MIGRANT HOUSING EMERGENCY : A CRITICAL READING OF FORMAL AND INFORMAL SETTLEMENT PHENOMENA

In contemporary society, where inequalities between the 'native' population and migrants are increasingly marked, they are inevitably reflected in the places where the population is settled and lives. Immigration in Italy is now considered a structural phenomenon, yet in public, political and media discourse it is still spoken of in alarmist terms, fuelling the tendency to reject and distance all that is labelled as 'different'. Regarding reception policies, they show some critical and contradictory issues that reveal the true activity of hotspot centres. These centres are the places characterised by a high degree of invisibility, in fact they constitute shadow zones in our society located on the fringes of cities, in isolated, often degraded places and subject to military surveillance. Compared to these conditions, not even non-profit organisations dealing with migration are aware of the significance of the procedures that take place within these centres. For migrants who want to settle in the territory, access to society from border and administrative detention centres is very often hindered by the public administration, which in fact fuels both regulatory and physical immobility. The procedures and regulations implemented in these so-called 'border' areas are therefore generally perceived as technical and politically neutral issues, but in reality they are easily associated with actions aimed at exclusion. For more than twenty years, the migration phenomenon in Italy has undergone ever-increasing incremental changes. Moreover, the continuous and sudden changes in national migration policies have not helped the ever-increasing demand for reception places. On the entire national territory, the necessary measures to identify suitable places to detain asylum seekers have not yet been put in place; in fact, hotspots and CAS (extraordinary reception centres) have so far been used as informal detention places. If all this is valid for regular migrants, a further and much more serious scenario of marginality opens for 'irregular' migrants considered as 'surplus', who are left alone to face the ongoing crisis and whose chances of integration or reintegration are non-existent. In these unstable basic conditions, informal settlements have also been transformed and relocated in contexts increasingly outside the city, taking forms that now shape the new paradigm of social exclusion. In the light of these informal issues, the contribution addresses the complex socio-spatial phenomenon of migrant informal settlements in out-of-town contexts, which is particularly related to planning and opens new future challenges for the discipline.