capitale, 57, 95n1 MAAM, see Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz (MAAM) Mattoni, A., 10, 21, 64, 151 See also Contentious politics Mediterranean sea, 4, 114, 115, 130 Mestizo/Mestiza, 10, 32, 106, 110, 125, 128, 130, 137, 147, 149, 155 See also Metropoliz Methodology, 12, 42, 43, 46, 48, 68, 89, 100, 109, 146 ethnography, 47 See also Ethnography, activist ethnography

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INDEX

Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz (MAAM), 45, 46, 93, 104–107, 110, 125 De Finis, Giorgio, 50, 106, 107, 128, 130, 135 Montanino, Veronica, 126, 132 Space Metropoliz, 50, 128, 149 Metropoliz Città Meticcia, 10, 13, 124, 128, 133, 134, 136, 138, 148–150, 156 Fiorucci, 3, 13, 45, 60, 72, 79 salami factory, 3, 5, 13, 42, 88, 147 Space Metropoliz, 50, 110, 128–132, 149 (see also Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz (MAAM); Mestizo/Mestiza) Metropoliz from the via Prenestina– Tor Tre, 2 Movimento per il Diritto all’Abitare, 13, 14, 30, 64, 90, 93, 116, 126, 138, 139, 154 See also Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM); Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC); Housing Rights Movements Mudu, P., 8, 22, 26, 28, 30, 32, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 80, 84, 94, 110, 114, 125, 147, 152 Humanitarian Industrial Complex, 22, 63, 84, 147 Museum, 4, 13, 48, 50, 80, 101, 104, 105, 110–112, 125, 130–136, 138, 139, 148, 152, 156 See also Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Arts, MACRO);

Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz (MAAM) N National Housing Plan, 3, 71, 72, 88, 139, 147, 150, 151 Article 5, 71, 139, 147, 150 Neoliberal, see Urbanisation Neoliberal urbanisation, 12, 23, 28, 29, 31, 146, 150 O Organisational rites, 94 assembly, 13, 101, 105, 109, 116, 153 barricade, 13, 103–107, 116, 128–132 (see also Commoning; Commons; Eurhythmisation; Social reproduction) comitato, 127 Ownership homeownership, 5, 21, 22 model, 7 (see also Urban Commons) P Pandemic, 5–7, 57, 94, 108, 125, 140, 150, 151, 156 Covid-19, 5, 14, 96n3, 108, 109, 124, 150 (see also Crisis; Social Reproduction; Welfare) Planning, 19, 21, 24, 31, 44, 56, 59, 60, 64, 71, 81–83, 89, 91, 110, 111, 132, 134, 146–148, 152, 153, 156 Positionality, see Ethnography Post-Crisis, see Urbanisation Prenestina (Street), 2, 3, 95, 95n1, 118n8, 126, 128, 156

 INDEX 

Public housing, 7, 62, 63, 81, 83 ERP (Edilizia Residenziale pubblica), 6, 62 See also Council housing Q Quotidian, see Eurhythmisation; Everyday life R Real estate, 56, 57, 70, 71, 93, 130 ACER, 6, 62 real estate urban regime, 13, 56, 138, 139, 146, 149 speculation, 7, 13, 28, 63, 130, 156, 157 See also Abusivismo; Neoliberal urbanisation Refugees, 3, 31, 63, 84, 85, 95n1, 96n2, 147, 152 Regeneration, see De Carli, B.; Frediani, A. Resistance, 30, 50, 66, 93, 101, 104, 105, 131, 136, 148, 153, 154 See also Caciagli, Carlotta; Organisational Rites Right to the City, 10–14, 19–33, 65, 133, 135, 137–141, 146, 151 See also Lefebvre, Henry; Urban Social Movements Roma Casilino 700 Camp, 86, 89, 147 Popica, 86, 91, 92 Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Arts (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, MACRO), 134–136, 138, 139 See also Metropolitan Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz (MAAM); Museum

165

S Salini, 83, 126, 131, 138, 147, 155–157 Shanty-towns, 7, 51, 59–61, 82 baraccamenti, 59, 82 See also Informality Social movements, 8, 10, 12–14, 21, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31, 63–65, 67, 94, 109, 137, 146, 152, 154 Social reproduction, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 21, 26, 28, 30, 59, 94, 100, 101, 113–118, 148, 153 See also Commoning; Organisational Rites Squatting social centres, 25, 90 squat effect, 125 squatted city, 5–8, 13, 23, 45, 51, 55–72, 138, 151 squatting for housing purposes, 7, 8, 11, 12, 25, 51 See also Housing; Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM); Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC); Metropoliz; Tsunami Tours T Tarrow, S., 10, 11, 21, 24, 26, 31, 43 Tilly, C., 10, 11, 21, 24, 26, 31, 43 Tor Sapienza, 3, 13, 60, 79–84, 88, 93, 96n4, 114, 133, 134, 139, 147, 152 Morandi, Giorgio, 3, 82, 83, 88 (see also Prenestina (street)) Tsunami Tours, 8, 62, 67, 68, 73n6, 118n8 See also Squatting; Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM); Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (CCLC)

166 

INDEX

U Upcycling, 46, 66, 153 Urban commons, see Commoning; Dispossession; Enclosure; Organisational Rites; Harvey, David Urbanisation mediterranean, 19–23 neoliberal, 11, 23, 28, 31, 146, 150 post-crisis, 23, 30, 146 See also Austerity urbanism; Real Estate

Urban regeneration, 5, 14, 46, 51, 63, 68, 79, 83, 130, 135, 137–141, 156 See also De Carli, B. Urban social movements, 13, 21, 26, 27, 30, 31, 67, 94, 146, 154 W Welfare grassroots welfare, 156 welfare state, 71, 155 (see also Article 5; Austerity urbanism; Crisis; Humanitarian Industrial Complex; Housing)