The Housing Struggle in Milan in the 1970s: Influences and Particularities

Introduction

The illegal occupation of vacant housing, or squatting, is a phenomenon that has been noted in several European cities on a cyclical basis, especially in the more intense phases of urbanization associated with industrial development. In the second half of the twentieth century, phases of resurgence of the phenomenon were recorded in many cities, immediately after the Second World War, ¹ and then in a number of successive waves between the 1960s and the end of the century. In the twenty-first century, the occupation of buildings is still a phenomenon present in Europe ² and one that also affects the whole world, both in developed and undeveloped countries, where levels of unauthorized habitation are significant. ³ However, these situations are difficult to compare with one other. ⁴

The recurrence of the phenomenon of abusive occupation suggests that squatting is a cyclical and conflictual response to the urgent requirement of having a dwelling place. While this is undoubtedly true, it is not enough to allow us to deduce that all illegal housing occupation, or that any period of recrudescence of this kind of occupation, are expressions of the same form of political project or of the same type of social movement. This article aims to illustrate the specificity of the case study in Milan, in the context of a movement that developed in Italy in the early 1970s, which in turn was also influenced by a more general European “phase” of squatting that began a few years earlier, with the intention of including this Italian experience in the historiographical debate on the phenomenon of housing occupation. The scale of analysis therefore concerns Milan, its housing situation in the context of the Italian housing situation in general, and the social subjects involved in the housing struggle and the methods adopted. The temporal aspect focuses on the period 1969-1975, to illustrate the reception of a form of struggle that was spreading throughout Europe. In this particular case study, however, there was an originality involved in terms of form and size, often different from contemporary Italian experiences and from successive phases in the housing occupation movement. While it is beyond doubt that the phenomenon of illegal building occupation is endemic in Italy, ⁵ every period of squatting has its own specific history and particular methods of action, together with its own specific impact on public opinion.

In particular, in Milan, more so than in the other major Italian cities, the housing occupation movement was able to absorb the influence of the transgressive, communitarian model that inspirited squatting in other northern Europe cities. With this influence, the Milanese movements soon imbibed a lexicon of “struggle” that was not yet common in Italy and which mixed the economic and political critique of urban speculation with the aspiration to build an alternative life—ideas emanating from the so-called countercultures in northern Europe and the United States. The result was the desire to live in a different way, based on a concept of community rather than the traditional family home. These were the first manifestations of utopian ideas that would become more widely rooted in Italy only in the 1980s, but such notions also represented, in the concrete experience of struggle, a reason for friction between the young militants and the older occupying families. The northern Europe connection also, in some cases, gave rise to common experiences of struggle, especially in Germany. ⁶ These were experiences that involved a number of Italian militants, mostly from Milan, as part of a more general interchange of reciprocal influence. ⁷ It was a link, moreover, that was facilitated by geographical and social factors: northern European capitals were relatively close, and they were visited by many bourgeois students and young people, who also played a leading role in the extra-parliamentary movements in Milan.

The frequent European experience of many young Milanese is also linked to particular generational and social factors, compared with the housing occupation movement in other Italian cities, and in Rome especially. In Milan, the social composition of the movement included a significant majority of wage-earners with a guaranteed income, mostly industrial workers, employees of urban service companies, and lower-middle-class office workers. More than in other Italian contexts, but similar to the situation in other European cities, there was a considerable presence of young people. These were mostly males who had recently moved to the city to work in industry and the tertiary sector, but equally important was the participation of young middle-class high school and university students, which included a large female component.

The subproletarian presence, on the contrary, was essentially a minority, especially in relation to the dynamism of the labor market in the city. In Milan, the relationship between housing demand and supply (of economic and council housing) was less dramatic than in other large cities, something due above all to the huge expansion of construction that continued to affect the municipalities in the province. In a city relatively small in terms of area (about 180 km²), the demographic and social pressure was channeled into the neighboring municipalities, each of which constituted an autonomous reality, sometimes covering a large territorial area, with its own urban and building planning and its own resources to meet the demand for housing.

A further interesting element with regard to the specificity of the Milanese experience involved the role played in the housing struggle by tenants who had already been assigned council housing: these were mostly organized by trade unions and associations created by left-wing parties.

Squatting in Milan was not, therefore, an anomalous experience, but it did represent a process that developed its own specific characteristics, which can make interesting reading.

The article, therefore, necessarily describes the most relevant episodes, with the intention of proposing them as elements in a more general debate on housing occupation movements.

European Examples and the First Occupations in Milan

The experience of housing occupation in Milan, and more generally in Italy, was part of a period that affected much of Western Europe and involved shared needs and practices. The first stimulus, of course, was to find accommodation for those who did not have it. Another common element was the spirit of deconstruction of society and culture. Occupation was therefore a manifestation of an anti-capitalist approach to habitation—at the same time both an instrument and objective of struggle. A common finding by scholars is also the significant presence of young people among both the organizers of squatter movements and the occupants themselves. This was a presence related to the 1968 student rebellion and the activism of the young, educated middle class. ⁸ However, youth activism also involved the new generational composition of the working class in the most industrially developed cities. Another common point in the experiences of European squatters was the difficult relations with the parties of the traditional left, which had themselves in previous decades organized protests about lack of housing and also occupied vacant buildings. It was a tension that derived from the libertarian sentiments of the youth movements, from their desire to be “independent” from institutional politics, bringing to political action their own existential needs. ⁹

There is a great deal of literature regarding the European squatter movements between the 1960s and the 1970s. ¹⁰ In relation to the many experiences studied, only those elements—objectives and methods—that were adopted as examples by the Italian squatter movement, especially in Milan, are taken into consideration here.

