Living in Milan. Housing Policies, Austerity, and Urban Regeneration

After a long absence from national political debate, the housing issue has forcefully returned following the protracted economic crisis of the past decade. In general, the significant impoverishment of housing policies in the wake of welfare restructuring decisions has deeply impacted the geography of social inequality. Moreover, the renewed questioning of the role of the State as a provider of universal social protection has contributed to the re-emergence of a source of insecurity that was thought to have been overcome. The consequences of the housing crisis thus fuel a true challenge for the citizenship, with cases of urban segmentation and polarisation that have recently intensified, triggering the disarticulation of the inclusive fabric of Italian cities and dramatically reminding us that the housing issue always holds a central role in the construction of society. The present study analyses the housing issue in Milan in order to account both for the ways in which national austerity policies and the specific welfare model have influenced possible answers to such a crisis and for the specific local initiatives that have been or are being experimented (e.g. social housing, cohousing, urban regeneration). The inquiry confirms the hypothesis of the third sector’s leading role in the management of new social risks in this southern European metropolis, along with all of the questions that such a role entails in terms of a possible emphasis on the local territorial imbalances that could stem from it. The study is mainly based on qualitative inquiry (participant observation, non-structured interviews, discourse and representation analyses). In this manner, it was possible to inquire into the spatial outcomes of housing and the ways in which housing, in turn, is influenced by ongoing territorial contexts and urban processes.