Keywords

The courtyard is slowly filling up. The condominium administrator is sitting behind a stall brought in for the occasion. We residents arrange ourselves in front of it: some are standing, and some have come down from their flats carrying a chair or a stool. For six years I have been taking part in this biannual ritual by voting, trying to assert my rights, getting exasperated, learning to extricate myself from ordinary and extraordinary expenses, arrears and so on. Often the issues are boring and prosaic, but nevertheless, if observed as a whole, they circumscribe the negotiations necessary for the fundamental practice of coexistence. We discuss what makes it difficult to live together and what needs to be done to live better under one roof.

Tonight, on the agenda there is a particularly important topic for our condominium: ways to access the Peace Mosque, that is, the Islamic prayer room located on the ground floor of the building which one can only enter by crossing the courtyard of the building. For years the matter has been handled informally: the entrance door had been in bad condition for some time, as was the rest of the condominium, and had therefore always remained open at any time of the day or night, providing an easy way to enter and exit. Now, however, a major renovation of the building, and the related investment of money from old owners, along with the entry of many new residents, seem to have changed the situation. As always, the meeting will go on for hours. It is now dark when Antonio,Footnote 1 my 70-year-old neighbour, born in Apulia but residing here in Turin since adolescence, says, looking around us: ‘You know, Francesco, I still remember when in this courtyard all of us children went down to celebrate birthdays. There were also benches to sit on; we’d be here chatting all evening. It would be nice if it went back to being like that, if instead of arguing about how to divide this space, we could think about how to use it together’ (Fieldnotes, June 2015).

3.1 Introduction

This chapter focuses on the various dimensions of living together and conviviality practices as crucial elements of the home-making processes involving migrant people. The case study I analyse here concerns a condominium in the city of Turin, Italy, characterised by the stratified social uses that residents make of the building’s large courtyard: a “contact zone” that connects the house and the city, the public and the domestic spheres. The approach I adopt is autoethnographic, since it is the building in which I myself have lived for many years. The contribution is therefore based on the network of relationships I have built up over time with my neighbours and is prompted by a reflection on the limits and opportunities associated with my positioning. The aim of the chapter is not only analytical, but also applicative, as I intend to show and discuss the ways in which it is possible to strengthen solidarity and mutual collaboration between residents, with particular reference to the relationships between different generations of internal and international migrants.

The ethnographic sketch that I have presented as a prologue recalls the initial moment of a path of reflection on my 10-year experience of life in an apartment building in Porta Palazzo, a district of the city of Turin, Italy, characterised by a long and stratified history of internal and international migrations (Black, 2012). It is a large six-storey building with around 100 apartments. Built in the second half of the nineteenth century, in its century and a half of life the building became the home of several generations of immigrants: first from the Piedmont countryside and mountains; then from the regions of north-east and southern Italy; and finally, starting from the 1990s, from a multiplicity of countries all over Europe and the world. At the beginning of the 2000s, the building boasted a double record in the context of Turin: it had become the most overcrowded in the city (with a density of 1026 inhabitants per hectare, four times higher than the surrounding neighbourhood, in turn the densest in Turin) and the most ‘multi-ethnic’, with over 75% of residents registered as ‘non-Italian citizens’ (ATC, 2004). The condominium is an empirical space of observation that mirrors, and exaggerates to some extent, the socio-cultural features of the surrounding neighbourhood. Porta Palazzo and its large open-air market have been described as a context where people “practice differences”, experiencing the “everyday multiculturalism” produced by situated interactions, conflicts, and exchanges (Semi et al., 2009; Semi, 2008). This part of the city appears to be ‘rooted in mobility’ (Clifford, 1997). Various flows of people and goods have constituted its peculiar imagery of a borderland: the gateway to the city, a central yet already peripheral area, a symbol of Turin’s identity but at the same time a segregated, marginal space full of inequalities. Porta Palazzo is an “ethnoscape” of globalisation (Appadurai, 1996), where internal and international migrations intersect a quite recent increase in tourism, attracted by its peculiar exotic atmosphere, at once familiar and alien (Vietti, 2019).

The history of this condominium, like that of many other buildings in Porta Palazzo and similar neighbourhoods in other urban contexts, recalls the need to consider the homemaking process as a long-term dynamic, involving several generations of migrants and various national, international and transnational mobilities (Dolkart, 2006). According to Janet Carsten’s acute observation, houses can ‘be analysed as “biographical objects” (…) in the sense that houses have biographies that are inextricably entwined with those of their inhabitants’ (Carsten, 2018: 107). These are biographies that can be examined by ‘thinking through the houses’ about the different dimensions of social life in which individual biographical events, the dynamics of family relationships and the broader economic and political contexts at the local and general level are intertwined (Mathews, 2011).

The reciprocity and mutuality of the relationship between the biography of the building and those of its inhabitants (Martínez, 2018: 124) also applies to the writer. Autoethnography is a research method that entails analytical virtues, but also clear limitations (Anderson, 2006; Ellis et al., 2011). Here, I would like to briefly highlight two reasons that prompted me to adopt this particular approach and to reflect on the connection between my personal life and my scholarly interests and activities. The first aspect concerns the possibility which autoethnography offers in terms of access to the dimension of everyday interactions. As pointed out by Semi and colleagues, “the everyday dimension is relevant […] because it is defined by relations, as a ‘place’, that is, as a set of ordinary, banal, constitutive, incorporated practices” (Semi et al., 2009: 69). It is precisely this flow of daily practices that I have been experiencing since I moved into the Porta Palazzo condominium in 2009. My family certainly belongs to the group of ‘pioneers’ of the gentrification taking place in this part of the city. The reasons that led us to choose to live here correspond perfectly to the list of ‘push factors’ that Schlichtman and Patch (2014: 1493) include in their ‘diagnostic tool’ to identify the ‘gentrifiers’: the low cost of housing, the aesthetic appreciation of the neighbourhood atmosphere and a fascination for its history, interest in social relations and interaction with people of different backgrounds and social classes, and flexibility about accepting annoyances and inconveniences related to the area (petty crime, dirt). I moved to the condominium during my doctorate in ‘Migration and intercultural processes’, and daily life in this housing context shared with fellow citizens of about 20 different nationalities accompanied all my subsequent studies about migration and urban transformation. However, for many years I did not think of the condominium as a research object. Certainly, impromptu meetings on the stairs and along its landings, time spent together with the neighbours, the relationships of friendship and trust that I was able to establish with some of them, and participation in some important moments of collective life such as condominium meetings made it possible for me to hear stories, collect anecdotes and physically enter the lives and homes of several other residents in the building. At the same time, many of my neighbours, both migrants and non-migrants, have entered my apartment frequently during this decade, dined with me and my family, helped me make repairs or lent me various items. This is the point where the second valuable feature of autoethnography comes in: the openness towards collaborative and participatory dimensions. As pointed out by Ellis and colleagues, co-constructed narratives illustrate the meanings of relational experiences and

use the personal experience of researchers-in-collaboration to illustrate how a community manifests particular social/cultural issues. Community autoethnographies thus not only facilitate “community-building” research practices but also make opportunities for “cultural and social intervention” possible. (Ellis et al., 2011: 279)

In my own case, moments of conviviality with my neighbours (Hemer et al., 2020; Neal et al., 2019; Nowicka & Vertovec, 2014; Wise, 2009; Wise & Noble, 2016) and the experience of life in common have become, starting from 2018, the basis for a participatory research project on the history of the building that I conducted together with other residents. In order to share the stories we collected, we decided to organise a “house party” involving all of the residents, which was held in the courtyard of the building in June 2019. This initiative was in some ways the outcome of a process started during that meeting, in which some neighbours, speaking about the Mosque, began to imagine a way to use and experience the space of the large condominium courtyard together.

The intersectionality between my gender, age, class, ethnicity and the social identities of my interlocutors influenced the types of conversations I was able to open with them and the social interactions I was allowed to observe (Rose, 1997; Valentine, 2007). In particular, my positionality in the condominium has been characterised by instability and dynamism in the condition of “insider” and “outsider” of the different groups of residents (Mullings, 1999).

In the following sections, I therefore move from the everyday home encounters I have had with the ‘next-door migrants’ over the course of a decade to contribute to the general objective of the volume: entering migrant homes and exploring how people relate to their dwellings along their migration and housing pathways. Research on homes and housing in the context of migration studies has been consolidated in recent years according to different lines of analysis that have allowed the domestic sphere to leave its place in the background, often implicit and therefore not discussed, and instead assume a new centrality in terms of reflection and conceptualisation (Boccagni, 2017). Housing has thus emerged as the context in which to observe different ‘social scales’, which can be grasped by paying particular attention to the processual dimensions and to the stratifications of meaning. As always happens with social dynamics, by placing oneself at the ‘margins’, one can better grasp the dynamics of power, the inequalities, and the ambivalences that characterise the practices of living (Boccagni et al., 2020). I analyse here the process of homemaking from a doubly marginal position: that of the migrants living in the Porta Palazzo condominium, and that of the courtyard, a place peripheral to the intimacy of domestic space. In the first part of the chapter, I offer an ethnographic account of the multiple uses of the condominium courtyard: a liminal, porous space that acts as a threshold between the private and properly domestic spaces of the apartments and the public space of the city. The courtyard is ideally a common space, shared among all the residents, but it is also a communication channel between the house and the city, between those who live in the condominium and those who enter or transit there for the most diverse reasons. As I aim to show, it is a space that performs various functions and hosts various forms of exchange – economic, social, and cultural. In the second part of the contribution, I focus on the methodological approach that allowed me to assume a posture that is not only analytical, but eminently applicative. The various steps of the transformative intervention I developed to increase the opportunities for interaction, sharing and solidarity among residents are here under scrutiny. The commitment to making the courtyard, through the active participation of residents, a ‘transversal space’ capable of responding to the aspiration of living together ‘through difference’ represents, in my experience, what is necessary for a politically and ethically committed study. This self-reflexive engagement constitutes a precondition to fight ‘from below’ and ‘from within’ the inequalities that mark the fragile housing biographies of many migrants who live in Italy, as in many other parts of the world (Lenhard & Samanani, 2020).

