Due to the specificity of housing as a welfare good, debates on housing, citizenship, and rights are complex and often confusing. This article examines rights-based approaches in the field of housing, shelter, and homelessness. It focuses on the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘socially constructed’ rights and suggests that a third way may be found by using Martha Nussbaum’s ‘central human capabilities’ approach as a foundation for universal human rights. ‘Citizenship’ is proposed as a conceptual bridge between the philosophical discourse on rights and its practical application at the national or international level. For this purpose, T.H. Marshall’s classic division between ‘civil’ and ‘social’ citizenship rights can be translated into a distinction between ‘legal rights’ to housing (individuals’ formal rights to a dwelling of a certain standard) and ‘programmatic rights to housing’ (what general housing standard members of certain society can legitimately expect). The paper tries to demonstrate that it is possible to object to natural and human rights in the housing field, and still be in favor of clearly delimited ‘positive’ legal rights to housing for homeless people. Conversely, one may be in sympathy with the discourse of universal moral rights, but be skeptical about individually enforceable legal rights, particularly with respect to the potential for such selective rights to stigmatize their ‘beneficiaries’.

The Long Way Home – access to housing, rights, and social inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees in Turin, Italy. This paper deals with the relationship between access to housing and social inclusion through the case of asylum seekers and refugees in Turin, Italy. The absence of a formal pattern of spatial segregation i.e. refugee camps in Western countries should facilitate the process of social inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees. However, other obstacles and more subtle forms of exclusion make their path far from being granted.

In most European countries, access to housing is a central step in the process of social inclusion. It is in fact a precondition for the actual exercise of the social rights they are entitled to by law. The paper argues that this system leads to indirect forms of socio-spatial exclusion, especially in the absence of adequate policies of access to housing.

To develop this argument, the paper analyses the case of asylum seekers and refugees in Turin, Italy. Notwithstanding the current regulation, they struggle to access adequate housing. Precarious forms of accommodation, such as in public shelters and squats, are experienced even for years. The resulting impossibility of registering with the municipality prevents them from accessing the other rights they are entitled to. Mainly using qualitative data collected in the last 5 years on asylum seekers, refugees, representatives of public institutions, and social organizations, this paper thus discusses the sensitive relationship between access to housing, social inclusion, and refugees’ rights. It unveils narratives and logics embedded in national and local policies and it examines actions and practices of claim, empowerment, and alternative re-appropriation of the idea of being at home.

Much has been written about the way in which global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space, and the global economy. Less analysis has been undertaken about how this reconfiguration stamps the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national welfare states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses and are incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of the global economic order. At the same time property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney see not only an increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it.

Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer ‘performances of citizenship’ and an approach to distribution and rights, including the right to housing, which reflects Wacquant’s characterization of a “Centaur-state that practices liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom” Wacquant, 2012: 66.