Pensare l'Informale. Note critiche su auto-costruzione e social housing (Imagining the In-formal. A critique on self-construction and social housing)

Through a deconstructive perspective, characteristic of anthropological disciplines, I intend to shine some critical notes about the contemporary intersection between social housing and public politics relating to practices of self building. The self help building, intended as possible resolution of national complex and structural housing crisis, is promoted by institutions as economically convenient, participated by the future residents and socializing. Nevertheless, the housing self-production has caused hitherto also contrastive public discourses that have identified self building as an act characterized by illegality (abusiveness), underdevelopment (slum) and social insecurity (absence of professionality and control). On one side, therefore, an institutional form of this technique is normed, authorized and implemented by the public sphere; on the other, an informal mode, reversed, abusive and illegal is generally repressed. I intend to problematize the complex public narrative that identify the practices and the politics of self help building as convenient, inclusive and participated and, at the same time, criminalize the housing informality, often based on spatial self-production, considering that as illegal praxis.