WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Sicilia Libertaria: The house as an ideology, review of the book "Living tired" (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 There are books that aren't perfect yet are necessary, maybe they aren't very

well written but the content is worth reading, books that mix personal and
collective a little too easily but still prove to be precious. This is the case
of "Abitare tired", written by the indefatigable Sarah Gainsforth, independent
researcher and freelance journalist who in the space of a handful of years has
made herself known for her writings on changing cities. ---- After having
comprehensively monitored the phenomenon of Airbnb and the touristization of
historic centres, in the book "Abitare tired", recently published by Effequ, the
author places the accent on the phenomenon of the house, one of the most typical
Italian obsessions. The barricades erected by Italian politics, horrified by the
European directive on energy efficiency, are proof of this: the provision, still
under discussion, provides that by 1 January 2030 all residential properties will
have to achieve at least energy class E. This means, in practice, that almost all
of the houses will have to face huge works such as the installation of a thermal
coat, the replacement of the fixtures, the installation of solar panels and the
introduction of heat pumps.
However, what terrifies the right in government, as underlined in a parliamentary
question by the Northern League Stefano Candiani, is "the loss of value of the
properties" for those who will not or will not be able to adapt. They don't give
a damn who should bear these costs or if they are necessary expenses (they are,
Italian homes are in terrible shape). The idea that the house is a fort to be
defended, an individual or at least a family refuge in which no one can tell you
what to do and what not to do, the idea that everything is valid inside it
because you own it is, in background, one of the theses around which society has
been built in recent years, one of the architraves of neoliberal individualism.
Thus, as Gainsforth points out in the text, "Italy is in demographic decline and
there are seven million empty houses on its territory". If with Covid we had
discovered that houses can be prisons, "something would have to change" says the
author again. This did not happen because since the Second World War "Italy has
become a country of owners"; just think that as many as 80% of families own their
own homes while the poor remain in rented accommodation, who must either resort
to the only houses left, the rented ones, without any margin of negotiation on
the conditions, or rely on ghettoization of the rare remaining council houses,
where services are absent.
Housing has become a conservative ideology that has shaped common sense,
anesthetizing any possible conflict over housing policies. I personally realized
this during the Christmas holidays. For lunch my partner and I hosted a couple of
friends who decided to buy a house in Milan. Both work in publishing, so they
cannot be defined as wealthy, and in fact they were able to purchase a
60-square-metre two-room apartment at the exorbitant cost of 300 thousand euros,
by taking on a twenty-year mortgage. "Crazy" I thought, while my partner tried to
sweeten the pill, pronouncing the phrase "the bad thing is renting". Words that
would have been meant to be comforting, probably, but with an obvious subtext. It
was then that I intervened, arguing that "of the revolutions that should be made
in Milan, I don't think the priority is the addition of other owners who would
rent the two-room apartment for 1500 euros a month in order to at least be able
to pay off the mortgage". When I subsequently gave the couple of friends
Gainsforth's book as a gift, the title of the volume triggered a significant
bitter smile in both.
Among the major merits of the text is the desire to retrace the historical path
that led to the current situation, i.e. the dominance of the house as an income.
Commendable intention, except that in the first half of the book the author
decides to do it starting from the origins of her family - an American father and
an Irish mother - which somewhat invalidates the rest of the work, which becomes
much more interesting when the focus becomes Italy. Also because in many chapters
some significant passages are told in a somewhat hasty way, and others give the
feeling of being a bignamino of one or two volumes at most. On the other hand,
the second part of the volume is much more effective, in which the demonization
of public housing and the contemporary popularization of private property, the
death of urban planning and the transformation of the General Regulatory Plans
from an instrument of social equity to an affirmation of the interests of
stronger.   On this last front Gainsforth has remarkable intuitions but forgets
to underline that more and more often many environmental struggles are
concentrated against the havoc of the new PGRs who continue to invoke tons of
cement with a dual purpose: the creation of independent villas (because the
American dream, made up of presumed independence and well-groomed grass,
basically remains the dream of every bourgeois) and the complete adherence to the
touristization of the villages, seen as the only solution to restore oxygen to
territories in difficulty. Finally, on the concepts of decorum, redevelopment and
regeneration, Gainsforth triggers the most complete analysis: in this regard, the
story of Retake is emblematic, the best known of the Italian associations which,
using the concept of sharing the common good inappropriately, cleans walls and
places doing, as the author rightly observes, "what the public health service
should do". The central message on which the activities of associations such as
Retake are based is "would you treat your home like this, would you ever throw
the garbage or a cigarette on your floor?", in an equation between home and city
that makes private property and public space coincide . Where even the conflict
must be cleaned up because it dirty the image.
A.T.

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca