Social Justice and Adequate Housing: Rights, Roma Inclusion and the Feeling of Home

This book presents a critical analysis of the concept of ’adequate housing’.

While the concept of adequate housing is used largely as a normative standard in the protection of housing rights and in the implementation of housing policies, its apparent objectivity and universality have never been questioned by political and legal theory. This book analyses and challenges the understanding of this term in law and politics by investigating its relationship with the idea of ’home’. ’It is necessary to provide them with adequate housing!’ It is very common to hear this phrase when dealing with housing poverty, especially in relation to migrants, minorities, indigenous and other subaltern groups are concerned. But what does ＂adequate housing＂ mean? This book tackles this issue by proposing a critical analysis of this concept and of its use in the development of housing policies addressing the subaltern group par excellence in Europe, Roma. In so doing, it focuses on the lives of Roma and Sinti in Italy who have been the target of inclusion policies. Highlighting the emotional connection to housing, and dismantling some of the most ’common sense’ ideas about Roma, it offers a radical revision of how social justice in the housing sector might be refigured.

This book will be invaluable for scholars and students working on relevant themes in socio and critical legal studies, sociology, human rights, urban studies, human geography and Romani studies

Silvia Cittadini is a postdoctoral researcher currently working on housing rights and resistance in contexts of cultural diversity. She was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Romani Studies Program of the Central European University in Budapest, a visiting fellow at the European Centre of Minority Issues of Flensburg and a doctoral student at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa, where she earned a PhD in Politics and Human Rights in 2019. In 2021 Silvia will be a Golda Meier post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she will continue her research with a study on housing resistance in the Israeli context.