Inside the social “dark matter”

Welfare State withdrawal and depoliticisation of society coexist with a proliferation of grassroots initiatives and civic activation in marginalised urban contexts. This paper investigates this social ‘dark matter’: civic participation organised relationally, yet largely invisible to registers. Across four large Italian cities, we relate Third Sector Entity (ETS) density to ISTAT’s composite distress index (IDISE): in Milan and Turin, density falls sharply as distress rises; the association is weaker in Naples, and almost flat in Rome. This deviant signal is consistent with a hypothesised formal-to-informal translation of participation. To test this, we turn to Rome and develop ‘new maps’ of civic participation, mapping grassroots initiatives and the inter-organisational networks connecting them. These relational maps reveal a markedly different configuration from that of registered organisations: civic infrastructures emerge, concentrated in marginal areas, combining formality with informality and conflict with collaboration. This hybridity is politically significant only insofar as it resists reduction to mere subsidiarity or destitute informality; whether it amounts to a self-produced territorial democracy remains an open, analytically demanding question. We therefore propose a replicable protocol to evaluate these civic infrastructures’ inclusiveness and transformative capacity, and discuss implications for planning policies capable of supporting them without absorbing or standardising their forms of action.