The various European housing occupation maneuvers were designed to respond to different needs: to find shelter for evicted people, to launch a radical critique of the gentrification of central districts, to fight for the preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods, to create new ways to experience community life, and to force the authorities—national and, especially, local—to construct economic housing for the working classes. These were all features that were also present in the Milan movement, which, however, more than the other European examples, placed great emphasis on the ideological side of things. The aim was to try to channel the various initiatives in the direction of a permanent social mobilization in the city, in the hope of replicating the experience of struggle that had characterized the factories in the autunno caldo—the “hot autumn”—of 1969. This often led to an exploitation of initiatives that meant that, with the insistence on urban conflict, sight was lost of the most immediate objective—providing people with housing.

In England, the most lasting movement began in December 1968, with the Squatting Campaign, promoted by Labor activists and the radical left. The goal was to induce authorities to rent out vacant council property while awaiting the planned demolition and redevelopment of the neighborhoods. ¹¹ The main tools of political intervention were legal counseling for the homeless against eviction and in favor of the assignment of new housing, and protest activity, including the occupation of parts of vacant buildings. A permanent expression of the movement was the Family Squatting Advisory Service (FSAS), which became a fixed presence in many suburban districts of London and later in other English and Welsh cities. Squatting itself was therefore an accessory practice, which did not trigger a real mass movement; for example, in 1971, at the height of the campaign, a hundred families were involved in the London occupations. The FSAS also revived the practice of illegal occupation by other political players. According to some estimates, in the Greater London Area in the mid-1970s, there were more than thirty-five thousand illegally occupied apartments, in addition to several thousand occupants who had legalized their position by reaching agreements with property owners. The number of occupied buildings rose to almost fifty thousand when those in other English cities were included. ¹²

Many groups acted independently; their members were above all young people, pertaining to the bohemian world that animated the countercultural movements in London. Beginning with the occupation of Piccadilly in 1969, these groups occupied fixed locations in central areas, forming communes and practicing alternative lifestyles. These in particular were the occupations that aroused the emulation of young “protesters” in other Western European cities. In the varied panorama of English squatting, other visions also existed. One of the most radical was that of the Marxist student leader Piers Corbyn and his group, who considered the occupation of housing as an instrument of anti-capitalist struggle; however, they soon abandoned the practice in order to commit themselves to providing stable political representation for the interests of the “Squatters and Tenants” of publically owned property, presenting candidates for local elections. ¹³ Another type of protest employed by squatters was the attempt to resist the redevelopment of certain neighborhoods, implemented by city authorities with the demolishment of old buildings in order to build offices or luxury homes. One case was Tolmers Square in London, near Euston Station. ¹⁴

Other, different events included the frequent “waves” of short-term occupations in the seaside town of Brighton that began in the summer of 1969. This was not a permanent political movement, but a succession of influences from various youth subcultures, with a rapid evolution of political and existential sensibilities. ¹⁵

Another phenomenon that fascinated and influenced young Italians in the 1960s and 1970s was the squatting situation in Holland. In particular, in Amsterdam, housing occupation intensified from 1965 to 1966, mainly involving couples who were too young to be allowed access to public housing, and this was followed by the intervention of libertarian and countercultural groups such as the Provos. But it was only in 1969-1970 that housing shortages and the youthful protest movement converged to turn squatting into a movement that was able to mobilize mass demonstrations in the city. ¹⁶ Overall, the occupation phenomenon had a major impact, with more than nine thousand people involved as inhabitants of occupied homes in Amsterdam alone, and about fifty thousand people throughout the whole of Holland. ¹⁷ By the mid-1970s, however, the mass movement had run out of steam, even though small groups of young people continued to occupy some abandoned buildings, either as a strategy to find a home or to create independent spaces for cultural activities. ¹⁸

The Danish squatting experience started up in 1963-1965 in Copenhagen, where old, disused private buildings in the city center were occupied to form a sort of autonomous community (Republic Sofiegården). With the momentum of student protest, in 1968-1971 a radical mass movement (Slumstormerbevægelsen) was formed in Denmark, but it was soon fragmented by ideological disagreements. The minority, and most ideological wing, Marxist-Leninist in tendency, directed its activism toward the local districts, establishing grass-roots organizations to defend the rights of tenants and the quality of life in the suburbs. Others took part in the well-known experience of Christiania, the self-managing community in central Copenhagen. ¹⁹

In Western Germany, squatting (Hausbesetzerbewegung) affected many cities, assuming specific features in each one. ²⁰ Some generalization is still possible: practically all the squatter organizations were hostile toward capitalism and housing as private consumption as part of their program ²¹ and were in favor of creating autonomous spaces where communal life could flourish. Another significant issue is related to the preservation of old buildings. There is the case, for example, of Frankfurt, where the occupation movement managed to bring together different needs and expectations and was also able to involve immigrants, Italians especially. In Frankfurt, from 1970 to 1973, activists banded together to protest against the gentrification of the city center that wanted to turn it into a citadel of financial offices, mobilizing against scarcity of housing and high rents. The occupation of vacant houses, both private and public, involved workers’ families, flanked by a protest movement against rising prices and in favor of the autoreduction of bills and rents. The squatter movement put down strong roots in working-class neighborhoods, and, through bargaining with the local authorities, obtained certain tangible results, such as the introduction of housing cost allowances for urban workers. The Frankfurt movement, however, failed in the original goal the promoters had set themselves, which was to prevent the transformation of the town center into a conglomeration of office blocks. Too many interests were involved, and the value of those areas is too high, for the conservationist intentions of the activists to be acknowledged. By the mid-1970s in Frankfurt, the housing occupation movement was over, and protest was instead focused on issues of high rents and domestic utilities. ²²

The first Italian reactions to these new stimuli from Europe took place in Milan in April 1967, when a few dozen members of the local beatnik culture decided to follow the example of the Dutch Provos. They rented uncultivated land in the southern suburbs of the town in order to set up a tent city and create a space for community life. The initiative was not formally illegal, but people of every political persuasion in Milan were scandalized. The press named the Via Ripamonti encampment Barbonia City (Tramp City) and painted it as a provocation that would undermine Milan’s civil coexistence and decorous lifestyle. In early June, the police destroyed the tent city and charged more than 250 participants, thus putting an end to an experience that had for the first time brought generational conflict to Milan—conflict that was focused mainly on the enormous difficulties involved in finding recreational spaces and accommodation. ²³

The following year Milan became one of the nerve centers of the 1968 student uprising.