3.2 The Courtyard as Liminal Zone

In architecture, borrowing a typically anthropological concept, the courtyard is interpreted as a ‘liminal space’, neither completely public nor totally private, which presents itself as a threshold capable of connecting and separating at the same time (Rapoport, 2007; Varga-Harris, 2016). This limen (Latin: threshold) characteristic makes it particularly relevant from the perspective of an ethnographic study of homemaking and homing processes which, as has been highlighted (Boccagni & Brighenti, 2017; Miranda Nieto et al., 2020), is based on the challenge of moving beyond the domestic thresholds of his interlocutors, and entering homes where there are rules about the use of spaces that are linked to the spheres of intimacy, familiarity and common belonging.

The courtyard is a porous space. It lets things pass through, but holds some things back. Its significance and ambivalence can perhaps be further captured by relating this type of space to the concept of hospitality (Selwyn, 2000). Just as hospitality refers to a relationship that is always connected to dimensions of power and control of the other, the courtyard is also a space in which the management of the proximity/distance between ‘us’ and ‘others’ is crucial.

The courtyard belongs to everyone and no one. It is here that the senses most clearly grasp the heterogeneous panorama of cultural diversity in a condominium (Bonfanti et al., 2019): the smells of the food cooked in the apartments coming out of the open windows; the rhythms of Asian, South American and African music played at full volume on satellite televisions and web radios; clothes of different shapes hung out to dry on the balconies. The sensescapes (auditory, tactile, olfactory…) are a significant element to take into account when analysing the interaction between residents in the urban environment (Low & Kalekin-Fishman, 2019). Indeed, it is often through these sensory dimensions that the logics of distinction are practised, the repulsion against mixing is expressed, or conversely, the interest in hybridisation is conveyed (Earl, 2018). The relationship between urban sensescapes and migration is particularly captured in two aspects. On the one hand, tastes, smells and sounds take on a translocal character, activating memories of mobility and dwelling that revolve around references, contrasts and assonances between the contexts of origin and immigration (Lahiri, 2011). On the other hand, particular attention should be paid to the question of power expressed by the politics of senses. According to Low (2013: 223), the perception of a “sensory invasion” of neighbourhoods characterised by a strong migratory stratification can be traced back to the existence of a “local sensory order”, with respect to which the sensory behaviours of migrant bodies produce infractions and “hence are interpreted as transgressive conduct”.

Referring to the well-known formulation that James Clifford (1997) originally proposed for post-colonial museums, courtyards can therefore be usefully thought of as ‘contact zones’, which make dialogue and intercultural collaboration possible, but which can also generate misunderstandings and frictions.

In this section I discuss some ethnographic notes relating to the various practices and opportunities for contact that I have been able to observe in the courtyard of the building where I live, in Turin. Given the variety of activities that this space hosts, it is useful to first map the different uses of the courtyard, which I analyse below (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
An illustration of a plan map of the condominium courtyard. 1. Staircase A. 2. Access door to the condominium courtyard. 3, 4, and 5 are in staircase D. 6 is in staircase C. The entrance of the peace mosque is at Staircase B.

Map of the condominium courtyard. (Author’s elaboration)

Full size image

My reflection is arranged in three sections, focusing on three stories which, while involving entire families and a plurality of people, revolve around the figures of three women of different ages and origins: Fatima, 39, originally from Morocco and a resident of the building for fourteen years; TingTing, 27, born in China, was reunited with her family at the age of 12 and since then growing up in the building, in the apartment owned by her parents; and Maryna, 61, from Ukraine, who has lived in her apartment for three years. In addition to being my neighbours, I personally played a role in the biographies of these three people and my position has allowed me to interact with them over a long period of time: Fatima took part in a social inclusion project I coordinated in Porta Palazzo; TingTing was my pupil during her studies and Maryna assisted my grandmother before moving into the apartment block following a new job opportunity. The interviews were collected within a longstanding relationship of reciprocity and exchange between the participants and the researcher. In this perspective, the courtyard has become for us a new ‘positional space’, an area “where the situated knowledges of both parties in the interview encounter engender a level of trust and co-operation” (Mullings, 1999: 340) that allowed us to reflect about the different positionalities we experienced in the subsequent stages of our relations.

