Rethoric of housing and social construction of housing policy
The reappearance of the housing question in the public debate in Italy
invites various questions about the categories adopted and their effectiveness
in dealing with the new terms of the question. Everywhere in Europe
the reappearance of new forms of housing deprivation from the ’70s has
deeply changed the housing question and this makes even more evident
the limitations of the traditional structure of social housing policies. In all
countries, the selection of target populations has been weakened by considerable
elements of irrationality and great limitations in terms of social
adequacy: redistributive inadequacy and scarce effectiveness as regards
some components of the population in need. The most remarkable has
been the exclusion of poor and marginal groups of population from the
benefits of housing social policy. The crisis of housing policy in the ’79s
and ’80s opened a new space for making housing policy more «social».
The coming of new practices, in contradiction with many traditional policy
notions, offered new opportunities to get over the social limitations of
policies and to improve their consistency with the needs and experience
of dwellers. In this perspective the debate regained an idea which had a
long tradition in the critical thinking on housing: that – further than its
physicality and «object» nature – «housing» is act – meaning, action, relationship.
The article argues that these principles – whose influence on
policies so far has been very scarce – can work as a real counter-model
even to-day and that the current risk of a new «differentialism» in housing
urges reconsideration of their potentiality for housing policies.