We are pleased to share that our ERC Postdoctoral Fellow, Chiara Cacciotti, has published a book entitled Qui è tutto abitato. L’occupazione romana di Santa Croce/Spin Time Labs come esperienza abitativa liminale (Everything Here is Inhabited: The Roman Occupation of Santa Croce/Spin Time Labs as a Liminal Living Experience), published by Ombre Corte. The publication was supported through the ERC Inhabitaing Radical Housing (project n. 851940).
The volume is the result of Chiara’s doctoral research conducted in the occupied Roman building from 2018 to 2020, after which she remained involved as an activist. Grounded in ethnographic investigation, the book critically examines the term housing emergency, arguing that in the Italian capital, it represents a condition that is anything but temporary—rather, it is chronic and endemic. Chiara explores the effects of this reality on the occupying community at the center of the case study, which experiences a form of liminal inhabitation characterized by the ongoing effort to organize, inhabit, and learn a non-traditional way of collective living.
The book aims to capture the complexity underlying a specific mode of inhabiting urban interstices—one that is far from provisional or temporary. On one hand, it documents and interprets everyday life in the building, including its moral economy and spatial grammar. On the other, it examines the efforts of squatters and activists within the local housing struggle movement to develop new political mechanisms to escape their precarious condition. This process is reflected in their attempts to open the building to the surrounding community. Over the past ten years, this transformation has turned it into a non-state public good, capable of welcoming diverse groups and fostering new forms of urban solidarity.