The activities that these women carry out in the communal courtyard are, in my opinion, significant in illustrating the three main functions that this space fulfils: economic, recreational and social. In each of the three stories, these functions appear intertwined and mutually interdependent. It is also interesting to note how the courtyard, with its role as a threshold between the city and the house, highlights how certain domestic activities usually performed by women inside the apartments (cooking, and caring for children and the elderly) could emerge on the public scene, so that they acquire visibility and new meanings (Ring, 2006).

3.2.1 Fatima: Baking for the Community

Fatima was born in Casablanca where she received a certificate in baking and pastry arts. In 2002, she emigrated alone to France, in the footsteps of a cousin already abroad, who facilitated her travel and first placement. After two years, Fatima decided to move to Italy, taking advantage of a job opportunity she had been offered through a friend living in Turin. Here, Fatima settled in Porta Palazzo and after a few months she was reunited with her husband, Abdel, who had remained in Morocco until then. The two rented a small two-room apartment in the building, the same accommodation where they still reside. For a couple the size of the apartment could be considered adequate, however today, with a growing family, it has become decidedly insufficient: Fatima and Abdel have three children, a boy and two girls, aged between twelve and six. Much of the family’s life is linked to Porta Palazzo: Abdel is a hairdresser and his shop is a few blocks away; the children attend schools in the neighbourhood.

The activity that Fatima carries out in the courtyard is linked to the presence of the Peace Mosque. The prayer room is not only a place of spiritual and social gathering, but also a catalyst for numerous commercial activities, some formal (for example the halal butchers located in the surroundings), others informal, as in the case of street vendors who stand every day, but especially on Fridays, next to the entrance and inside the courtyard, offering different types of goods to those who attend the mosque (no. 1 on the map). Next to them, there are also some young Roma women, originally from Romania, who, wearing the veil and respectfully greeting people in Arabic, ask the faithful for alms (no. 2).

On the occasion of Friday prayers, the entire courtyard is covered with carpets (no. 3). While the faithful gather, trucks and stalls are set up along the access paths to the place of worship. Immediately outside the building, on the pavement, the sellers who need more space are positioned, especially the vans that are full of watermelons in the summer months. In the entrance hall leading to the courtyard, on both sides there are sellers of dried fruit, mint, lben (fermented milk) and bread. Among these is Fatima:

My specialty is m’semen, a type of Moroccan flaky bread, which I prepare plain and also stuffed with meat. And then also the baghrir, you know, which looks like a spongy crepe, which is eaten with honey or sauces and which I sell especially during Ramadan. I prepare everything at home, every day; I put the bread in the cart, and I go to sell it. On normal days I am in the square, next to the market stalls, but on Fridays and throughout Ramadan I am here at the mosque. I sell to those who come for prayer, but also to the residents of the building who are returning home. I don’t earn much and it’s a very tiring job, summer and winter, but it still allows me to get by.Footnote 2

Through Fatima’s work, the connective role of the courtyard gains materiality: bread, produced inside an apartment of the condominium, is sold to buyers who enter the building from the outside, creating an economic exchange with the neighbourhood thanks to the social aggregation function of the mosque.

3.2.2 TingTing: Playing with Differences

I remember well the first period of TingTing’s life in Turin. At that time, I was collaborating with the middle school where she was placed as soon as she arrived from China. I taught first literacy courses for Chinese-speaking students and TingTing was one of my students. In one of the compositions that she managed to write after a year of school, about the many difficulties of her daily life, she told in simple words about the challenges she was facing: she had left her friends and the beautiful house where she used to live with her grandparents in China and found herself from one day to the next in Italy, in a small apartment, in an unknown school, where besides studying Italian she had to spend many hours helping her parents with the shoe stall at the market (Hu & Vietti, 2016; Marsden, 2015). As she recounts, years later:

When I was at school, I was sorry not to be able to invite my friends over. The others went to parties or met for homework, but I was ashamed to let people into our house, I didn’t want them to see where I lived. Luckily there was the courtyard. I spent many hours playing badminton with my sister. In China, they teach it at school – I was good – but here in Italy nobody plays this sport. Even today for my little brother it is the same: he is never at home, he is always on the balcony or down in the courtyard playing football with his Moroccan friends.Footnote 3

The portion of the courtyard farthest from the entrance to the building is often transformed into a playground. Especially in the afternoon, when many children and young people who live in the tenement return from school, there are challenges and matches (no. 4). There are some chasing each other, some playing badminton and some playing football, transforming into football goals the racks where the riders and the Bengali rose sellers who live in the building leave their bicycles (no. 5). Beyond the different origins of their parents (China, Morocco, Romania, Nigeria, Pakistan), the courtyard as a playground becomes a common meeting ground for second-generation children and young people who grew up in Turin, and who find a safe space here for transition between school and family, between town and home, where they can hang out independently (Güney & Kabaş, 2017).

