Chiara Cacciotti, Università “La Sapienza” di Roma
ABSTRACT
Starting from an ethnographic fieldwork project conducted within a squat in Rome (Santa Croce/Spin Time
Labs), this paper aims to investigate the effects on the lives of squatters in a particular condition of housing
liminality that I here define as ‘stable precarity’, due to the more systemic chronicization of housing emergency
at a city level. The paper, therefore, takes a two-fold approach: on the one hand, it interprets some of the daily
life experiences in the building and the moral economy of the squatter’s community; on the other, it shows the
attempts of squatters and activists of the political movement in Rome that squatted the building (Action) to
move on from their liminal condition, specifically by transitioning from the more traditional political
instruments of the struggle over housing in Rome to an informal practice of urban regeneration that seeks to
open the building to the surrounding neighborhood, with the aim of making the squat a common good for
public use.
KEYWORDS
Precarity, housing emergency, moral economy, squatting, urban social movements.
