Living on the road: absence of house and processes of home rebuilding
This article discuss the housing issues referring to the situation of poverty.
The aim is to point out size and features of housing from an extreme
perspective, the one of the homeless. Housing hardships may show up
under more or less serious and different ways and manners. The study
of the very extreme conditions of housing deprivation may contribute
to enlighten, by comparison, some significant features of housing experience,
to underline the inadequacy of the traditional policies and to
suggest different interpretations, emphasizing how problematic are the
conceptual schemes used to represent the housing issue. Basing itself on
the results of several researches carried on in the Turin context following
the ethnographic method, the article schematizes meanings and features
of the housing deprivation, from the point of view of the homeless. The
consequences of the lack of housing are examined under different aspects,
together with the process of coping carried out by the homeless.