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Le secteur du logement constitue une entree pertinente pour comprendre le contexte actuel de diffusion de l’austerite. C’est particulierement vrai pour les pays du sud de l’Europe et notamment l’Italie, qui conservent des caracteristiques specifiques en matiere de logement et de welfare. Cet article explore les nouveaux usages de la propriete qui se developpent pour faire face a l’austerite, et notamment la diffusion des locations de courte duree sur les plateformes en ligne (Airbnb et similaires). Apres un cadrage sur les specificites de la ville de Turin, notre cas d’etude, on se focalisera sur le quartier populaire de Aurora, au Nord du centre-ville, et sur la geographie locale des locations temporaires. Il s’agira d’etudier les diverses formes de rente urbaine qui s’elaborent dans les pratiques quotidiennes en contexte d’austerite, en particulier au sein des classes moyennes. L’analyse des entretiens permet d’interpreter ces comportements comme des strategies de contournement du quotidien de la crise. La conclusion porte sur les implications a long terme de ces pratiques, en particulier pour ce qui concerne la structure urbaine et la reproduction des inegalites sociales, tout en suggerant de nouvelles pistes de recherche.

There is a growing scholarly consensus over the transformation of the urban public place from a challenging, conflicting and negotiated one to a festive and convivial place. Decades of gentrification, renewals and city branding have fostered an urban form made of well-regulated and controlled islands of publicness in a sea of privatopias. Beyond structural forces, urban policies and the action of households and citizens, a key role has been played by global architecture and design. With this chapter, we will address this issue looking precisely at the practices of conceiving and designing the public places by urban designers. How the ideals of a cosmopolis, urban and democratic, is put in place by professionals dealing with neoliberal constraints, post-democratic states and refined middle-class users? What is the contemporary meaning of cosmopolitanism, when related to the urban core? Cosmopolitanism for whom, under which conditions? The chapter will provide a case-study detailed analysis of the perspective of urban designers towards projects and urbanism, with a specific attention to public space design.

Studies of urban segregation have proliferated since the 1990s, spurred by debate on the impact of globalization on the socio-spatial structure of cities. Some studies have found segregation to increase in post-Fordist cities, either taking the form of socio-spatial ‘dualization’ (SASSEN, 1991) or a ‘fragmentation’ affecting all social categories that goes so far as to threaten the very existence of the city as a political community (SANTOS, 1990; MARCUSE and VAN KEMPEN, 1999; SOJA, 2000; BEN...

Depuis les annees 1990, les etudes sur la segregation urbaine se sont multipliees, relancees par le debat autour de l’impact de la globalisation sur la structure socio-spatiale des villes. Certaines etudes ont conclu a une augmentation de la segregation dans les villes post-fordistes, que cette derniere prenne la forme d’une « dualisation » socio-spatiale (SASSEN, 1991), ou d’une « fragmentation » touchant toutes les categories sociales au point de menacer l’existence meme de la ville comme c...

On the night of 14 June 2017, a 24-storey skyscraper in North Kensington, London, caught fire, leaving 71 people dead and hundreds homeless. Grenfell Tower was a public housing block, built in the early 1970s in Brutalist style, which underwent a controversial refurbishment in 2016. This tragedy in one of the richest areas of one of the richest cities on earth points to a contemporary paradox: the need for more affordable housing is far from being behind us and, indeed, is returning to the fore as a social problem. Our starting point is that housing policies in most European societies have gradually reduced their scope and, breaking with the post-war tradition of cross-class mass housing, are now limited to supporting the more vulnerable households. One of the many effects of this public policy transformation is that public intervention is now conceived as marginal, leaving the market as the main vehicle for service provision (housing, in this case). A second effect can be seen in public facility maintenance: cost cutting has trumped improvements. The Grenfell Tower fire draws attention to several aspects. Here, we will focus on three: the rise of a homeowners’ society, the link between social inequalities and housing, and the financialization of housing. The article suggests the need for a radical shift in housing policies, tackling the nexus between inequality reproduction, extraction mechanisms, and living conditions.

In Italy, as in other southern European countries, both the notions of diversity and multiculturalism have only recently come into use. In this article, we show how over the last 30 years two Italian cities, Turin and Naples have been transformed and reshaped by patterns of mobility and informal commerce that we have referred to as ‘shadow circuits’. Shadow circuits work through the connection of distant places in Europe and the Mediterranean and contribute to the understanding of complex, stratified societies, mobile societies in particular. A mobile ethnography perspective has been carried during fieldwork and is discussed in length in this article. The examples of Turin and Naples are particularly useful because, unlike many other Italian cities, both have developed pro-multiculturalism and pro-diversity policies in the last two decades. This makes them particularly interesting case studies for addressing the gap between diversity as a policy and diversity as a social fact.