The production of informal space
The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing
Category: Articles in English
Juggling the formal and the informal
This paper focuses on the informal occupation of public housing in Naples, analysing a specific case of illegal access which is an alternative to ‘ordinary squatting’
Migrants, Religion and Residential Segregation
This article investigates residential segregation at the intraurban level of migrants in Rome and Milan, considering religion as a point of reference
The Dark Side of Urban Informality in the Global North
This article deals with housing illegality/informality in Italy, where it represents an established aspect of urban development. It presents a case study focused on Desio, a town close to Milan in northern Italy. Here housing illegality occurs by virtue of the well‐established presence of a mafia‐type criminal organization (the ‘Ndrangheta).
Inverse Planning in the Cracks of Formal Land Use Regulation
This paper focuses on a case of ‘non-public planning’ in an informal neighbourhood of Maputo, Mozambique. Here, several residents undertook some planning duties (e.g. drawing up a detailed plan) in order to regularise their informal dwellings in lieu of the Municipality, due to its inertia. This was an attempt to …
The illicit side of urban development: Corruption and organised crime in the field of urban planning
The paper deals with issues of corruption in the planning domain. It centres on thorough analysis of the case of Desio (Milan, Italy), where a recent judicial inquiry discovered several instances of corruption related to the drafting of the local master plan, in an environment characterised by the rooted presence …
Expatriates and the city: The spatialities of the high-skilled migrants’ transnational living in Moscow
The paper focuses on residential strategies and patterns of highly skilled migrants from Western countries in Moscow. During recent decades, transnational migration of highly skilled workers has grown and diversified; as a consequence, residential practices and socio-spatial behaviour of this kind of migrants (the so-called ‘expatriates’) in the destination city diversified as …
The transfer of development rights in the midst of the economic crisis
The paper deals with the transfer of development rights (TDR) in Italy. It presents a comparative analysis of the TDR programs implemented in the twelve capital cities of the Lombardy region in the past decade. After introducing the international debate on TDR and the distinctive features of the transfer of …
Discrete emergence of neoliberal policies on public space
This article investigates the birth and evolution of a Business Improvement District (BID) in Talimhane, Istanbul, which is the first case of use of this instrument of neoliberal governance in the Turkish city. The distinctive nature of the Talimhane BID consists in the fact that it has been developed through …
Formal Institutions and the Production of Informal Urban Spaces
The paper provides an introductory theoretical framework for this special issue. Firstly, the main weaknesses of the traditional ‘geography of informality’ are analyzed, including its tendency to focus on urban poverty in the ‘Global South’, to privilege its economic causes, and to treat the phenomenon in terms of clear-cut dichotomies. …