The paper addresses the ways in which the negative social connotation associated with a majority of foreigners in an Italian primary school (Carlo Pisacane, Rome) was first ‘ethnicized’ in numerical terms, and subsequently politically transformed into an issue of national identity. The purpose of this paper is then to show Pisacane’s attempts to transform itself from a school of immigrants into a cosmopolitan space and, to some extent, how it is unintentionally transforming itself into a cosmopolitan enclave. The proposal is therefore to rethink to Pisacane as a cosmopolitan enclave within which different forms of everyday cosmopolitanisms have the opportunity to grow and develop, together with some paradoxes and unintentional practices of exclusion. In the attempt to eradicate the opposition between being cosmopolitan and being parochial, the suggestion is to rethink to cosmopolitanism no longer as a typical phenomenon of Western “rootless” elites but rather as situated.

No abstract

This paper explores the long-standing relationship in Rome between socio-cultural diversity and the temporary nature of low-income housing solutions. I argue that that this phenomenon began long before recent neoliberal trends and the global post-2008 crisis, and instead emerged from the gradual development of a moral and racialized understanding of housing as a ‘social award’. This has created a specific social category known as ‘housing otherness’, which includes migrants and Italian squatters who are experiencing severe housing distress. This exclusionary approach towards the most ‘diverse’ sections of the population in Rome can be traced back to the inception of public housing in Italy during the 1920s. The paper aims to provide a historical account of this process and demonstrate how it is based on the limited availability of residency and settling as a commodity. I also introduce the grassroots Roman housing rights movements and highlights their efforts to challenge the notion that residency and settling should be seen as something that is earned or deserved rather than as basic human rights.