Ambiguities of social housing policy and immigrant housing demand: the case of Bari

This paper focuses on the implementation and effects of recent housing policies in a city located in southern Italy currently experiencing problematic and enormous housing pressure: Bari. The extreme fragmentation of housing demand, the emergence of new population groups at risk for social exclusion and the general reduction in public spending have stimulated new policies to tackle the housing emergency. Alongside traditional public housing policies, in recent years new hybrid forms of policies have emerged that can be defined as Social Housing. Within this framework, the study focuses on the housing condition of immigrants in detail. We want to overcome the logic of the best practices analysis that tends to hide the critical aspects. It would be appropriate for this purpose to adopt a systemic approach such as that used by ‘field theory’, especially oriented to the analysis of the bureaucratic field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1994), and by its variants as New Institutionalism (Meyer and Scott, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991).