The many shades of grey in urban governance
This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference.
The production of informal space
The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing
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
Immigrants, mosques and religious pluralism
This chapter examines the immigrant influx from a thematic viewpoint – namely, the placement and construction of buildings of a religious nature – and from the specific geographical viewpoint of Italy.
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 multifaceted politics of informality in Jerusalem
The chapter investigates the multifaceted politics of housing informality in Jerusalem arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the city. It stresses the concomitant existence of different kinds of informality in different areas of the city: Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem lying on the Israeli (western) side of the ‘security barrier’, …
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 …