Coesione sociale, togetherness, prossimità: cosa si può imparare dal caso di Napoli

The paper shows the historical transformation of poor and/or segregated districts in the timeframe ranging from the traditional industrial society to the fragmented society that emerged from the crisis of the fordist-keyne- sian regime in the 1970s. It focuses on the peculiarities of the Neapolitan case, and of Southern European cities in general, characterize by informal fields of interaction that allow the most disadvantaged subjects to develop survival strategies and to cooperate albeit the rates of poverty and unem- ployment are persistently high. Yet these socio-economic interstitial spaces are extremely precarious. A promising outcome would be then a combina- tion of both more universalistic redistribution policies and of recognition policies directed not only to discriminated ethnic groups but also to a semi- proletariat typical of traditional urban economies of subsistence dependent upon clientelistic protections or out of the ordinary state concessions.