Abitare la crisi nella periferia contemporanea: attese, occupazioni e idee di futuro ai margini della città di Milano

Abstract

In the Italian context, buying a house is considered one of the most important social, economic, and cultural investment in people’s lives. Local, regional and national policies tend to transmit and reinforce the idea that house represents a source of economic and psychological stability and it offers the possibility to project a "good future". Nevertheless, the recent economic crisis has not only brought down the housing market, but also made it more difficult to be able to support the economic weight of rent. The article, through the reconstruction of lives and working stories of some Milanese peripheral inhabitants, shows, on the one hand, the creativity in the production of new tactics to housing access; on the other, it shows the sense of nostalgia of the marginal inhabitants of the city. We identified in "wait" a useful key to understanding the various biographies and experiences analyzed. Moreover, we point out that "wait" in its meanings of pause, suspension and break, but also of expectation, hope and prospect, represents a recurring element that gives a structural dimension to the risk of dispersion emerging from biographical narratives. The article, through ethnographic analysis, shows possible paths that people create from the moment they find themselves without a home to when they critically reflect on their experiences. The aim of our analysis is to show how wait produces a structured and structuring feature into recent Italian housing policies and how it creates imaginaries and strategies in the context of the Milanese outskirts.