From Reception to Hospitality: Cultural, Methodological and Economic Aspects of the Laboratory CIRCO in Rome

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has spread a sense of emergency in the management of migrants’ arrivals in Europe making extraordinary reception facilities a structural feature of the Italian system and fostering interventions by non-governmental organizations to support vulnerable people. At the local level, the emergency generates urban policies that blend security and decorum, depicting minorities and urban poor as undesirable subjects to be pushed at the margins of the socio-spatial order. The welfare shrinkage, born out of austerity policies, pushed local authorities to curb migrants’ access to territorial rights such as social services. This lack of formal welfare leads migrants to rely on informal social networks, showing their capacity to construct their own paths of socio-spatial insertion in a new environment. The diversity of urban solidarity experiences – local associations, urban movements and individual citizens – creates an autonomous infrastructure of resistance to security policies and put in question the dominant nationalism. Drawing on these experiences in Rome, CIRCO proposes to rethink migrants’ reception through the mutual concept of hospitality, with the aim of generating new forms of reciprocity and cohabitation. CIRCO (acronym for house indispensable for civic recreation and hospitality) is active in the Architectural and Urban Design Laboratory of the master’s degree program in Urban Design of the Roma Tre University. Starting from the reuse of abandoned buildings and opening them to mobile populations and all the urban inhabitants, CIRCO reinterprets the temporariness and coexistence of diversity to trigger a process of collaborative construction of spaces for democracy, exchange, work and sociability, able to produce fractures in the territory of urban speculation, and build emancipatory paths to the right to dwelling. The paper presents a summary of the three years of activity of CIRCO: from the methodological and cultural system, to the production of urban “waste” maps, up to the synthetic proposal of some design scenarios.