Boano, Camillo;
Grimaldi, Manuel;
Mastromarino, Stefano;
Peragine, Richard Lee;
Stopani, Antonio;
(2025)
The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia.
Environment & Urbanization
, 37
(2)
pp. 552-573.
10.1177/09562478251362623.
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Abstract
This paper critically examines the socio-technical assistance practices and design politics involved in the eradication of migrant farmworker ghettos in Capitanata, southern Italy, with particular attention to the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone. In a context shaped by migratory regimes of control and agricultural labour exploitation, government-led interventions are sustaining projects aimed at the ‘overcoming of informal settlements’ in the area. Drawing on long-term ethnography and activist research, the paper interrogates the technocratic logic and depoliticizing frameworks underpinning such interventions and reveals how they fail to account for the social, economic and political complexity of these territories. By confronting the epistemological and operational assumptions behind the project of ‘overcoming’, we call for design politics rooted in accountability and adjacency. The case of the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone serves to question dominant spatial imaginaries, highlighting how these settlements function as spaces of precarity and exclusion, but also of belonging, shaping imagined futures.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/09562478251362623 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/09562478251362623 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | ghettos, informal rural settlements, migrant farmworker, Puglia |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Development Planning Unit |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10220032 |
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