Living the liminal life: informalities in a utopian housing project

Abstract

This article presents ethnographic research carried out in Rome’s Corviale public housing project: a 1-km-long building where squatting and unauthorised construction are widespread, most notably along the entire fourth floor. It first outlines the institutional background to these informalities, demonstrating that they have not emerged outside or in opposition to the state, but are the outcome of regulatory ambiguities determined by bureaucratic (in)actions over three decades and are tightly connected to the management of Rome’s housing sector more broadly. It then explores how informalities are organised and experienced by residents; identifying social relations, power dynamics, and how squatters position their practices normatively in relation to institutional neglect and the local activities of semi-organised criminals. Beyond adding to debates on housing informalities in the global North, the analysis makes a wider theoretical contribution, focusing on the centrality of time as a defining feature of informal housing practices. It highlights how institutionally imposed temporalities generate conditions of protracted liminality, constraining residents’ means and methods of survival but also producing the foundations for claims-making and negotiations to modify regulatory practices from ‘below’. Lastly, it analyses a recent policy initiative to formalise the fourth floor, exploring its ability to uproot the multidimensional informalities that have crystallised over time.