01/10/2025
ENGLISH
Article: publication
Journal and no.: Environment & Urbanization, 37(2)
Camillo Boano, Manuel Grimaldi, Stefano Mastromarino, Richard Lee Peragine, Antonio Stopani
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.
Link to the article: Environment & Urbanization
Cite: Boano, C., Grimaldi, M., Mastromarino, S., Peragine, R. L., & Stopani, A. (2025). The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia. Environment & Urbanization, 37(2), 552-573. https://doi.org/10.1177/09562478251362623
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Keywords: PNRR, design politics, Borgo Mezzanone
Period: September 2023-October 2025
Project: Camp Form(s); REFRAME
Inappropriable is a research, a collective investigation and a condition of possibility which sets out to interrogate practices of inhabitation, infrastructures of life, of marronage and fugitive worldling, focusing on labour ecologies in territories of migration: frontiers where bodies, spaces and labour are reconfigured through extractive and plantation-like capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion.