What characterizes meaningful initiatives and policies for the inclusion of refugees? SIforREF developed a tool box with clear indicators to assess this question. Crucial: Policies and Practices must empower the target group to help themselves rather than creating dependencies on services provided to them. Lucà Katya is SIforREF Board Member and Delegate for Social Inclusion in the Municipality of Parma. In our latest blog post, she writes about the relevance of housing autonomy and the city's approach to empower refugees in this field.
Ms. Katya, how is refugee inclusion and the issue of housing linked for you?
Supporting the empowerment of refugees is fundamental in order to ensure their full achievement of autonomy, avoiding losing the progress achieved during the reception phase and ending up in conditions of serious marginalization. In particular, the achievement of housing autonomy is
crucial, as it is a fundamental step in their integration process. The
theme of the house is central in the lives of refugees, in order to find
stability in current life and for the symbolic value it holds,
considering that they are people forced to abandon their loved ones and
their home.
Could you emphazise a bit more on this role housing autonomy is having
in the process of refugee inclusion?
The
fact of having lost one's home has a shocking impact on people's
ability to put back together the fragments of one’s own identity and to
reconnect relational tissues. The house is above all something
extremely concrete and tangible, a place anchored to recognizable and
emotionally connoted spatial elements. The rooms in which we grew up,
the street on which our balcony overlooked, are all images indelibly
imprinted in the memory of those who have abandoned those places, and
the fact that they may no longer exist in the present does nothing but
relegate them with even greater intensity in an idealized past. At the
same time, however, the house transcends the simple physical space, and
acquires an intangible, imaginary character, which transforms it into a
symbolic dimension. It is not only the concrete space inhabited by an
individual or a family, but on the contrary it becomes one of the
fundamental images of humanity, a place around which strong feelings
are aggregated. In the home the person can experience the connection
with strong identity elements, both individual and collective, and
receives that sense of protection and security that will allow him to
face the difficulties of life.
From the point of view of
international law, various forms of protection are envisaged, such as
the Convention on the Status of Refugees, which establishes that
refugees must be granted the most favorable treatment possible in terms
of access to homes, and in any case, a treatment no less favorable
than that granted, in the same circumstances, to foreigners in general.
Although the international and internal regulatory sources guarantee
different forms of protection, the annual reports on Italian reception
systems show that there are many obstacles in achieving housing
autonomy. In 2018, for example, less than 5% of refugees welcomed in
Italy benefited from an accommodation grant at the end of the reception
program (SPRAR / SIPROIMI annual report. Atlante SIPROIMI 2018).
Refugees, who in the vast majority of cases do not have the economic
resources to buy a house, are unlikely to be able to access public
housing and are therefore forced to seek accommodation in the private
market, experiencing situations of strong discrimination. This
contributes to increasing the risk of marginalization.
How does the municipality of Parma address the issue of housing autonomy?
In
the Municipality of Parma there are various measures to support the
housing inclusion of all foreign citizens, and in general of subjects
in marginal conditions. Among these there are measures to stem the
housing emergency, contributions for the rent, contributions for the
"innocent arrears" ... But it is important to underline that, alongside
the canonical measures, it is necessary to promote practices of
social innovation that involve refugees and entire community, and
which allow a process of growth in civil society. In Parma various
best practices have been carried out in this sense: family welcome,
co-housing projects between young refugees and young Italians, etc ...
The interesting aspect of these innovative practices is that they not
only respond to the needs expressed by both groups (eg the need for
housing and social networks for refugees, the desire for autonomy from
the family in young Italians), but they also allow to generate a
change in the mentality of the local community.