Insurgent public sphere in illegal settlements in Naples metro-region

The chapter examines the case-study of a new neighborhood which, not untypically for Southern Italy, was built by informal practices. It is an illegal housing development built in the last thirty years by a criminal organization in a municipality on the outskirt of Naples. The actions taken by a group of this neighborhood’s inhabitants invite a fresh reading of territorial transformations and the complexity of the relations between social practice and the system of rules, all of particular significance in a context where the rules of organized crime hold sway. In this framework, the emergence of a new public sphere would seem to imply a significant break with criminal networks. At the same time, however, it invites a rethinking of these kinds of urban practices as ‘exceptions to the order of formal urbanization’. In fact, from one side, the illegal housing development case-study shows criminal organizations as a ‘controlling element able to intervene in the conformity of spatial order’. From the other, it underlines the centrality of the unresolved tension between order and ‘mutation’ in the practices of space regulation. To describe and interpret the case, then, this essay tries to consider some pieces of a large theoretical base of reference literature. We argue that this ‘extreme case’ permits a freer examination of the different theoretical approaches that seemingly exist in isolation the one from the other, while dialectically providing useful elements on which to base and target policies for more unpredictable and unplannable contexts.