The study of the former Moi was based on observation of the evolution of the neighbourhood between 2005 and 2019. As previously mentioned, initially, during the design and construction phase, the neighborhood was analyzed and described through the works of the Summer School. Subsequently, after the occupation process, in 2013, the authors carried out several survey in this place and interviewed the designers of “MOI—migrants an opportunity of inclusion “sponsored by the Compagnia di San Paolo, and a member of the Refugee and Migrant Solidarity Committee of the Ex-Moi and La Salette occupations of Turin. Finally, in 2016–18 given the relevance of this situation, the case study was one of the places investigated by the students of the Urban Design Atelier of the Politecnico di Torino, about the topic of forms and rights to live in the contemporary city. The work focused on a detailed survey on the informal practices of living, on the adaptation of some spaces to different needs and on the marginal dimension of living.
Obviously not all the manifestations of rights associated with living in the contemporary city fall into this category. The former Olympic Village is a completely different story compared to Geneva; it is a far cry from Lefebvre’s perspective and the right-to-housing movements of the seventies, but is nevertheless emblematic not only of contemporary rights associated with the city and housing (even if they are often not acknowledged), but also the way they are considered by the people who live there or pass through.
The site in question is the former Moi in Turin (MOI was the acronym of “wholesale fruit and vegetable market”). It had been abandoned for a long time, but was restored and turned into the Olympic Village in view of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. At the time it represented a real opportunity for Turin which had been trying for quite some time to leave the Fordist era behind and give the city a new identity.
A little over a decade ago, in this place, an attempt was made to create a “manifesto” of a “different kind of lifestyle” compared to the homologated working-class city. However, in a relatively short space of time the area experienced accelerated impoverishment and social marginalisation processes. Until to get, in the last few years, it symbolises the territorialisation of poverty and hardship packed into urban areas where the demand for basic housing rights is closely linked to the social exclusion of those who demand that right (Tosi 2017).
The design of the district was a partial transposition of the city’s ambitious plans for transformation. It was the result of an international competition launched in 2002 to build accommodation for the 2500 journalists and athletes attending the Olympic event. Subsequently, between 2003 and 2005, a working group coordinated by the studio Camerana et al. was tasked with its construction; their brief involved very tight deadlines coupled with high expectations.
If, on the one hand, the story of its construction fits perfectly into the broader urban branding operation to define the city’s new post-Fordist identity, on the other hand it paradoxically appears to echo the ambitions and illusions characterising the construction of the neighbourhoods of the factory-city exemplified by Falchera and Mirafiori.
The former Moi area, had been imagined as a place for a different kind of living: a more comfortable “inner” space suited to a society by a varied of young and dynamic population eager to live in a “different” environment reminiscent of contemporary Northern European city projects.
The silhouettes of the inhabitants, the chessboard setting of the buildings, their shapes and colours, everything was very different from the typical Turin life style.
This part of “another” Turin soon revealed how fragile it was. Despite the glitzy photographs taken when construction was completed, the idea of a “different life style” rapidly dissolved as people stayed only very briefly at the Olympic Village and then moved on: initially athletes, technicians, and journalists, then students, middle-class families, co-housers, shopkeepers, and technicians working for the Regional Environmental Protection Agency. This rapid succession of segments of the population left numerous ‘footsteps’ on the ground. The much celebrated continuity of the ground floors with shared spaces, as well as the layout of the ground itself—designed to unhinge the rigid and consolidated house system in Turin—were rewritten in a series of fences, some of which are very rigid. However, unlike Les Grottes, very different materials were used to build these fences in the former Moi district: hard materials to mark harsh borders. Iron barriers, concrete blocks, and leftover material were used to divide public space. These barriers not only segment the area, but also the idea of a smooth space, they also prematurely distort the design and rewrite its history. The plan to recover such a site failed, weighed down as it was by such a heavy legacy: railway infrastructures, the Lingotto complex, and the factory districts built in the seventies. The latter, together with the crumbling coloured plaster of the façades and empty ground floors are just the first signs of the failure of the “subversive” idea of living in “coloured houses”.
