This comparative study examines how southern Italian migrants faced social and political exclusion within and outside of their nation-state in the decades following the Second World War. Using Turin, Italy and Frankfurt am Main, West Germany as case studies, I investigate how urban renewal plans and discriminatory rental practices exacerbated housing shortages and induced migrants to live in precarious housing conditions. Taking inspiration from recent conceptualizations of citizenship put forth by historians Geoff Eley, Jan Palmowski, and Kathleen Canning, I show citizenship to be a contingent and contested category. By articulating housing claims and engaging in contest, southern Italian migrants and other disadvantaged residents pushed for an expansion and more equitable administration of institutionalized social service practices. By marching in the streets, going on rent strike, and occupying apartment buildings, migrants’ collective actions highlighted governing bodies’ failed promises to deliver a baseline standard of living. Southern Italians, allies, and news media channels frequently used women’s and children’s voices to amplify migrants’ claims to safe and affordable housing, portraying their motivations as apolitical and need-based in a time when internal security grew in importance. As extraparliamentary groups and domestic and international terrorist organizations threatened the existing sociopolitical order in both Italy and West Germany, city council debates became embroiled in questions of legality and whether to evict or accommodate housing occupiers. I complicate dominant narratives that center on tensions between self-identifying activists and police, as emblemized by conflict over housing in the streets, to show how city administrations began to differentiate between housing occupations conducted out of social need and those they perceived as part of more radical political movements. In turn, migrants and other socioeconomically disadvantaged occupiers were more amenable to negotiations with city officials, pushing for reforms within existing systems rather than more revolutionary changes. Overall, I argue that migrants challenged the socioeconomic and political practices that treated them as temporary residents or second-class citizens. By occupying the very spaces that had previously symbolized their marginalization, they exerted a right to state aid and assistance while subsequently reconfiguring the social fabric of their neighborhoods and communities. As local administrations reluctantly responded to their claims, they shifted definitions of urban citizenship and enacted reforms that had ramifications for housing and migration policies.
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