Towards Social Housing Policies That Emancipate Instead of Segregating

Milan is the richest and most international city in Italy and the third in the EU, but not all of its inhabitants take advantage of these growing opportunities: tenants of the more than 60,000 publicly owned homes, concentrated in social housing neighborhoods, are more often victims of school dropout, unemployment, health fragility, and ethnic conflicts. Public housing is no longer an instrument of social emancipation, but often becomes an instrument of segregation, concentrating and reproducing critical issues and social inequalities.

Raffaella Saporito of SDA Bocconi has been awarded a grant from Fondazione Cariplo for the project ExCoP: Exploring and Addressing Unintentional Inequality Consequences of Public Housing, which aims to map the dimensions of inequality in Milan's public housing neighborhoods, assess the consistency between housing need criteria for access to public housing established at the regional level and the actual housing needs, develop a measurable indicators to assess how much need is covered by public housing, and investigate whether different service management strategies implemented by public housing providers can foster the social inclusion of beneficiaries.

"Reforms in public housing management over the past two decades have prioritized ensuring the economic sustainability of this service, and have often resulted in controversial gentrification practices, with uncertain outcomes even on economic terms," Saporito says. "However, some experimental practices are opening up a new way to combine the economic and social sustainability of social housing, integrating asset management with the logic of public service designed for the needs of an increasingly complex user base."

The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano and will take a multidisciplinary approach, combining public management and urban planning.

According to Saporito, the project "will not only improve the current representation of the actual quality of life in Milan, providing evidence on the marginality of a large segment of the population that does not reap the benefits of development and, indeed, is exposed to possible further forms of inequality, but aims to provide solutions and tools for policy making and public management."