Market and religious places in the multicultural urban spaces as key spaces of the social integration

Conflicts in urban space are one of the main issue concerning the urban planning and its developing process nowadays. Observing and analyzing the ways in which these conflicts interfere with urban processes, give us the opportunity to ask for new methods and tools in our discipline and to look for comprehensive and multi-focus solutions. The paper underlines the stressful processes that lie ahead the places of worship and the urban markets. We select these places among others due to their ability in aggregating different people and because they are place in which the overlapping of functions and scopes between (with?) resident and migrant population are extremely visible. The asymmetries of power, covered by the rhetoric of cooperation and integration, are enduring and strong as never before, due also to the recent economic crises that increased social conflicts. This is more evident in urban space, where the demand for new integration policies clashes with the fear of diversity, the “alter” who does not come from “our place”. The research deals with these reflections and merges the planning approach with the anthropological one, trying to give new perspectives and to formulate new mixed planning practices.

The spaces of the city in which it takes place are of great interest for the researcher who wishes to deepen the links between the processes of inclusion of migrants into the host society and their particular work. The sharing of space, in the case of city markets, and the "permeability on the road" (Fioretti, 2013) in the case of ethnic shops, the organization within each bank or shop of the working hours, participation in traders associations are important parameters for the understanding of the level of sharing of the city.