Housing History in Milan: A Political Economy of Urban Transformation

This paper develops a theoretical and methodological framework to interpret how class conflict has reshaped urban space across different stages of capitalism. By focusing on four competitive and contradictory functions of dwelling––reproductive, emancipatory, productive, and speculative––it outlines an approach to analysing how shifting alliances among workers, employers and rentiers structure housing regimes. The case of Milan is used as a first application of this framework, illustrating how these dynamics can be traced across liberal, corporatist, Fordist-Keynesian, and neoliberal phases.