Il diritto della città (a essere sé stessa)

The hypothesis on squatting for housing presented in this chapter involves the city as an additional intentional subject. Born to create political opportunities, the contemporary city has seen those spaces of opportunity progressively shrink, all in favor of an increasingly sharp alternative between the private sphere of the domestic and the mercantile sphere of the public (often privatized in this same logic). In the intentions of the city in its early days, the domestic space (the home) was managed by family affections, the public space (the marketplace) by individual interests, and the political space (the boulé) by politics itself. That is, while the domestic and public spheres could activate relational scripts (I act with you according to the love I bear you, at home; I act with you according to the interest that drives me, in the marketplace), political space (from Pericles onwards, subtracted from the parental networks of affection and the economic networks of interest) has always presented itself as the creative space of social interaction, the one least dependent on the available scripts of domestic love (the parental network) and personal interest (the economic network). In the political sphere, what counts is the ability to invent new forms of interaction, which will certainly lead to affections and interests, but which are first and foremost political relational spaces because they are urban, establishing the city as that human institution that necessarily constitutes those spaces. The housing occupations seem to open up on the city horizon as spaces institutionalized from below beyond the dimension of family affections and before the consolidation of economic interests, in a zone that is now gray because it is systematically repressed by the life of the contemporary city. That zone is spatially called neighborhood, it is not necessarily made up of people who "must like each other" (as expected among relatives). (as is expected among relatives) nor of people who "must compete for the collective good" (as is expected within purely economic relations) and is instead conceived as the original space of politics, that intermediate area in which relations are not already given but must be constituted.