Marginalization Through Mobility and Porosity: How Social Housing Dwellers See and Live the City

Abstract

AbstractUrban mobility in its broader meaning has become fundamental in neoliberal times, for it determines who gets what, how often, and at what cost. While motility is a component of mobility—together with connectivity and reversibility—defined by Kaufmann (2014) as a quality of the actor and/or of the dialectical relation between the self and the field of the possible, and accessibility concerns the structures necessary to take part in this possible, porosity is a quality of the territory and/or of the dialectical relation between space and society. The three of them inseparably carry the city dwellers’ possibilities of fulfilling their projects and wishes in the city territory. In order to start picturing how the society–space dialectic based on motility, accessibility, and porosity shapes daily social relations, especially where spatial justice is at stake, this study—part of the all-encompassing Action Research Project Mapping San Siro—surveyed 100 inhabitants of the Milanese neighbourhood. The resulting picture is a snapshot, a working scenario which helps bottom-up initiatives understand and focus on the most problematic, sometimes underlying aspects of marginality. While the quantitative results point to low-income inhabitants who work hard, use public transportation on an everyday basis, have few, if any, professional dreams, and feel reasonably welcome in a city they did not choose to live in, a number of qualitative results show that mobility (as a whole social phenomenon) problems can be deeper, not yet surfaced or voiced.