Housing Issue and Right to Housing in Palermo

Abstract

This article 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 strictly 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 poverty conditions, aggravated by the economic crisis, seem to find in the various forms of the illegal occupation, as for abandoned or unused buildings, an extreme mode to democratically get a denied right.