Barbara Saracino

Life on Social Housing Estates: Studying Housing Quality with an Ethnographic Approach

For the residents of social housing estates, their quality of life may suffer on the various dimensions of ‘housing hardship’. Several of these dimensions are structural (e.g. the quality of the dwelling and of communal spaces) or social (e.g. the relationships between housing quality and economic, family-related, psycho-social factors). Some social housing projects may be particularly exposed to the harmful effects of social fragmentation and isolation, as well as the loss of a sense of community.

Nuove e vecchie periferie popolari. Una ricerca etnografica in due aree di edilizia residenziale pubblica

Public housing suburbs are often an important element in reshaping the social and spatial geography of the city. This article is based on the study of two areas of public housing in Livorno: an historical and a more recent one. In Livorno social housing has led the urban development and the concentration of homogeneous groups of inhabitants. We report some results of an ethnographic research reconstructing how the spatial separation interacts with social relations of inhabitants of physically and socially peripheral areas. This kind of so called weak suburbs, despite possible trajectories of change, present complex patterns of problems. Attention has also been paid to the way concepts of neighborhood, suburb and community are merged in different combinations in the two areas, highlighting the «neighborhood effect», segregation, and encapsulation forms.