One theme that was at first not particularly emphasized within the context of global protests relating to university education was the issue of out-of-town students. There were more than twenty thousand of them in Milan, but only two thousand three hundred beds available in student lodging-houses, and prices were high. ²⁴ The private market was inaccessible due to the inflated prices that had followed the surge in immigration over previous years. The issue of the occupation of buildings that young people could live in thus suddenly convulsed the student movement. The first real squat of the period in Milan started on November 28, 1968, when a few hundred out-of-town students occupied the former Hotel Commercio in the city center’s Piazza Fontana. This was a disused building, owned by the municipality, that was due to be demolished in order for the area to be redeveloped. Some families that had recently been evicted from areas in the center immediately occupied the former hotel and were then joined by artists and exponents of the counterculture. The occupants renamed the building as the Students and Workers’ House and, thanks to the solidarity of the trade union associations of certain companies involved in the social struggle, restored essential services to make the edifice habitable. Meetings were held in the communal areas and cultural initiatives and political debates were promoted in tandem with the students’ movement and those fighting for the rights of social housing tenants and the evicted. The community of the former hotel, supported by many students in the Faculty of Architecture, developed an in-depth analysis of the municipal urban planning policy, criticizing in particular the plan to expel the lower classes from the center in order to make way for offices and luxury shops. Milan’s first squat, in other words, immediately tried to combine the residential requirements of the university students’ proletarian faction with the free expression of the youth community, within the context of a political debate regarding the city’s destiny.

Despite the widespread sympathy of members of the City Council, which had a center-left majority, the occupation of the Hotel Commercio did not really lead anywhere. It was hampered by frequent clashes between the occupants’ “spontaneist” methods of organization and the aspirations of the Marxist-Leninist groups, who wanted to turn the former hotel into a stronghold to bring revolution to the city. After a relentless press campaign, in mid-August 1969, the police forced the occupants out and the hotel was immediately demolished.

From the brief picture given here, it emerges that, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, examples of urban struggle occurred throughout Western Europe. The various experiences of squatting, however, outside the narrow groups of militants who promoted the occupations, lacked the ability to bring social subjects together in a stable and organized manner. The leap in quality in this direction came out of the Italian experience at the beginning of the 1970s, which was able to bring a mass perspective to the housing occupation movement and present a framework for making demands that could promote social and institutional change.

The Housing Crisis in Italy

In Italy, the “urban crisis”—the housing crisis and urban inefficiency—exploded as a matter of political conflict during the period 1968-1969 and intensified in the early 1970s.

Congestion in the cities, the precarious conditions of housing stock, the inadequacy of services, the stagnation of investment in the private construction sector, and the difficulties of municipal finances brought social tension around the housing question to the forefront.

Private-sector construction had slowed down in the second half of the 1960s, after having been responsible, in contrast to the rest of Europe, for building the majority of new housing since 1950. ²⁵ This was made possible by a very favorable tax regime. The result was a housing market primarily aimed at the middle classes, the only ones who could access mortgages to finance the purchase of houses, or who could afford the rents, which were rising faster than both wages and the average prices for consumer goods. ²⁶

The public authorities were struggling to participate in the construction of public housing in a significant way. The difficulties were caused by the lack of success of the housing policies of the first center-left national governments, starting with the failure to reform the urban planning act of 1942, mainly due to resistance from building interests (owners and constructors), who were opposed to any form of restriction. ²⁷ The legislation enacted actually allowed subdivision of plots by private individuals even in the absence of detailed urban planning. The new buildings were mostly located on the outskirts of the city, where land prices were lower, and consequently municipalities had to borrow in order to pay for new infrastructure and services. An initial attempt at reform, implemented with law no. 167 in 1962, allowed municipalities to purchase the areas for primary urbanization and for the construction of public buildings at preferential prices, but the state funding allocated for these operations was inadequate. A new provision in 1967 (law no. 765) finally obliged the municipalities to adopt detailed regulatory plans in accordance with certain national standards, but the law was suspended for one year, during which several new construction permits were granted in derogation of any planning. ²⁸

More than twenty national public bodies (railways, post office, pension and welfare funds, etc.) were involved in the construction of public housing in Italy. In 1963, law no. 60 created GESCAL, a national body financed through automatic deductions from employees’ pay, which invested part of its assets in financing buildings, or more often in the amortization of mortgages contracted by other institutions that constructed “economical” housing, that is, not necessarily destined for the neediest but rather for the middle classes, who could become homeowners through the rent-to-own process (deferred sale with monthly payment). ²⁹ However, property constructed through public financing had a low incidence, which reached its peak around 1961, with 10.3 percent of the stock and, according to the most pessimistic surveys, plummeted to 2.6 percent in 1971. ³⁰