As for TingTing, now grown up, it is interesting to note how life in the condominium has contributed to an unexpected turning point in her working life. In fact, nine years ago the numerous neighbours from different sub-Saharan African countries present in the building convinced TingTing’s parents to try a different commercial enterprise: leaving behind the market stall, they acquired a small convenience store in the block next to the condominium, specialising in the sale of gastronomic and aesthetic products for African customers, and in particular for Senegalese migrants. Thanks to daily contact with these customers, and certainly also due to her own particular talent, TingTing (who encountered many difficulties in her Italian school career, dropping out at age 16 after twice failing the first year of high school) has learned to speak Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. This skill, which soon became known within the Senegalese community of Turin, ensured good business for the family shop, which TingTing now manages herself.

3.2.3 Maryna: Remembering Together

The country Maryna comes from no longer exists, and neither does her home. She was born in a small town near Donetsk in 1960, in what was then the Soviet Union, which later became Ukraine and which has been part of the unrecognised Donetsk People’s Republic since 2014. The house where she spent her childhood, and which she had renovated by sending remittances from abroad, was bombed during the Donbass war and is now reduced to rubble. Moreover, Maryna has never had housing stability throughout her life: as a young woman, during the time of the USSR, she worked on cruise ships, perpetually travelling between China and Cuba. Then, at the beginning of the 2000s, when her husband was the victim of a mining accident, she went abroad to Italy, like many other Ukrainian women, to work as a badante (live-in care worker). She has changed houses many times since, moving from time to time into the homes of the elderly she assists. She first lived in the province of Naples, then near Cuneo and finally in Turin. In the Porta Palazzo condominium Maryna lives with Lucia, 87, originally from Abruzzo, who has lived in the building for over 60 years, and is one of the last residents who witnessed life in the neighbourhood and in the house in the immediate post-war period.

Lucia’s apartment is quite large, with three rooms, because her children grew up here. Today one of the ‘children’s rooms’ has passed to Maryna, who has settled in, along with two suitcases of clothes and personal items with which she has been moving from house to house. Her life is marked by the perennial cycle of being a companion to her ‘grandparents’ in their last years. By now Maryna also feels old, she is often tired, and in the long hours spent in the courtyard listening to Lucia she happened to mention that she thinks that she will soon be in need of help:

I don’t like this neighbourhood very much – there are no gardens, no green spaces – so in the morning when I go out with my ‘grandmother’ I prefer to stop here in the courtyard. Luckily a few months ago someone from the building brought this old sofa down to throw it away and they never came to pick it up, so we also have a comfortable place to sit! (no. 6) I like being here; in the Soviet Union all the town houses had common courtyards, where clothes were spread out, there were swings for the children, the elderly played chess, it was nice. Then Lucia knows everything about this condominium, she tells me the stories of the Fifties. Do you know that part of the building was a hotel? She worked in the kitchen of the restaurant: right where the children play, she peeled the potatoes. The world she lived in as a young woman reminds me a little of the life I led in my country.Footnote 4

For Maryna and Lucia, the courtyard appears as a place for sharing memories, a connector between the present and the past, between Italy and Ukraine. This transnational connection becomes materially tangible when Maryna connects with her smartphone via video call with her two daughters residing in Kiev. Once every three months, she piles up boxes in a corner of the courtyard: boxes full of consumer goods and gifts bought in supermarkets in Turin, to send to Ukraine via the couriers that shuttle between Italy and Eastern Europe.

3.3 Conviviality and Transversal Rituals

The home encounters of Fatima, TingTing and Maryna that I briefly described highlight the opportunities, but also the pitfalls of a certain fragmentation of the inner condominium space. The various population groups I have examined (the visitors to the Mosque and the street vendors who offer them bread and mint, the children who play football and badminton, the elderly who rest and chat with those who assist them) use different areas of the courtyard, at different times of the day and week, and with a certain indifference (if not annoyance) towards each other (Cancellieri, 2017; Killias, 2018; Cancellieri, Chap. 2).

