Shades of (in)justice. Right to the city and right to the housing in Sant'Elia, Cagliari

The paper analyses different meanings of the “right to housing” by discussing a concrete and particular case study, represented by the district of Sant’Elia, in Cagliari, the main city on the island of Sardinia. This district almost exclusively features council estates where a mainly low-income and fairly marginalized community lives. Nowadays, Sant’Elia hosts movements that protest for their right to housing and particularly against court-ordered evictions that are being carried out or planned in the near future. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to contextualize the right to housing within the broader experiences of protests in Cagliari for the right to the city and against social injustice and spatial inequality. Second, it seeks to shed light on the conflicts and contradictions that occur within and between different social movements apparently united in the common struggle for the right to housing. Thereby, we reveal the multiple shades and possible declinations that the concept of justice may acquire in applying it to housing issues. This article first introduces the serious housing problem in contemporary Italy, focusing on the main impacts of 2008 crisis both at the national scale and at the local level of the city of Cagliari. The study then turns to the case study of Sant’Elia in order to examine how its long- and short-term protest movements have developed and how they work. From the methodological point of view, this work draws on a broader project devoted to Sant’Elia which is based on the results of a six-month empirical field work that included semi-structured questionnaires, participant observation, qualitative interviews, focus group discussions with the residents in this district as well as a range of secondary sources, like press releases and statistical data .