Rethinking Public Housing Through Squatting. The Case of Housing Rights Movements in Rome

This article analyses the contribution of housing squats and Housing Rights Movements (HRMs) in Rome in envisioning a new model of public estates that could respond to the surge and complexification of the post-2008 housing crisis. The first part of the article fleshes out the theoretical and methodological framework for investigating the peculiarities of housing squats in comparison to other forms of housing informality and urban squatting. In the second part, it analyses the development and composition of housing struggles since the post-Second World War. It then details the new demographics of the housing crisis in Rome to provide a framework for the innovation in the HRMs' confrontational politics and demands towards a more comprehensive notion of the 'right to the city'. Their emphasis upon the role of city developers and real estate agents, and the opposition towards the exclusionary nature of contemporary social welfare, have in fact redirected squatting actions towards different urban vacancies that are repurposed for habitation. I conclude by suggesting that these practices prefigure a new model of public housing estates that is economically, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive, whereby it pivots around use value and commoning

Housing Squats in the Pandemic: Viale delle Province 198

The twin buildings located in Viale delle Province 198 used to be the administrative headquarters of the National Institute of Social Protection (INPS) in Rome, then left vacant since the acquisition by the real estate fund, Investire SGR. It was squatted in 2012 by hundreds of families in a condition of housing vulnerability with the political and logistical support of the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, that are part of the local Housing Rights Movements. Given its layout and central location, Viale delle Province 198 has become a hub of autonomous infrastructures of the welfare and contentious politics from below, with a strong focus on healthcare. This vocation has been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, whose unforeseen challenges compounded pre-existing patterns of exclusion. On the one hand, the activists, inhabitants and local social workers have engaged to consolidate the social innovations that have been devised since the onset of the pandemic. On the other hand, they and their solidarity networks are coalescing to cope with the repercussion of the eviction procedure that started during the summer 2022, and that would cause the dissolution of the autonomous infrastructures they have generated

A New ELISA Using the ANANAS Technology Showing High Sensitivity to diagnose the Bovine Rhinotracheitis from Individual Sera to Pooled Milk

Diagnostic tests for veterinary surveillance programs should be efficient, easy to use and, possibly, economical. In this context, classic Enzyme linked ImmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA) remains the most common analytical platform employed for serological analyses. The analysis of pooled samples instead of individual ones is a common procedure that permits to certify, with one single test, entire herds as "disease-free". However, diagnostic tests for pooled samples need to be particularly sensitive, especially when the levels of disease markers are low, as in the case of anti-BoHV1 antibodies in milk as markers of Infectious Bovine Rhinotracheitis (IBR) disease. The avidin-nucleic-acid-nanoassembly (ANANAS) is a novel kind of signal amplification platform for immunodiagnostics based on colloidal poly-avidin nanoparticles that, using model analytes, was shown to strongly increase ELISA test performance as compared to monomeric avidin. Here, for the first time, we applied the ANANAS reagent integration in a real diagnostic context. The monoclonal 1G10 anti-bovine IgG1 antibody was biotinylated and integrated with the ANANAS reagents for indirect IBR diagnosis from pooled milk mimicking tank samples from herds with IBR prevalence between 1 to 8%. The sensitivity and specificity of the ANANAS integrated method was compared to that of a classic test based on the same 1G10 antibody directly linked to horseradish peroxidase, and a commercial IDEXX kit recently introduced in the market. ANANAS integration increased by 5-fold the sensitivity of the 1G10 mAb-based conventional ELISA without loosing specificity. When compared to the commercial kit, the 1G10-ANANAS integrated method was capable to detect the presence of anti-BHV1 antibodies from bulk milk of gE antibody positive animals with 2-fold higher sensitivity and similar specificity. The results demonstrate the potentials of this new amplification technology, which permits improving current classic ELISA sensitivity limits without the need for new hardware investments

Rethinking Public Housing Through Squatting. The Case of Housing Rights Movements in Rome

This article analyses the contribution of housing squats and Housing Rights Movements (HRMs) in Rome in envisioning a new model of public estates that could respond to the surge and complexification of the post-2008 housing crisis. The first part of the article fleshes out the theoretical and methodological framework for investigating the peculiarities of housing squats in comparison to other forms of housing informality and urban squatting. In the second part, it analyses the development and composition of housing struggles since the post-Second World War. It then details the new demographics of the housing crisis in Rome to provide a framework for the innovation in the HRMs' confrontational politics and demands towards a more comprehensive notion of the 'right to the city'. Their emphasis upon the role of city developers and real estate agents, and the opposition towards the exclusionary nature of contemporary social welfare, have in fact redirected squatting actions towards different urban vacancies that are repurposed for habitation. I conclude by suggesting that these practices prefigure a new model of public housing estates that is economically, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive, whereby it pivots around use value and commoning.<br /