Conviviality, alongside other somewhat interconnected concepts, such as ‘super-diversity’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘everyday multiculturalism’, has emerged as one of the interpretative paradigms for exploring the socio-cultural dynamics linked to migration in an urban context (Wise & Noble, 2016: 427). This is a concept with a complex genealogy, which in recent years has been at the centre of a wide debate within anthropology and between different disciplines. A growing body of case studies on convivial collectivities, spaces and everydayness has thus been consolidated, providing a basis for a comparative approach aimed at grasping how this category is situated in different contexts (Nowicka & Vertovec, 2014). Living together is a process, located in a specific space and time, which requires work to build connections, relationships and meanings (Heil, 2015). The authors who focused on the ambivalence of this analytical category highlighted how the reference to conviviality should not be understood as a simplistic celebration of the ‘joy of differences’, but as an invitation to expand on the concrete practices, efforts, negotiations and conflicts that run through the attempt to live together while trying to understand each other through differences (Hemer et al., 2020). In a remarkable contribution, Meissner and Heil (2020) drew attention to the conviviality-integration nexus. In particular, they note how the concept of integration is used in a normative way, prefiguring an idealistic, pacified, stabilised, “integratable society” where differences do not matter. In contrast to this assumption, Meissner and Heil provocatively propose the option of a “convivial disintegration” capable of giving space to the dimensions of conflict, uncertainty and alternative possibilities. In this perspective, the use of the category of conviviality should point “to difference never ceasing to matter” and invite us “to think about the necessary interventions that strengthen resilience in living with difference” (Meissner & Heil, 2020: 14). The differences, importantly, are not necessarily or only related to the sphere of ethnicity. As much broader comparative studies have clearly shown (Pastore & Ponzo, 2012), alliances and conflicts between groups in immigration districts are defined on the basis of the intersection between different criteria, among these being age and length of residence.

Taking into account this complexity and inspired by the desire expressed by my neighbour Antonio to imagine ways of using the condominium courtyard space together, in autumn 2018 I came to the conclusion that my task as ‘resident anthropologist’ could consist precisely in applying my vocation for “cultural translation” to the building where I had chosen to live. Following Wise (2009), I proposed myself to my coresidents as a transversal enabler, or ‘facilitator’, understanding this concept as the practice of relationships of knowledge and meaningful exchange through differences (Wise, 2009: 23). I thought of a participatory research path that revolved around the three axes that I had already seen at work in the condominium courtyard: (a) the connection between the building and the surrounding area; (b) playful interactions between the youngest residents; (c) and sharing of memories among older residents.

My initiative began with the dissemination of a simple flyer in which I proposed to all coresidents to create a collection of stories of the building, sharing anecdotes, photographs and their points of view about everyday life there. My intention was to collect the testimonies myself over the following months, to then circulate them as part of a ‘house party’ to be held in the courtyard, open not only to residents of the building, but to the whole neighbourhood. My goal was to trigger a process of consolidation of a shared history of the condominium, considering it the basis for fostering communication and collaboration among different generations and different groups of residents. The connection between home and memory, as highlighted by Ratnam (2018), is a fundamental part of the identity-making process, on an individual and collective level. In this sense, what counts are not only the memories of the ‘past homes’ where people lived – and, in the case of migrants, were very often left behind in their countries of origin – but also the awareness of the experiences of ‘past inhabitants’ who had lived in the buildings where they live: a memory embedded in the materiality of domestic objects, in the physical structures of the house, in its spaces and in the transformations that have shaped it over time (Pink, 2004). From this point of view, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) argued several years ago, an interdisciplinary approach that brings architecture and anthropology into dialogue can illustrate that “the house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person […] a ready-made environment fashioned by a previous generation and lived in long before it becomes an object of thought” (Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995: 2). Houses are, at the same time, built environments and cultural constructions that accumulate more significations through association with their resident social groups over time (Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999: 4).

The first weeks after the dissemination of the flyer brought a new and unexpected development: in addition to learning of the availability of some coresidents who would tell me what they knew and remembered about the building, I was contacted by several others who offered to help me to interview their neighbours. I welcomed their collaboration with great pleasure, being able to count on the active participation of a greater number of people. The collection continued throughout the spring of 2019 and allowed us, together, to reconstruct the events of the building over its 180 years of history. Although more informal and less ambitious, our initiative shares similar premises as other participatory research projects aiming to trace “home-city biographies” through the experiences, memories and narratives of residents. Blunt and colleagues, writing about their study in Hackney, east London, noted how this approach allowed them to investigate the multi-layered and entangled temporalities of home and the city. The intersection of migration, housing, and family histories helps to articulate narratives of domestic and urban change in terms of stability and instability, exploring the traces of the past in the present (Blunt et al., 2020: 2). These biographies not only connected the life stories of urban residents to particular dwellings, but outline “the interplay of their home lives with streets, neighbourhoods and the wider city” (Blunt & Sheringham, 2018: 13). We thus discovered that many aspects of the mobility that seemed peculiar to the present time of the condominium also actually belonged to its past and its very origins. Shortly after it was built in 1836, the building had begun to host hotels and inns for the workers and customers of the nearby large Porta Palazzo market. Its mission to provide rest and refreshment to people arriving in the city would last for many decades, until the last hotel-restaurant was closed in 1975 (as Mrs Lucia, who worked there for decades as a cook, still remembered). After giving refuge to the evacuees from the bombings during the Second World War, in the early 1950s the courtyard of the condominium was filled with new production and commercial activities: a dairy, a butcher, an umbrella factory, the warehouse of a cheesemaker, a printing house and even an exotic pet shop, complete with an enclosure full of parrots and turtles, to the delight of the many resident children. These were the years in which many new coresidents from other Italian regions, in particular from Veneto and the South, began to join former Piedmontese residents. The memories of those who spent their childhood in the building during that time highlight not just the difficulties of everyday life, but also a certain nostalgia for the sociability and solidarity that existed among the tenants. As Antonio recollects:

