The Resources of Multi-Ethnic Environments in Italy: Planning in the “Cities of Difference”

Abstract

Immigration is a “hot issue” in many European countries and the cities represent the main gateway for the majority of the newcomers. From the spatial dynamics and policies’ point of view, the debate on urban space and immigration has been dominated by the topic of the problematic aspects of the newcomers’ concentration in specific neighborhoods. In this direction, space policies have always been characterized by a dominant approach aimed at mitigating forms of concentration, breaking up the immigrants settlements’ territorialities, or dispersing the newcomers groups across the urban territory. In the last twenty years these forms of intervention have mainly resulted in the promotion of “social mixing” initiatives that this paper puts under critical observation. In this direction, a main objective is considering some core concepts and narratives that underpin analysis and forms of intervention in multi-ethnic neighborhoods as “assumptions” that, far to be proofed, play a large part in conditioning the public debate and policy agendas on this issue, but also in orientating the researchers’ ways of seeing. This objective implies a reframing of the descriptions and of the forms of intervention in multi-ethnic settlements, considering the “concentration/segregation” issue as a powerful “assumption” that is at once both descriptive and prescriptive, leading to “mixing” policies as an embedded answer to descriptions based on concentration. Italian multi-ethnic settlements are “deeply” multi-ethnic, as people from different countries live in these areas, including the prevailing presence of Italian citizens. They are not ethnic enclaves, but “cities of difference” in the multicultural sense given by Fincher and Jacobs (1998). Despite these peculiarities, innovative ways of intervention have not be developed, and planning in multi-ethnic contexts works with the same means and rationalities seen in other countries where the concentration phenomena are more significant. Based on the most recent findings of some “out of the mainstream” literature aimed at describing multi-ethnic settlements in an innovative way, as well as on some case-studies, the paper aims at pointing out how much the peculiarities of the Italian environments may be useful to consider them as “urban labs” to discover the “resources” of multi-ethnic environments, and to develop new forms of research and action: challenging existing descriptions of multi-ethnic settlements, discussing innovative methodologies and intellectual approaches to these neighborhoods, and detecting alternative modes of interventions in such urban environments with a particular attention to the role – provider, enabler, conflicts’ mediator, ruler – that the public hand may play in the face of the welfare restructuring.