One of GESCAL’s functions was to provide financial support for the work of the IACPs (the Autonomous Institutes of Public Housing), which had been formed at the start of the twentieth century on the initiative of local administrations, in the wake of law no. 254 of 1903. The history of some IACPs was long and full of achievements, and in the early 1970s there were 102 spread throughout Italy. In those years, however, IACPs struggled to find the necessary capital to meet the demand for housing with cheap rents, especially in the large cities. When funding arrived from GESCAL, the envisaged building specifications had prices that were too low for the construction market and the IACPs were thus forced to take on further debts to complete the tenders, turning to the banks and the rather high interest rates that the market imposed. ³¹ This situation slowed down building activity, imposed cuts on the maintenance costs of buildings, and entailed increased expenses for tenants. The construction cost of public housing was further burdened by urban planning expenses: in the 1960s and 1970s, the IACPs only had access to the marginal and peripheral areas of the city, where land was cheaper but where there was a lack of infrastructure and services, which still had to be built. According to the normal market mechanism, the private areas adjacent to new plots allocated to public housing also benefited from public investments for urbanization; hence, these areas increased their value and attracted private investments for new residential building. The “virtuous” aspect of the market, therefore, expanded the demand and supported the construction industry, but its collateral effect was to increase the costs of public housing, occasioning higher rents, and to increase the deficit in the local authorities’ balance sheets. The reasoning is presented here in a somewhat didactic way, but it is pivotal for an understanding of the motivations of the anti-speculation battles against “urban income growth,” which was an important feature for the house occupation movement, and which also permeated the more cautious intentions of the reformist parties. ³²

The cycle of conflict that began in winter 1968-1969 was a sudden acceleration of the struggles against the high rents that had been charged for over a decade, after the abolition of the legal limits on rents established in the post-war period, and was characterized by the rapid mobilization of new social actors and by the practice of new forms of collective action. This transformation initially occurred within the context of the traditional tenants’ associations. The foremost of these organizations was UNIA (the National Union of Tenants and Assignees), which was established nationally in 1964 as a unitary political expression of the trade unions and leading parties of the left. However, other organizations were present, too. In Milan, for example, there was APICEP (the Provincial Association of Public Housing Tenants), which organized the tenants of the IACP houses and was associated with the PCI (Italian Communist Party). There were also spontaneous committees in the neighborhoods of the major cities, the result of activism that involved sympathizers from the parties of the left, social Catholicism, and trade unions: from the mid-1960s they endeavored to act as mediators with the municipal administrations in order to address the difficulties of life in the city outskirts.

The associations of the tenants that had been allocated public housing had on occasion conducted protests involving the autoreduction of rent (by as much as 30%) or the suspension of payment of ancillary expenses. These were mainly demonstrative protests, aimed at inducing the proprietary body to renegotiate the most adverse situations and improve the quality of services; as a longer term goal, the intention was to obtain the tenants’ participation in the management of public housing buildings. The new cycle of struggles took up those same tools again, but also extended them to private homeowners, and, as one of the forms of pressure against high rents and long waiting lists for the allocation of public housing, the practice of squatting was also deployed. The trade union associations called for the symbolic occupation of vacant public buildings as a form of demonstrative struggle. ³³ The outcome of these actions was traditionally identified as a unitary mobilization of protest, which took the form of a national strike in support of housing on November 19, 1969, followed by intense parliamentary efforts and union mobilization to provide a response to the housing problem. ³⁴

The result was the House Reform Act of 1971 (law no. 865), which imposed price controls in the housing market, effectively initiating public intervention in the sector. The law suppressed—at least formally—GESCAL, attempting to bring the general planning of public housing to government level and to organize it operationally at the level of the Regions (which were established in 1970). The legal instruments were then strengthened to allow the municipalities to expropriate building land at controlled prices, but clearly this was not done with sufficient caution, because the numerous disputes that ensued inevitably led to the municipalities capitulating to private individuals. Law no. 865, furthermore, envisaged the “democratisation” of the management of the IACPs, including trade union representation on their boards of directors. However, the aspects of the housing law that had the greatest impact did not become significantly operational until 1981, when more detailed implementation rules were established and financing started to be made available. ³⁵

From the point of view of the unions and the parliamentary left, law no. 865 was an excellent result, because it recognized the importance of the home as a “social service,” hence associating it once more with welfare policies and national economic planning. Thus, in 1972, the tenants’ union UNIA amended its organization (the name became SUNIA) and definitively condemned the practice of illegal occupation, as did the PCI and the PSI (the Italian Socialist Party). The analyses that formed the basis of these attitudes contained important elements of truth. For the unions and the parties of the left, the practice of squatting triggered a war among the poor, slowing down as it did the allocation of public housing. It was also noted that the majority of the operational figures in the illegal occupation movements belonged to the underclass, and that they expressed no general political design more complex than that of solving their own housing needs. ³⁶

In effect, the housing problem had led to the spread of the practice of illegal occupations precisely in the middle in the gestation period of law no. 865. In Rome, in particular, the movement had taken on mass characteristics, with the apolitical underclass as a dominant presence. In the early 1970s, three thousand apartments were illegally occupied in the capital, mostly in outlying areas, and thousands of other citizens practiced the “total autoreduction” of their rent. The struggles were led by a myriad of self-governed committees, often supported by organizations of the extra-parliamentary left (Lotta Continua [LC], Avanguardia Operaia [AO], and later also Autonomia Operaia), who, however, could not be called the real political protagonists of a movement that was largely spontaneous and not always coordinated. The most emblematic outcomes of that period in Rome were the occupations in the San Basilio district between the winter of 1973 and the tragic days of September 5 to 8, 1974, when, following evictions by the police, a bloody battle broke out in the neighborhood. Shots were fired both by the police and by groups of protesters, leading to the death of one of the protesters and several casualties. ³⁷

The history of the housing occupation movements in Rome would also witness other manifestations of the problem, now covered in a detailed historiography. ³⁸ Let us, however, turn our attention to what was occurring in Milan at the same time, in order to illustrate both the distinctive and autonomous nature of this experience.