Housing Squats in the Pandemic: Viale delle Province 198

The twin buildings located in Viale delle Province 198 used to be the administrative headquarters of the National Institute of Social Protection (INPS) in Rome, then left vacant since the acquisition by the real estate fund, Investire SGR. It was squatted in 2012 by hundreds of families in a condition of housing vulnerability with the political and logistical support of the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, that are part of the local Housing Rights Movements. Given its layout and central location, Viale delle Province 198 has become a hub of autonomous infrastructures of the welfare and contentious politics from below, with a strong focus on healthcare. This vocation has been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, whose unforeseen challenges compounded pre-existing patterns of exclusion. On the one hand, the activists, inhabitants and local social workers have engaged to consolidate the social innovations that have been devised since the onset of the pandemic. On the other hand, they and their solidarity networks are coalescing to cope with the repercussion of the eviction procedure that started during the summer 2022, and that would cause the dissolution of the autonomous infrastructures they have generated.<br /

The ‘right to the city’ in the post-welfare metropolis. Community building, autonomous infrastructures and urban commons in Rome’s self-organised housing squats.

In the city of Rome, the housing crisis has reached emergency proportions as part of an interrelated and ongoing crisis of social reproduction intrinsic to the process of neoliberal restructuring in the prolonged aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Part of this crisis are the estimated that 10,000 people are currently living inside more than 100 previously empty buildings, of both private and public ownership, that have been occupied and self-renovated by the squatters as an autonomous response towards their condition of severe housing deprivation. These numbers present a continuum with the connotation of Rome as a self-made city in which Housing Rights Movements have historically represented a catalyser for thriving urban struggles. This thesis contends that nowadays housing squats represent spaces where the 'right to the city' is re-appropriated through the autonomous regeneration of unused urban ecologies, the commoning of social reproduction, and the crafting of urban commons. It aims at contributing to the field of studies of Critical Organisation Studies, Urban Studies and Urban Geography concerned with urban squatting and the organisational forms adopted by grassroots urban movements within the current phase of post-crisis, post-welfare neoliberal restructuring. The analysis is structured around the interviews, fieldnotes and visual materials collected during a one-year long activist-ethnography carried out inside two housing squats affiliated with the Movement Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, Tiburtina 770 and Metropoliz. Chapter 1 contextualises squatting for housing purposes within a broader crisis of social reproduction in relation to the notion of 'right to the city'. Chapter 2 describes the epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges intrinsic to the chosen activist-ethnographic approach for its subjective orientation and scope. Chapter 3 contextualises the historical, geographical and legislative framework pertaining squatting within which the Movements operate. Chapter 4 describes the social composition of the squatters and the initial process of community-building. Chapter 5 recounts the making of the squats into autonomous infrastructures where producing manifold urban commons. Chapter 6 discusses the different strategies of local activism and networking implemented by the squatters. Chapter 7 narrates the role of squatters as part of the Housing Rights Movements for contending 'right to the city', problematising it in relation to the forms of activism and organisation they configure

“Border as method” : an archive about tumultuous borderscapes.

The long-standing collaboration between Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson finds in Border as Method, or, the multiplication of labor (Mezzadra &amp; Neilson, 2013) a turning point, whereas it constitutes an encyclopedic anthology of their eclectic approach to the substance of borders and borderscapes in our conflicted contemporariness. Their capability of deconstructing the reification of the borders through multiple theoretical standpoints indeed ranges from ?migrations? studies to what they call ?the operations of capital? (especially extraction, logistics, and finance), from social movements to the study of the Common

Toward a fine-grained understanding of informality: Subjective meanings, perceptions, and expectations in informal housing trajectories

This article focuses on the role of subjective meanings in the production of informal housing. It argues that, although individual and family meanings, aspirations, perceptions, and expectations have usually been overlooked in studies on urban informality, their analysis is fundamental for a sophisticated understanding of the genesis, features, and developing trajectories of informal housing. To this end, the article investigates the informalization process of temporary self-promoted housing units (the so-called casette, i.e. “little houses”) built in the aftermath of the 2009 earthquake in the city of L’Aquila, Italy. Although it is exceptional, the phenomenon of the casette illuminates several traits of other informal housing practices. Thus, it offers two interrelated conceptual insights for a deeper, fine-grained understanding of the varied ontologies of housing informality. First, it illustrates the concurrence of simultaneous drivers, differing in nature (e.g. subjective and objective, structural and agency-related, micro and macro) at the root of the production of informal space, where a key role is also played by inhabitants’ meanings, aspirations, perceptions, and expectations. Second, it shows that informality is not a fixed and unambiguous state. On the contrary, it is a field traversed by intertwined forces in a perpetual state of tension, so that a housing unit can move through different shades of (il)legality entailing varied combinations of subjective and objective drivers