Closing the Gap: A Comparative Exploration of Financialised Geographies of Student Housing in the Cities of Turin and Milan, Italy

The paper compares how the recent involvement of institutional investors in the student housing sector has reshaped the politics of student bed provision in Italy and how multilevel regulatory frameworks and forms of statecraft have contributed to the production of contextual financialised geographies in the cities of Milan and Turin. Despite national legislation and recent reforms under the Next Generation EU plan opening to public co-financing of student halls managed by private operators, investment in and localisation of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) in Italy have been largely dependent upon local economic, social, spatial and institutional conditions that mediate and regulate the provision of student housing and its role within contextual urban redevelopment strategies. Drawing on the analysis of student housing consultancy reports, planning documents, and interviews with local administrators and PBSA operators, we show how financialised geographies of student housing in Milan and Turin articulate themselves in path-dependent ways that, while shaped by national legislation, are closely tied to local states’ negotiations with private actors and contextual urban politics of representation. Still, notwithstanding the socio-economic differences occurring between the two cities, we argue that the creation of financialised student housing submarkets in the two cities similarly hinges on the promotion of an apparently unambiguous and neutral institutional discourse regarding the need to “close the gap” between potential demand and supply in student beds, which fundamentally ends up providing new avenues for rent extraction. In conclusion, we show that the porous relations between multilevel regulatory frameworks and contextual arrangements of the local state produce variegated geographies of financialisation, which, however, seem to converge towards a common dominant discourse whereby the private sector is portrayed as the only solution to bridge the retreat of the public.