Milan: The Housing Shortage and the Social Actors Involved

Most of the demographic growth in Milan took place between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1960s: the population rose from 1.2 million inhabitants to 1.58 (in 1961), and then passed the 1.7 million in 1971. Growth was just as intense throughout the metropolitan area (the province), which had fewer than two million inhabitants in 1951 and more than three million in 1971. ³⁹ The increase in population was accompanied by significant real estate development: in 1951, the city had just more than one million residential units, which rose to more than 1.5 million in 1961 and to 1.85 million ten years later. Growth in the entire urban territory was even more striking, rising from 2.1 million in 1961 to 3.1 million in 1971 (a percentage greater than the demographic growth itself).

Most of the construction was carried out by the private sector: in cities, by large real estate companies and in the province mainly by small building firms. Public housing, however, was on average more active in Milan than in the rest of Italy: at least 15 percent of the new constructions in the city were built with public intervention (construction or financing). ⁴⁰ The main player in Milan public housing was the IACP, which was managing four hundred fifteen thousand premises in 1970. The majority of these were built with the construction logic of the self-sufficient neighborhood, hence located in outlying areas, which meant that that the association incurred enormous urbanization costs. ⁴¹ Furthermore, in order to build, the IACP was obliged to borrow from the banks, a further item to add to the burden of the rents. ⁴²

However, the IACP was not able to meet the growing demand for social housing. In the early 1970s, there were thirty-seven thousand unprocessed applications for social housing in Milan: these were not homeless people, but mainly families who were no longer able to afford private-market rents. ⁴³ Almost a fifth of the applicants were still living in lower class city center neighborhoods, without indoor toilets or effective heating systems, sometimes even without running water. They were the victims of the gentrification of the city center, which property speculation had triggered and which would be brought to completion over the following decades. There were almost two hundred thousand privately owned premises in the city, left without maintenance and in conditions of extreme dilapidation, given that their owners wanted to empty them and put them on the market, converted into luxury homes or tertiary housing. The city center population actually began to decrease: 5.3 percent of the population lived there in 1951, but only 2 percent in 1971, despite the significant demographic growth. ⁴⁴

It is extremely difficult to quantify what the overall housing needs in the city and its surrounding territory were, as the estimates of the time were incompatible with one another and often ideologically oriented. According to one cautious estimate from ISTAT, in 1971 the demand was for one hundred seventy to two hundred thousand premises (three hundred fifty to four hundred fifty thousand for the metropolitan area overall); a few years later, the urban planning program for the Milan area calculated this need at around five hundred fifty thousand premises, one hundred ninety thousand of which were needed extremely urgently. ⁴⁵ The City Council, political parties, and city newspapers were quickly inflamed by the political controversy centered around vacant housing. According to SUNIA, this numbered around thirty-six thousand premises; ⁴⁶ market prices, however, made balancing supply and demand a very difficult matter for the working and lower-middle classes.

A political battle broke out over the numbers. According to Lotta Continua, in the mid-1970s in Milan, there were four hundred thousand workers available to occupy vacant houses. While the figure itself is implausible, the calculation is quite an interesting one, attempting as it does to include in the housing demands the requests of young people intent on “affirming their independence from the family.” ⁴⁷

The seriousness of the housing situation had in effect made it difficult to grasp some of the newer features of the overall demand for housing, created by the evolution of society: above all, with reference to young people, whose position at the center of things had been developing ever since the era of student rebellion. The institution of social housing itself, however, had been conceived exclusively for families with children. In contrast to West Germany, France, and England, studio flats were not constructed as social housing, and even the private market imposed minimum dimensions well above European standards and beyond the needs—and the means—of young couples. ⁴⁸ Every other non-traditional form of cohabitation—from homosexual families to communes—were not take into consideration by the projects of the various political forces, not even those of the extra-parliamentary left, until at least the second half of the 1970s. ⁴⁹

It was in Milan that the new wave of housing protest marked more clearly than elsewhere its break with the past. The most significant innovation did not concern the methods, but rather the social actors involved, comprising the lower segments of the middle-class, highly unionized and politicized workers, students, and exponents of alternative cultures. Compared with situations such as Rome, the participation of the subproletariat was less evident. This kind of multi-class participation, and the dissimilar expectations and cultures involved, also posed new problems for the squatter movement. In fact, from the point of view of the most politicized factions, the urban struggle was also conceived as a political laboratory that was an extension of the factory struggle “within society.” Nevertheless, the dynamics of a socially composite movement, such as the one created around squatting, were not the same as those of the factory struggle, involving different practices and hopes in one specific area, which only sporadically gave rise to the objective identified by the legendary slogan “Let’s take over the city.” ⁵⁰

The political flaw of the political squatting movement of Milan in those years lay squarely in its weak links with the workers’ struggle. ⁵¹ While occupations were often carried out with the involvement of worker activists, the entire movement found itself in difficulty above all in comprehending the different rhythms of urban social struggle, which were unhampered by a rigid ideological harness.

In short, political squatting was the mass manifestation of differing needs. Many people, especially among the student population, formed their identities as adults, citizens and militants in occupations, and they sought an experience of communal life in squatting, in order to feel part of a group of equals, following a path into politics that was both adventurous and romantic. ⁵² Together with these figures, there were members of the proletariat who had lost their homes through eviction for falling behind on rent, or who could not wait the long periods required before the allocation of social housing. It was, in any case, a fairly insignificant minority of the needy that engaged in this radical form of struggle.

From Rent Strikes to Housing Occupation

From 1970 onwards, the housing occupation struggle in Milan developed above all on the basis of two different social conditions: social housing tenants and the evicted accommodated in reception centers. Mobilization was promoted by militants of the radical left.

