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Formal and Informal Housing in Today’s City

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The Endless Reconstruction and Modern Disasters

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Abstract

This chapter discusses how the construction of urban public and private space in the city of Messina followed lines of intervention that, from post-earthquake reconstruction onwards, relegated marginalized subjects to specific areas of the city, and housed them in specific types of accommodation in order to make the most of ground rent, favor speculative building by large landowners and build patronage networks. This is a process of marginalization that resulted from public policies, but, in common discourse, it is embodied in the unacceptable formula of a “shanty culture”. Against such wisdom, and by means of in-depth interviews, the study reveals how, in the face of this sort of symbolic violence, such marginalized population puts into practice social mobility strategies, geared toward owning their own home and reproducing middle-class lifestyles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some of these areas, especially those that were encompassed by the city center, which in the past were considered marginal for being too internal, are today perceived as central (Di Leo 1985, p. 46), while other areas, such as the southern neighborhoods of the Zona Sud, continue to be perceived as peripheral in spite of the fact that they are between five and eight kilometers from the city center.

  2. 2.

    Usually, the main perpendicular axes that connect the hills and the sea retain the name of the stream over which they were built. The most important are Torrente San Filippo, Torrente Gazzi (South), Torrente Zaera (Center). But in this case, today’s term for that neighborhood, Viale Europa, has prevailed; Torrente Annunziata and Torrente Giostra (North).

  3. 3.

    The organized struggles of these communities in places of work and in the matter of housing have been discussed in Farinella and Irrera (2014) and Saitta (2018).

  4. 4.

    On this paradigmatic disaster in contemporary Italy, on its management and the effects in terms of speculation, corruption, political instrumentality, and demagogy, see v. Özerdem and Rufini (2013); Contreras et al. (2017).

  5. 5.

    What was taking place in Messina during the 1920s was also happening elsewhere, for example, in Rome and Milan. During the 1920s, the main political problem for Fascism was, in fact, the “absolute necessity of including building property in the new order of national economic forces” (Bortolotti 1978, p. 53)—even though this meant stifling the social base represented by the small- and medium-sized property owners who had supported the rise of Fascism in favor of larger building companies, which were now given new opportunities for integrating rent and profit (Bortolotti 1978, p. 67). If in cities such as Rome, where there had been no earthquake, the inner areas were demolished and “gutted” (sventrate is the word Fascism had used), in places that had been almost destroyed, such as the area of the Strait, where nature had done most of the work, there was all the more reason to move forward using the same criteria. Likewise, if, like in Rome, those working-class suburbs called borgate were built to contain the homeless masses that had been produced artificially by the national government (Ferrarotti 1970), in Messina, the same authorities were building low-income housing and neighborhoods for people evicted by natural events.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento Scipog, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Domenica Farinella

  2. Dipartimento Cospecs, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Pietro Saitta

Authors
  1. Domenica Farinella
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  2. Pietro Saitta
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Farinella, D., Saitta, P. (2019). Formal and Informal Housing in Today’s City. In: The Endless Reconstruction and Modern Disasters. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19361-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19361-4_6

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