The housing emergency in Palermo between rights and legality

Abstract

This paper explores the dichotomy between interests and values in the field of the right to housing for homeless people, focusing on the informal practices of reappropriation of spaces (properties owned by the Municipality of Palermo) in the case study of Palermo. The experience we are dealing with here must be addressed in a wider context of structural and latent conflicts concerning the city of Palermo, which are streactly related to the emergency housing issue. Indeed, Palermo’s housing issue is a quite complex and articulated theme, where the ineffectiveness of public policies and the increasing of hardship and poverty conditions, exacerbated by the economic crisis of 2008, seem to find in the various forms of the illegal occupation, as concerned to the abandoned or unused buildings, an extreme mode to get “democratically” a denied right.