The tenants’ struggle had already been developing for several years in the broader context of the defense of wages against the erosion caused by the high cost of living. In 1968 in Quarto Oggiaro, an outlying IACP district populated by nearly forty thousand people, the tenants decided to reject the rent increase established by the proprietary body and initiated what was then defined for the first time as a “rent strike.” The struggle was implemented in different ways: some tenants decided not to pay the increase applied, some simply stopped paying, and some groups chose to align their rent with a symbolic percentage of 10 percent of the head of the household’s monthly wage. The initiative, which began with the backing of the traditional tenants’ associations, was above all demonstrative in nature; however, it lasted for more than a year and a half and was quite successful, involving almost 40 percent of the IACP tenants in Quarto Oggiaro. ⁵³ Then, in 1970, it also spread to other peripheral districts. Not all of these were predominantly proletarian in composition: in Gallaratese (a zone in the northwest of Milan), for example, the social housing inhabitants were primarily lower-middle-class white-collar workers. Overall, around 18 to 20 percent of the tenants of the districts involved in the struggle practiced some form of rent strike, costing the IACP around five billion lire a year. ⁵⁴

The movement expanded further into the working-class belt of the city in 1970-1971, where one-fifth of the IACP tenants practiced rent autoreduction. ⁵⁵ The main artificer of this struggle was the Unione Inquilini (UI; the Tenants’ Union), founded in 1968 and consisting of militants from the radical left. ⁵⁶ The UI lacked centralized management, a characteristic that was an attraction toward its initiatives, but the organization was not able to exercise effective coordination between the various neighborhoods in the struggle, nor to connect the housing struggle with the workers’ initiative in the factories.

The practice of the rent strike, meanwhile, extended throughout the city, also taking in some working-class neighborhoods closer to the center (Paolo Sarpi, Porta Romana), where it was used against private landlords, mostly large real estate companies. To extend the struggle further, some LC activists managed to mobilize a group of homeless families who were housed in municipal shelters for the evicted, and in September 1970 they occupied a rent-to-own IACP building in the Gallaratese district. ⁵⁷ The practice of illegal occupations by evicted people was fairly common, but these were isolated initiatives which sometimes even led to an agreement with the IACP; this time, the maneuver had political intentions, with the ambition of expanding the front in the housing struggle. The collective occupation in Gallaratese only lasted one day and the eviction led to violent clashes with the police. However, a new front had indeed been opened and its watchword was the right to a home, with several hundred tenants and activists ready to “defend” the occupations and oppose the police. The occupation in Gallaratese was repeated on Christmas Eve 1970, with the same outcome: immediate eviction and violent clashes, while the fifteen occupying families took refuge in the student residence, the Casa dello Studente. The ground was also prepared on a symbolic level, with the linking of the desperate needs of the homeless with student activism.

In January 1971, 25 families of evicted people occupied an IACP building in Via Mac Mahon, in the northwestern Ghisolfa district, a neighborhood of social housing where construction had begun at the start of the twentieth century. The occupied house was a building that was not yet complete, intended for middle-class tenants through the rent-to-own process. In this case, too, encouragement and support for the occupation had come from young members of LC, and the latter joined the fray against the police, who were swiftly on the scene. The family heads arrested in Via Mac Mahon received summary trials and were, unexpectedly, unconditionally acquitted by the magistrates; the municipality then arranged for social housing apartments to be allocated to them. ⁵⁸

The success of the Via Mac Mahon experience induced some sectors of the extra-parliamentary left to make squatting their main weapon in the urban struggle. In truth, the tenants’ associations were considerably more cautious about a struggle that united the anger of the homeless and the spotlight-seeking of certain extreme left groups. In Milan, the urgency to obtain a house and the willingness to resort to radical action involved perhaps a few hundred evicted people who were still in municipality reception centers. However, it also involved the search for independence of several thousand young immigrants, mostly males, who actually had jobs but, as regards accommodation, could only find very modest lodgings or rooms to rent with three or four beds crammed into them and exorbitant rents charged. ⁵⁹ In this milieu, the LC’s bold attitude ended up prevailing, and they assembled a considerable operational force from the avant-garde revolutionary workers’ movements in certain factories (Pirelli, OM, Magneti Marelli, Fargas), together with other groups from the student movement and the Catholic left (ACLI—the Christian Associations of Italian Workers), once again raising the level of the conflict with the occupation of Viale Tibaldi, starting on June 1, 1971.

It was an experience that would be celebrated in the collective imagination of Milan’s protest movements, ⁶⁰ and it did, in fact, present some innovative characteristics and conclude with certain important concession. However, it also led to the tragic death of a child, intoxicated by the gas fired by police during the eviction. ⁶¹ The target of the occupation was a building that had not yet been completed, located on the ring road but not far from the center. Built by the IACP in an area where old social housing had been demolished, it was due to be sold on rent-to-own terms to middle-class tenants. The group of occupants rapidly grew to a total of 75 families; there were families of militant workers, many young couples with children, and retired elderly people. More than in any other previous situation of this kind, the social background of the occupants was highly diversified; also present were dozens of young militants, on hand to provide defense. During the course of the brief occupation, a series of initiatives also took shape, which aimed to establish the experience on a community basis ⁶² : a medical clinic and a nursery for the children were opened and a communal canteen was set up. More actively than in the past, support was sought from the neighborhood population and above all from the factories in the area, which were still numerous. Eviction, however, was not long in coming, on June 5, and the occupants took refuge in the Polytechnic, at the invitation of the students and the Board of the Faculty of Architecture. ⁶³ They were then also evicted from this new haven by the police, who launched a military takeover of the university. This time, it was the ACLI Catholics who took in the occupants, while, in the city, mobilization reached its broadest consensus in a mass demonstration in favor of housing rights (June 12). This was attended by far left, progressive Catholic and trade union organizations (but not by either the PCI or PSI). ⁶⁴ The center-left municipality was forced to respond to the situation, and assigned a house to all the occupant families at a rent commensurate with the income of the family head (10%-15% of their salary, as requested by the organizations involved in the struggle).