I arrived in Turin from Apulia, with my parents, in 1958. There was poverty, there were many living in one room and we warmed up with the stove, but it was also a beautiful period: there was solidarity, we got by and helped each other. My father worked for what is now called AMIAT, that is, he collected garbage on the streets – at that time it was still done with pitchforks and baskets. In the building there were many children, all from southern families. I spent all my time in the courtyard playing with them with the shavings we took from the carpenter who worked on the ground floor.Footnote 5

It was with this background that the building entered the new phase of international immigration from the early 1990s. The Porta Palazzo district was the settlement area for the pioneers of the various immigrant communities and the building faithfully recorded on its apartment intercom buzzers the multiple layering of Moroccan, Chinese, Nigerian, Senegalese, Egyptian, Bengali, Tunisian, Peruvian, Albanian, and Romanian surnames. Before the end of the decade, the building became the only one in the city where the foreign population outnumbered native-born residents (CICSENE, 1997: 31). High population density and high incidence of foreign residents were two related phenomena: the building’s inhabitants remember how in that period the apartments served as a shelter for many immigrants who had just arrived in the city, almost exclusively young men, living in extremely precarious conditions with a large number of compatriots. According to Fabrizio, a tenant in the building and an anti-eviction activist, exploitation by the Italian owners of the flats was widespread: they didn’t hesitate to rent out the few square metres available in the semi-ruined attics for illegal profit.

Despite these difficulties, during the 1990s the condominium established itself as a point of reference for the new inhabitants of the neighbourhood, in particular for the Muslim faithful who began to identify it with the Islamic prayer room that had been established here in 1995. In the words of Hassan, now head of the association that runs the Peace Mosque:

We opened the prayer room here certainly because the rent for the spaces was lower than elsewhere, but above all because this was the centre of our community and we knew that many of our brothers in difficulty, who needed the support of the mosque, lived here. Every week hundreds of people come here to pray, but also to ask for information and help, today just as it was 25 years ago. Over time, this has also led to clashes with residents, especially because of the issue of access through the courtyard and the large number of people entering the building for Friday prayers.Footnote 6

As I mentioned in the ethnographic vignette at the beginning of the chapter, the renovation of the building carried out in the first decade of the 2000s triggered ambivalent reactions from the residents regarding the presence of the Islamic prayer room. At the meeting, there are some who take this opportunity to ask outright that the Mosque be moved elsewhere: only then, they say, can the renovation of the building be complete. Others recall instead that it is only thanks to the presence of the mosque that the problem of drug dealing and other illicit activities involving the condominium and the surrounding block in the Nineties has significantly decreased over the last years.

These tensions concerning the management of the Peace Mosque are part of the broader conflicts about the “compulsory redevelopment plan” for the building, imposed by the municipality of Turin in 2001 and completed in 2012. The renovation is part of the initiatives carried out by the public administration and private investors in Porta Palazzo, which boosted the ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood (Bourlessas et al., 2021). A significant number of inhabitants were consequently forced to move elsewhere, and in the last decade, a further flow of new residents has transformed the residential dynamics of the building. The proximity to the new university campus made the building particularly attractive for students: young people who once again brought mobility-related stories to the condominium, as Cristina recounts:

My boyfriend and I are both doing our PhDs in Turin. I am originally from Rome and he is from Palermo. We are renting here and the owner, Luca, is a doctor more or less the same age as we are. He is abroad, in London, for a specialisation course. We have been here for a year and we will stay for another year, then he will come back and we will have to find another accommodation.Footnote 7

It was precisely these students who, after the collection of the stories, in the spring of 2019 made an important contribution to the participatory planning of the ‘house party’ day in which the memories of the house were shared with the neighbourhood through recreational activities organised in the courtyard. The party was configured as a ‘transversal ritual’, to adopt Wise’s (2009) concept, capable of enhancing collective awareness of the opportunities for mutual understanding and solidarity among the residents. The point was not to display a pacified, univocal and official story of the condominium under the banner of integration. On the contrary, building on the “convivial disintegration” of the house (Meissner & Heil, 2020), the party was intended to provide room for differences and unpredictable encounters (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2
A photo presents the performers performing in the courtyard and spectators sitting around in the courtyard.

