Self-managed social centres in Italy
The centres (Italian: centri sociali) tend to be squatted and provide self-organised, self-financing spaces for alternative and noncommercial activities such as concerts, exhibitions, farmers' markets, infoshops, and migrant initiatives.
Self-managed social centres were first occupied in the mid-1970s in cities such as Milan by groups of young people, both students and unemployed.
[1] The social centres in Milan were used for diverse activities such as concerts, films, yoga classes, discussion groups and counselling for drug addicts.
[1] Two factors which helped the wave spread were the well-publicised eviction resistance (and subsequent resquat) of Leoncavallo in Milan and the Panther student movement.
[3] What linked these political and cultural projects was the fact that they were squatted, their focus on self-management and self-financing, and the use of the space as a social venue for the local community.
[1] Legalization can create problems, since forming an association imposes hierarchy on a previously horizontally organized collective and also contracts tend to be for a fixed time period and can be hard to renew.
Therefore, in the 2010s, some projects such as Teatro Valle Occupato (Rome), XM24 (Bologna), and Macao (Milan), have attempted to promote new, more flexible forms of legalization, with varying degrees of success.
[4] Social centres provide cheap DIY venues for many alternative forms of music, including punk and Italian hardcore.
In the 1990s, the rap group Assalti Frontali built a recording studio at Forte Prenestino and 99 Posse were associated with Officina 99 in Naples.
[9] Famous street artist Blu has been connected with the centre since its beginning and supported it in the fight against eviction by painting a huge mural on a neighbouring building which was scheduled to be demolished.
[12] Genoa's LSOA Buridda, first squatted in 2003, offered open space for exercise, sports, art workshops, and other cultural events.
Its influences were originally punk, trade unionism, and Calusca, the last being a local libertarian bookshop and library which then became based at the project.
[17] The T28 social centre was squatted in 1975 and houses the Ambulatorio Medico Popolare, a free medical clinic that had treated over 5,000 people by 2018.
In 2017, the city council decided it wanted to sell the complex of buildings known as Ortomercato (which includes the Macao site) for redevelopment.
[22] As of 1999, other social centres in Naples included Lo Ska (Laboratorio Occupato di Sperimentazione e Kultura Antagonista) and DAMM (Diego Armando Maradona Montesanto).
[25] Metropoliz is a refugee squat occupied in 2009 that took the unusual step of opening a contemporary art gallery in 2012 as a means for the artists to support the squatters.
