Making home, becoming neighbours: the effects of immigrant home-making practices on living together in the diverse urban areas of a small city

The paper explores home-making practices of immigrants living in the historical centre of Desio, a small city in Brianza, an industrial district up north of the Milanese metropolitan area (Italy). The process of everyday construction of domesticity is explored taking into account the symbolical and material engagement with the house and the home area. Aspects related to housing tenure, processes of self building and care, forms of cohabitation, variuos uses and forms of privateness/publicness of the domestic space, will be analysed in order to account for different forms of belonging and ways of “feeling at home”.

The research question explored in the paper is that different forms of investing in the house and the domestic space - varying accordingly to status and socio-economic gaps, habits and cultural traditions (in terms of gender roles, ethnicity and religion), migratory paths (settled vs newcomers), together with the housing market and policies practices regulation - are crucial elements affecting sociability (neighbours relations and the construction of the neighbourhood as a shared space) social networks (ethnic or non-ethnic forms of incorporation into the local context), social cohesion and the role played by everyday encounters in promoting interethnic relations and knowledge.

The paper will focus on two of the housing complexes explored in the ethnographic fieldwork: a building hosting only Pakistani immigrants, and a courtyard which instead is marked by ethnic and social “superdiversity”. The ultimate aim of the paper is to show how “hard” elements (material and socio-economic conditions) are more relevant than “soft” elements (ethnicity and culture) in shaping cohabitation in diverse urban settings.