A moment from the party in the courtyard of the condominium. (Author’s picture)

Full size image

In sum, one Saturday afternoon in June, over 150 people gathered in the courtyard, attracted by word of mouth and some simple flyers posted in the surrounding block. About half were residents, and half were people from the neighbourhood, friends and schoolmates of the children of the building, together with their parents. A dozen Chinese and Senegalese teenagers arrived at the party at the invitation of TingTing, who for some time had been working as an educator in a very active cultural association in the neighbourhood. The programme was specially designed for the youngest: it began with a circus performance staged by a family of street artists, also living in the house, known as the ‘Circo Famiglia Show’. To watch the performance, the public sat on carpets made available by the mosque, normally used by the faithful for Friday prayers, which in this case instead became a shared space for all those present. Whoever could, sat cross-legged on the ground, as the others took their seats: among them, Maryna and Lucia, who laughed heartily at the jokes and sleight of hand of the circus performers. A treasure hunt then continued the entertainment: six teams of children and adults challenged each other to find clues scattered in the courtyard and in all the common areas of the building, solving riddles about the history of the house, for which they had to interact with some of the coresidents. Finally, all participants were invited to enjoy a snack based on almond paste pastries prepared by Fatima and other Moroccan cooks and offered inside the Islamic prayer room. For many coresidents, this was the first opportunity in many years to remove their shoes and enter their neighbours’ place of worship. The issue of access to the Mosque arose that day in a brand new and different fashion.

3.4 Conclusion

In this chapter I have highlighted some aspects of homemaking inside an apartment building in Turin’s Porta Palazzo – a building characterised, today as in the past, by a high proportion of residents of immigrant origin. My analysis developed from my particular position as a resident of the building. It was therefore from an autoethnographic approach that I reflected on the unique role that the large condominium courtyard plays in the daily life of the building’s inhabitants.

Most notably, the courtyard acts as a liminal area of contact, which makes it possible to meet different groups of people: those who live in the building and those who come from outside to pray in the mosque, which is accessed through the always-open door of the building; Moroccan women who, like Fatima, cook bread at home to sell to the faithful who pass through the courtyard entering and leaving the prayer room; children, sons and daughters of Chinese, Nigerian or Pakistani parents, who after returning from school spend their afternoons playing football or badminton together; the ‘old’ and ‘new’ residents, as in the case of Maryna and Lucia, who can find a way to interact and communicate by sharing memories and stories.

Long-term observation of this common space, as well as the critical issues that emerged from the condominium meeting described in the prologue of the chapter, gave me the opportunity to consider the house not only with an analytical purpose, but also with a strong applicative commitment. This led me to propose to my “next-door migrants” to undertake participatory research on the history of the building with the goal of creating a convivial moment addressed to the residents and the neighbourhood.

In my analysis, the condominium courtyard emerged as a ‘space of transversality’ (Wise, 2009) where it was possible to create a habit of interaction, exchange and mutual learning. Contact, Wise points out (ibid.: 37), offers opportunities in terms of mutual understanding and solidarity, but also presents risks linked to the unease and conflicts that can arise from missed or failed encounters. It is therefore necessary for ‘transversality facilitators’ to work to create ‘spaces of intercultural care’ by paying attention to the differences in power and inequalities that affect conviviality (Wise & Noble, 2016). The same critical stance should be applied when we look at the ‘community’ that is created through the practices of conviviality: a community that we can precisely define as ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998), without defined and stable boundaries (determined by ethnic or other differences), but rather produced and reproduced through continuous activities of interaction, cohabitation and sharing (Neal et al., 2019).

Reflecting on the potential and limits of conviviality with respect to the intersection of home and migration seems to me to be particularly crucial in the context of the pandemic period that began a few months after the activities analysed in this chapter. Starting from spring 2020, because of the Covid-19 epidemic and the consequent lockdown, millions of citizens were forced to stay at home: a condition that for many migrants meant being confined to cramped domestic spaces and discovering, or rediscovering, the importance of the common spaces of the buildings, and connections and solidarity with their neighbours. For adults, and especially for children, courtyards have long been the only open-air space that can be used for socialising, asking for help, blowing off steam and escaping, for at least a few hours, conditions of discomfort and overcrowding. This rediscovered centrality of encounters and exchanges with coresidents, mostly informal and spontaneous, emphasises the need to reflect on the methods and conditions that will allow these practices of coexistence and conviviality to play a significant role in contrasting, or at least mitigating, the new forms of poverty, exclusion and marginality that the current economic and social crisis is generating (Bargna et al., 2020).