Reconceptualizing the Right to Housing Through Assemblage Theory – Activisms and Social Movements in Turin

This thesis focuses on reevaluating the idea of the right to housing by moving beyond structuralist frameworks which reduce this right to a fixed legal entitlement or a moral claim, or try to define it based on the logic of markets only. Although the insights provided by traditional approaches regarding social struggles including the housing question are valuable, their reliance on rigid categories and binary oppositions makes the messy, relational, and unpredictable realities of housing struggles overlooked. To fill theses gaps, the thesis turns to Assemblage theory as the conceptual framework through which the idea of the right to housing is viewed as a dynamic composition of practices, infrastructures, institutions, discourses, and affective relations that are always in motion and are continuously reshaped through negotiation, resistance, and experimentation. Through this approach, right to housing is reconceptualized as an open-ended political process which is emergent rather than predetermined, collective rather than individual, and situated rather than universal. Reconceptualization of the right to housing through an assemblage thinking approach includes shifting the attention to creative and unfinished ways through which housing can be claimed, inhabited, and transformed in urban life. This perspective is about directing traditional approaches towards a more flexible and open-ended one through which any static interpretation of right to housing is challenged, and instead, right to housing is considered an idea assembled in practice through diverse and shifting interactions across urban life. This can offer a more process-oriented, and inclusive way of re-engagement with housing justice and reimagination of housing rights, through which housing can be regarded not only as shelter, but as a site of becoming where new forms of dwelling, belonging, and urban justice can continuously take shape.