Multicultural planning e integrazione: i mercati multietnici come nuove eterotopie dell'insorgenza

My PhD thesis focuses on the role urban planning can play in the management of diversity in the city. In European countries, migration policies have failed to create a common and shared space to deal with the numerous questions raised by the so called “migration crisis” creating informal, legal, passive or active boundaries for foreigners. However, even when absent at the level of government we can nevertheless observe informal practices that are put in place by migrants to give an answer to their immediate needs and that can be used as a magnifying glass of more deeply rooted sociopolitical needs. I argue that these dynamics can be observed in same particular space as multiethnic markets in the city where informal practices could be looked as clues in order to suggest new policies. Urban planning has a crucial role to play in these policies, enhancing the creation of new forms of ‘living the city’ and a renewed form of urban citizenship can represent a pivotal point to commit urban planning in the quest for spatial and social justice (Sandercook, 1996). Notions of formal citizenship have changed within the context of contemporary massive urban migration (Penninx et al., 2004).The search for new models of integration has been the priority of States concerned by both the problem of the second generation without legal rights, and new incoming groups. Better integration of migrant groups and guarantees of security have been the leitmotiv in the European political discourses in this search. However, the gap between the policies defined at the national level and the implemented policies on the ground increased, because local experiences do not resonate with the abstract frame of the national policy directives. This gap leads to a further growing apart of formal and informal practices of citizenship. Usually these conflicts show themselves in sensitive urban space like squares, ethnic streets or suburbs. However, before their final outbreaks, these conflicts are informal and can be observed in shared and everyday urban space as streets, squares and markets. I suggest that these practices are insurgent (Holston,1996) that means they are a direct response to some gap into the management policies of the multicultural issue in the market and as a consequence in the city. These practices show the weakness or the failures of policies when national or local governments decided to rationalize, restrict and underestimate the relevant role of the space in the integration policies. In fact, the neglected part of the policies is the power of diversion (Olivier de Sardan, 2008) that those subjected to certain policies exert as an option strategy. This means that people can sometimes act in open contrast with policies that seemingly stimulate integration while they increase cultural, economic or political segregation. These dynamics reveal some problems entangled in the national policies that can be listed as follows: – A misunderstanding of the importance of cultural differences, and of the fact that they are not fixed in a time or in a space but adjustable, flexible and dynamic; – Misinterpretation of the practices that immigrants bring with them that could be seen as illegal or could be in contrast with the customary and formal understanding of a space; – Unawareness or underestimation of the asymmetrical local power relations and their consequences on the everyday life and on the relation with the policies themselves. This includes the overcoming of the concept of a single public interest in favour of a wider view of several public interests, sometimes struggling against each other; – The fear of more forward-looking policies that need an upturning of the present fixed idea of national identity; – Underestimation of the potential of multicultural planning in improving public, multicultural and accessible space in the city I conclude the dissertation with a deep rethinking of the notion of citizenship that has to take into account the needs behind the everyday informal practices as a core objective for more encompassing integration policies. I push forward the notion of metrozenship made by Oren Yiftachel and using it as a tool for a new social impact assessment aimed at foreseeing the possible consequences of a policy before its implementation. The very last part of the dissertation is dedicated to the theorical analysis of the market space as an heterotopia (Foucault, 1974). I argue that this comparison can open and widen the possibility for the urban planning to think at such space and to use it as a microcosm in which experiment new forms of living the diversity.