Residual People, Residual Spaces : Framing Roma (Social) Housing Exclusion in Light of the Housing Regime

Sammanfattning: Italy is the only country in Europe that has institutionalized a completely parallel and segregating housing system - the camp system for Roma people. These camps were created purely based on an elusive nomadic character innate to the population. Over the decades, with further migratory flows of Roma people reaching the country, conditions have only worsened, developing a system so much tethered to the Italian society that the country has even been renamed ‘Campland’. Over time, this same exclusion has been problematized, resulting in the criminalisation of Roma people, at the same time bringing to light the exceptionality of their living conditions. The first part of this study is devoted to understanding the process of discursive legitimization of said exclusion. The approach, inspired by a Foucaldian understanding, involved also grasping the dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures (Fairclough, 1992) - in this sense, it entailed situating it outside its boundaries of exceptionality and inside the broader context of wider housing exclusion affecting Italy. The aim of this thesis was thus to reconstruct both the specific condition of Roma exclusion, and the structural inequalities innate to the Italian housing regime which enabled its development. The concept of social exclusion (Levitas et al, 2007) is implemented in the study first as a way to understand the overall condition faced by Roma people, and as a way to bring forward reflections on the role of housing as one of its fundamental dimensions. The study illustrates how the implementation of the camps and its relative discourse were enabled by the constant retreat of the State from the provision of housing, and how the current institutional incapacity to solve the Roma Question is directly connected to the inability to answer the housing needs of wider segments of the population. The only proposed institutional responses, in both cases, are only ‘filler’ solutions embedded in ideas of temporality, thus failing to address the underlying problem: the structural shortage of public housing.