School as Integration Gateway: The città-IN Project

This chapter presents the città-IN project, which positions public primary schools as the essential gateway for integration of immigrant families and as the central nodes within their broader rights. Rather than viewing school services as mere administrative tasks, we frame them as interfaces where parents first encounter the digital infrastructures and institutional rules of the welfare system. These interactions are critical, as they often dictate whether a family feels empowered or excluded from their rights. The study focuses on the San Siro neighbourhood in Milan, an area characterised by both rich cultural diversity and significant socio-economic pressure. Here, the città-IN project employs an action-research model, adapting the Mediation Grammar (MG) framework to evaluate five school services. By moving beyond top-down observation, the project combines participatory research with user-centred evaluation to see how language barriers, the quality of information, and the real-world accessibility of rights impact the daily lives of immigrant families. Ultimately, the chapter argues that in contexts marked by school segregation and vulnerability, the school acts as a double-edged sword: it can be a space of profound inclusion or a barrier to it. By applying the Mediation Grammar, we provide both a way to measure these empowerment gaps and a practical strategy for redesigning services to be more equitable. This discussion establishes the groundwork for the empirical findings and community interventions explored in the following chapters.