However, the housing situation was still critical. In Milan, there were two hundred thousand residents in fifty-seven thousand dwellings that were essentially uninhabitable, primarily in run-down areas in the center or the old suburbs (the Romana, Ticinese, Padova, Sempione, and Garibaldi districts). ⁶⁵ Then there were the young people without families and the many students whose militancy in the occupation movement had allowed them to develop conditions of community life outside the parental home or away from their dreary student lodgings.

After Viale Tibaldi, there was a lull in mass occupations; or rather, there were no conspicuous events, but instead a steady trickle of small, primarily symbolic occupations. ⁶⁶ The main organizations of the far left attempted to strengthen their presence in the neighborhoods, even participating in the Consigli di zona (local councils), decentralized bodies of municipal administration. These, however, were dominated by the political majority of the municipal council.

On the housing front, the political objective had become the reform of law no. 865/1971 and decree no. 1035 of 1972, which established the regulations for the allocation of social housing, but which set the rents on the basis of thresholds that were too high—according to the tenants’ movement—because the “fair profit” of the IACP was something that continued to be acknowledged, being given more weight than the “right to housing” of the working classes. ⁶⁷ And so criticism of the “urban income growth” returned, finding further expression in the theoretical elaborations of Architecture students and professors, who challenged the city’s urban planning policy. ⁶⁸

The confrontation over housing took on new characteristics in the struggle against the gentrification of the city center, creating the conditions for merging with the union struggles, because the process of “valorisation” of the city center also involved the closure and demolition of the premises of certain local companies situated in central areas, whose disused land was now the object of property speculation. The most emblematic case was that of the centrally located Garibaldi district, ⁶⁹ its mixed social composition comprising families of long-settled proletariat, local artisans with their workshops, low-income pensioners, young people in makeshift accommodation, members of the middle class and intellectuals. The protests against the redevelopment schemes, implemented by leaving buildings to decay so that they could be demolished and then rebuilt, had begun in 1969, when they also involved rent strikes, mostly relating to private property companies that were purchasing the apartment buildings. All the parties represented in the City Council declared themselves favorable to solutions that would avoid the expulsion of the inhabitants and called for restoration interventions at the expense of the municipality. However, no incisive action was taken and the Council of State rejected the municipality’s attempts to expropriate the buildings on Corso Garibaldi in order to commence redevelopment. ⁷⁰ Then, in 1972, construction sites for the underground railway were opened in the neighborhood, making several interventions and some demolitions a matter of urgency. Faced with this perspective, a new front was opened in the struggle, adopting an explicitly anti-capitalist orientation and based on the refusal of the very concept of urban regeneration. ⁷¹ The solution proposed was self-management of the neighborhood by the inhabitants, and the main tool was summarized in the slogan: “proletarian rent = 10% of wage,” to oblige the owners to carry out the necessary renovations. It was an example of a struggle to preserve the original features of an old neighborhood, something that until that moment had not been of interest to the Milan housing movement. Even though far from the revolutionary projects of those years, in the long run the results were not insignificant: starting from 1981, the municipality’s agreements with the building companies and large real estate owners made it possible to launch the redevelopment of the district. ⁷² Thus, for a few decades, the disintegration of the variegated social milieu of the Garibaldi district slowed down; despite this, by the end of the century, it had lost all the characteristics of a working-class settlement.

In general, the Milan housing movement was never really able to activate conservationist struggles as a practice in historic neighborhoods. The revolutionary left organizations, which gradually abandoned the “take over the city” slogan, tended instead to consider the occupation of buildings as an exemplary act, rather than an operation that was actually capable of reaching lasting objectives, if not in terms of mobilization. On the other hand, the UI did not seem able to link its occupations to broader mobilization involving entire neighborhoods, which had socially mixed compositions. In short, it was not possible to combine the requirements of the “needy” elements who were in search of a home with the difficulties of those who had homes, but in run-down buildings and neighborhoods, or with the various protest initiatives that continued to flourish in local districts around themes relating to quality of life (green spaces, services, etc.). Every demonstrative action and every activity involving the neighborhoods in the struggle required the constant presence of professional activists, which in turn triggered rivalries between the various far left groups; it was a situation that led that to a reduction in occupations as an instrument of struggle.

In the spring of 1974, a new impulse in the occupation movement began to concern itself with the large number of vacant apartments (there were more than thirty-five thousand in the city). ⁷³ In March, a committee of aspiring public housing recipients—approximately 650 families—supported by the main extra-parliamentary left and ACLI organizations, occupied a building complex in Via Marx in the western suburb of Baggio. The condominiums, totalling one thousand hundred apartments, had been built for the managers and employees of large public companies, but allocations were very slow, and the criteria involved rather questionable. ⁷⁴ The aim was to keep attention focused on the delays in social housing policy and to bring the “anger of the workers” back into the city at a moment when conflict in the city factories was at a low ebb. ⁷⁵ Several of the family heads of the occupants were employed by the companies and organizations to which the allocations were due, ⁷⁶ and many others were militant workers in large factories in Milan. This social composition resulted in more careful management of the movement, at least in its intentions. The organizing committee maintained contacts with the factory councils of several companies, obtaining their solidarity and support for the protest marches that were organized in the city center throughout the spring.