Recent newsworthy events explicitly reveal the exacerbation of that parable. On 30 March 2013,Footnote 10 150 refugees seeking political asylum occupied a building in the former MOI complex; the building had either been abandoned or was perhaps waiting for the population vaguely and confusedly identified by the housing project. In the 2019, after 5 years, the number of occupants has risen from 150 to over 1300 from twenty-eight different countries. When the first refugees illegally occupied the building seven years after the Olympics, the former Moi was suffering from lack of identity. The Regional Environmental Protection Agency, which in the meantime had fenced off its offices, only occupied part of the Moi; almost all the students had left, leaving big empty spaces inside. The gestures, experiences, and demands of individuals, very unlike the envisaged inhabitants, were visible in the buildings and open spaces (usually neglected and abandoned). In a few years, private, overcrowded, narrow worlds had been rebuilt; worlds that were capable of providing sanctuary and hiding their inhabitants. The people had been started to sleep under the stairs, revealing a notion of intimacy that gone beyond the walls of the apartment and marked the entire building, symbol of that community. The underground parking lot had been become a depot, a market, a place where more or less legal exchanges took place. It was a space that protects against the dangers of urban life even though it sometimes contained them (episodes of illegal acts and crimes have been reported by the local press, the police and, in some cases, the army). The concept of extimité, extimacy, in the former Moi was visible on the facades of the buildings covered in street art and words in different languages written by the inhabitants themselves. The ground floors used as bike cooperative, community kitchens, and dormitories, has been closed off from the outside words and has not been connected to the open space ‘tamed’ by the construction of a sports playground, flowerbeds, vegetable gardens, and rest areas. These spaces had been transformed in contradictory, violent, and unregulated ways into an authentic “village” inhabited by a population imprisoned inside the city and waiting for a verdict of acknowledgement. Only this ‘waiting’ had qualified them as a community (Fig. 3).
This too represent a village. But a village made of narrow, overcrowded spaces, cluttered with objects and voices demanding rights that are neither exchangeable nor negotiable: the right to inviolability, the right to the freedom to believe, to think, to be welcomed, to join with others in an association, to be respected without being discriminated. These are fundamental rights: their value does not depend on the number of people who demand them, yet they should not be confused with the right to housing (or the right to the city). Even if housing is crucial to obtain them.
The situation of former Moi was perhaps the most important form of claiming space and rights taking place in the city of Turin in the last 10 years. It reveals the complexity of the contemporary city, the fragmentation of its populations and the different meaning that the concept of housing rights revealed in the space (Fig. 4).
In November 2017 the city administration began a process that the Mayor of Turin called “sweet” evacuation, to design a new project of social housing settlement in that area. The eviction process was accompanied by a relocation project for the migrants involved.Footnote 11 This choice represents the climax point of what for years has been a fragmented and conflicting political and media management on the occupation of the former Olympic Village. (Andrea and Irene 2020). In July 2019 the last building (the orange and gray one where about 350 people lived) was cleared. In the following days, was defined a “safety operation” in order to avoid new, arbitrary intrusions. It was a question of preventing access to the area by placing jersey bumps along the perimeter and garrisoning the neighborhood with the army.
In December 2020, the renovation of the occupied buildings was started. They will become (in 2023) a new social housing hub with 400 beds dedicated to students and young workers (in temporary housing formulas with easy access yet to be defined in the modalities).
The redevelopment of the former Moi area is part of an important urban transformation that affects the Lingotto district: the inauguration of the skyscraper of the Piedmont Region, the Parco della Salute, the connection of the Lingotto railway station to line 1 of the underground. The acclaimed policy of social inclusion and integration—and poorly concealed through rhetorical slogans that not matched the eviction actions implemented—quickly revealed its true goal: a building redevelopment process without recipients (who are these students and young workers if the city knows an aging index among the most important in Italy and if the universities are located in areas very far from the neighborhood?!).
In conclusion, the challenge of legitimize a primordial right (to exist) that revealed the most complex and extreme side of the right to housing (in its forms of occupation and appropriation) has been transformed in an ordinary request for social security and urban transformation.