Addomesticare il welfare dal basso. Prospettive e paradossi delle occupazioni abitative romane

In this article, Piero Vereni asks whether some Roman housing occupations can be understood as a form of “welfare from below.” He begins from the broader crisis of Mediterranean welfare: public retrenchment has increased social vulnerability, while the growing role of private and third-sector actors has made the relationship among state, market, family, and intermediate associations much more unstable. Against that background, he uses the Roman case to explore whether housing occupations create an alternative system of care and redistribution outside both state provision and market exchange. A first major claim is historical. Vereni argues that contemporary housing occupations in Rome differ significantly from those of the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier occupations were largely driven by extreme material necessity and involved recently urbanized, often poor Italian families seeking access to public housing. More recent occupations, by contrast, often involve disused private or semi-private buildings, are more explicitly political in form, and are managed through assemblies in which activists frequently live alongside occupants rather than directing them from outside. They also reflect a changed social composition shaped by precarious labor, downward mobility, and super-diversity, with Italian activists and migrant residents sharing space in increasingly heterogeneous settings. The article’s ethnographic core shows that these occupations are not just emergency shelters. Through cases such as Rosanna, Silvia, Fatima, and women involved in Lucha y Siesta, Vereni describes occupations as spaces where people rebuild forms of domesticity, solidarity, and mutual care. These settings often blur the line between private and public, producing an extended sense of home that goes beyond the single apartment unit. In this sense, occupations can function as moral and social infrastructures, not merely as illegal responses to homelessness. They create forms of proximity, reciprocity, and shared life that the formal housing system often fails to provide. At the same time, Vereni is careful not to romanticize them. He shows that public discourse, especially in the media and in legal frameworks such as Article 5 of the 2014 housing decree, tends to collapse very different phenomena into a single criminalized image of “the occupier.” Media representations often conflate organized political occupations, mafia-style takeovers of assigned public housing, migrant poverty, and urban disorder. This simplification produces a powerful figure of alterity: the occupier as foreigner, criminal, and often woman. The legal consequence is equally blunt, since anyone occupying a building “without title” can be denied residence registration and access to utilities, which deepens social exclusion rather than resolving housing precarity. One of the article’s strongest analytical points is that both official housing policy and bottom-up occupations are shaped by moral assumptions about who deserves a house. Vereni draws on housing studies to argue that Italian housing policy has historically centered on the “normal” working family, while systematically marginalizing those who do not fit that norm, especially the homeless and Roma populations. Yet he then suggests that occupations themselves often reproduce a similar bias. Even when they challenge state and market logics, they still tend to privilege the nuclear family as the legitimate subject of housing. Those who fall outside that family model remain more easily excluded, even within supposedly alternative welfare arrangements. This leads to the article’s central paradox. Housing occupations can indeed be read as a kind of informal welfare, because they mobilize associations, solidarity networks, and practical cooperation to meet urgent needs. But the relationship between political activists and resident families is deeply contradictory. Activists may imagine occupations as experiments in a different urban order, oriented toward common goods and collective rights, while many occupants mainly want a decent, ordinary home, not a transformed city. Vereni therefore argues that these spaces are internally fractured: they combine political radicalism with aspirations to bourgeois normality, and collective experimentation with the reproduction of conventional domestic ideals. His conclusion is deliberately unsentimental. If one reads these occupations cynically, they can appear as mechanisms that help late capitalism reincorporate abandoned spaces and excluded populations at low cost, while leaving deeper structures untouched. More importantly, they may perpetuate older forms of exclusion by still privileging those who conform to the normative model of the monogamous nuclear household. So the article does not present occupations as a simple emancipatory alternative. Rather, it treats them as morally dense, politically ambivalent, and sociologically revealing sites where the limits of both formal welfare and grassroots solidarity become visible.