Cohabitation, domestic hyper-proximity and intersectionality

This article is focused on a very specific ingredient of social and care policies, namely, cohabitation among users. It is a little explored topic, both by the social sciences, both by those involved in the analysis of public policies, and by those disciplines that look more closely at the dimensions of space. Domestic space hyper-proximity concerns a plethora of social groups and social needs. In fact, there are several social services that make coexistence "under the same roof and behind the same door" (Costa, 2016a; 2020) a fundamental pillar of their action, both in the context of public policies and in the social planning of private non-profit entities such as associations, cooperatives, and foundations. Most of the welfare services that have a residential content as well, require people to live together, in residential structures or in in shared apartments, frequently with the support of social workers. In these places of daily life, users or guests have a room for themselves or even just a bed while all the other spaces of domesticity are shared. Women victims of domestic violence or trafficking, migrants fleeing wars and persecutions, ex-prisoners, young care leavers, disabled people, single mothers or fathers, and many other people whose life has in some way “derailed” are led to live together. Sharing domestic spaces allows to reduce the costs of social intervention making services sustainable from an economic point of view, to better organize social workers intervention and to implement therapeutic and/or educational paths that make sharing - of experiences, ways of doing and being, of facing problems - a strength. But ensuring that people live under the same roof requires a strong investment of time and energy on the part of those who organize this kind of housing opportunities. Not everyone is able to handle and respect the minimum rules of coexistence in domestic spaces and not all forms of coexistence are easy to handle. The needs of privacy and appropriation of everyday spaces are sometimes severely tested by the fact of having to live with strangers, with whom it is required to cooperate and come to terms on various aspects, to be tolerant and to negotiate micro- forms of adaptation day by day. Cohabitation is increasingly embedded in care settings, but it is under-researched. Here I propose and discuss some of the key concepts useful for analyzing this specific form of life which, although very often temporary, concerns people who, for different reasons, find themselves facing complex problems, at the intersection of problems and conditions of various kinds, be they related to housing and other material deprivation, addictions, absence of family networks, ethnic background and so on. Intersectionality is used both to analyze users’ conditions and to highlight cohabitation policies approach in dealing with needs. The article also presents very preliminary findings of a long research devoted to analyzing different cohabitation projects and services around Italy, developed through 42 interviews to key informants as policy makers, services managers, services coordinators, professionals, to understand how they cope with intersectional problematic dimensions of their users and through a more limited (desk based) data collection about more than 80 cohabitation projects.