There were too many occupying families for the apartments that were already habitable, and to avoid obstructing the construction site, causing interruption to the works and a freeze on the wages of construction workers, the committee also identified another objective. On March 27, other apartment blocks were occupied in Via Cilea, in the Gallaratese district. The complex, of around five hundred homes, had (almost) been completed by the private company Monte Amiata, which had obtained building permits from the municipality with a mandate to build affordable housing. The construction, planned primarily by the architect Carlo Aymonino, a well-known professional and member of the PCI, had none of the traditional features of social housing. ⁷⁷ Rather than the achievement of a new vision of this kind of habitation, in the occupants’ opinion it was a matter of speculation—the construction, in other words, of luxury apartment blocks in an area restricted to cheap housing. A group of occupants also presented a complaint to the judiciary in relation to this situation, ⁷⁸ the manifestation of one of the multiple currents involved in the occupation, intended as it was to accompany demonstrative action with legal initiatives. A further element was the intention to make use of union support to negotiate with the municipality for the allocation of social housing to the occupants. The large group of young people supporting the occupation, however, seemed more intent on coming to blows with the police. The occupation committee, organized with delegates from each staircase and each building, took all these sensitivities into account and tried to work out a synthesis ⁷⁹ —a difficult operation that paralyzed every other initiative to link the occupation together with the neighborhood, where many social protest groups were active. ⁸⁰

However, on April 4, the police evicted the occupants from the complex in Via Marx; no major incidents were reported, given that most of the occupants already intended to move to Via Cilea. In the Gallaratese district as a whole, though, the number of occupying families decreased over the following weeks, when it emerged that there could be no satisfactory solution to the struggle. On May 2, with a substantial deployment of police forces, the Via Cilea complex was cleared; the eviction marked the de facto end of the mass movement. ⁸¹

The most significant response of the municipal institutions to these new episodes of occupations with mass characteristics came a year later. On April 29, 1975, in its final hearing before the elections, the City Council approved the “Velluto Plan,” named after the city planning councilor. The plan aimed to improve infrastructure in the outlying districts and to make available affordable housing with eighty thousand dwellings, in particular through the refurbishment of run-down buildings. This was an important decision, but its achievement would also turn out to be a very troubled process. ⁸² This new period of municipal interventionism was certainly influenced by the social pressure of housing occupation, even though many of the participants in the movement had nurtured other ambitions of social transformation.

The Conclusion of a Cycle (and New Scenarios)

This article has illustrated the circulation within Europe and the reception in Italy of housing occupation as a form of struggle adaptable to different circumstances and different political objectives. In Milan, the spread of this practice in the early 1970s was promoted by the need for non-traditional dwellings, something that mainly interested the younger generation influenced by student protest. While the presence of traditional families was significant, it was much less numerous than in Rome. The families constituted above all the “mass of manoeuvre” of the occupation movement, whose objectives were chosen with little attention to the occupants’ needs, but rather to demonstrate the vitality and mobilization capacity of the social movement. Yet, the mass dimension that the occupations assumed was made possible by the scarcity of rental housing for the most recent influx of immigrants, and also by the form of the urban real estate market which, due to the very high prices, made it difficult for single-income working-class families and the lower segments of the middle classes to access housing.

The practice of squatting was deployed in many directions, following the traditions of housing occupation in other European cities. More often than in other situations in Italy, extra-parliamentary left-wing organizations firmly committed themselves to these struggles, sometimes even in competition with one another, as they sought hegemony over the “movement,” which was showing signs of weakening within the factories.

The period of squatting described here achieved certain important contingent results in Milan, such as agreements for granting public housing to occupants, and also results at an institutional level, with the active commitment of the municipal administration and the development of social participation in public housing neighborhoods. The revolutionary aspect was a failure, however, despite being long fuelled by the ideological rhetoric of left-wing groups. The periodization of the cycles of struggle was once again marked by the economic situation.

From the mid-1970s, there was less conflict in the factories, ⁸³ this being the main point of reference for every extreme left initiative in the city. The new economic phase reduced immigration to Milan and thus reduced pressure on the real estate market of cheap housing, which became sufficient to respond to lower-middle class demand. This particular social segment therefore lost all interest in the housing struggle. ⁸⁴

Finally, the Milanese squatting period failed to establish a long-lasting recognition of the needs of young people. ⁸⁵ A separation between the oligarchic strategies of the organizing groups of the housing occupations and young people, who constituted the main operational mass, was a phenomenon common to other European situations, but it was less evident in Rome, where there was a considerable underclass base—a base that had dramatic requirements for survival and that was homeless.

In Milan, the housing issue gradually returned into the hands of the trade union organizations of tenants assigned to public housing, who ended up incorporating certain instances of the occupation period, proposing their own (restrictive) interpretation of rent commensurate with income. ⁸⁶

Squatting did not disappear as a form of struggle, but its characteristics and ambitions altered; essentially, it became more fragmented, but more widespread, managing to keep social alarm high without making possible meaningful steps forward in the political movement that supported it. The phenomenon still awaits more precise quantification, which in those years not even the police were able to provide. ⁸⁷ In most cases, only a few apartments were occupied, mainly by young people. The areas affected were those bordering on the center, in run-down buildings that had been abandoned by their tenants for this reason. When the occupation seemed to stabilize—in the wake of negotiations with the owner of the building—the squatters’ community life began with a basic renovation of the apartments, attempting above all to consolidate the privacy aspect.

Occupations were increasingly rarely connected with the extreme left organizations that grew out of 1968, and fewer attempts were made to establish links with the struggle in the factories. This proletariato giovanile (young proletariat), ⁸⁸ which still occupied vacant premises in the second half of the 1970s, acted above all in order to find themselves a dwelling place within the context of movements produced by alternative existential requirements: generational rebellion, feminism, ecology, anti-consumerism, the arts, and, for some, the drug culture. Their intention was to intervene with regard to these issues in terms of the problems of the neighborhoods, ⁸⁹ thus moving into the spaces that the parliamentary left had deserted and that were also gradually abandoned by the revolutionary left. This was a brief, convulsive period, which re-elaborated, from an exclusively youthful point of view, the preceding period of struggle involving housing occupation. It marked the transition toward the longer-lasting era of the spread of occupied social centers that would begin at the end of the 1970s. ⁹⁰