New article in Cities: Local practices addressing migrants’ housing precarity

📄 The article is available in free access until 12 September 2026 at the this link

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article by Giovanna Marconi in Cities, one of the leading international journals in urban studies.

Local practices addressing migrants’ housing precarity: Evidence from the Veneto Region, Italy investigates the structural causes of migrants’ housing exclusion and analyses how innovative local initiatives can help improve access to adequate housing through new forms of governance, intermediation and collaboration between public institutions and civil society.

The article builds on several years of action-research carried out by the IUAV-SSIIM UNESCO Chair and brings together evidence generated through a number of European projects, including CapaCityMetro-Italia, IMPACT Veneto, POLIS, and PUSH – Precarious Housing in Europe. These projects provided the empirical basis for extensive fieldwork, stakeholder engagement, policy dialogue and the identification of innovative housing practices across the Veneto Region.

The paper argues that migrants’ housing precarity is not simply the consequence of individual vulnerability, but the outcome of structural housing shortages, institutional arrangements and discriminatory mechanisms embedded in both the private rental market and public housing systems. At the same time, it shows how locally grounded initiatives can partially counteract these dynamics, while highlighting the need to scale up successful practices through more coherent multi-level housing policies.