ABSTRACT
In November 2013, the Municipality of Turin, historically left-wing, issued an invitation to tender for the ‘Implementation of actions in favour of the Roma population’. The document contained an overall strategy to ‘overcome the critical aspects of [Roma] settlements, both the authorised and the non-authorised ones’ (Comune di Torino, 2013a, p. 4). The contract was finally assigned to the project ‘The possible city’, proposed by a group of six local associations, some of which had previously worked with Roma people in marginal conditions. According to the tender, the biggest illegal Roma settlement, called ‘Lungo Stura’ and located on the edges of the Stura River, where nearly 800 Romanian Roma lived, was supposed to disappear. With this aim, the project foresaw the social and housing integration of the people living there. This integration included the rehousing into the private rental market or into self-renovated farms in Turin and its surroundings, and also an assisted return to Romania. In the latter case, Romanian local associations would take charge of the reintegration of the families who went back. The total public funding for the project was 5,000,000 euros.2 On 26 February 2015, an unexpected eviction took place in the Lungo Stura settlement. Two hundred people were forced to leave by the police just before the bulldozer came to destroy their shacks and caravans: no resistance was put up to the eviction, either by the Roma living there or by local associations.
