Urban poverty in Italy

The chapter describes the incidence and features of poverty in the ten largest Italian cities. Exploiting the bulk of existing research, the chapter discusses how poverty is produced in each city, stressing the connection between the social organization of the urban life – including the economy, the social dynamics, the social fabric, the local politics – and the triggering of individual and household trajectories of impoverishment. Following an analysis based on maps that show how the disadvantaged population is more or less concentrated is some areas of each city, the situation of the three largest ones – Milan, Naples and Rome – is described in more detail. These three cities are very different from each other: Milan is the wealthiest city of the country, and here poverty transforms typically in social exclusion, while Naples is the ideal-typical case of Mediterranean city with a large diffusion of “integrated poverty”, but also of disqualified poverty and urban segregation. Rome is an immense territory with large dispersed and often isolated peripheries (the so-called borgate) where a highly vulnerable and variegated population live often in conflict with each other.