The icon of the university student in a tent and some truths about “rights” and student housing

The great problem of rents in Milan also affects students, the protest of the tents at the Polytechnic. By 2024, the places for non-residents at the Statale will be doubled and Calenda proposes the conversion of empty buildings into university residences

The iconography of suffering rights is in constant evolution, and after all the hunger for empathetic information is also constant, always yearning for new icons to be displayed. In the catalog de doléances the last appearance is the Universitaria with the tent. To materialize it, a student of the Milan Polytechnic who last week he pitched a curtain on the lawn in front of Poli to give visibility to his protest: “The situation here in the city is impracticable. I went to visit an indeterminate number of houses and for all of them they asked for a single room from 700 euros upwards, without expenses”. She feels “all the precariousness of the situation”. Tearful (but slightly misleading) information rolled out the red carpet and last weekend more tents joined, up to seven, in an impromptu Occupy Poli. “Since day one, this tent has wanted to represent not just one, but many people in difficulty because rents in Milan are truly unsustainable”. The great stir of indignation aroused by the camp is grafted on to a phony mood, that of Milan as a “city that rejects”, and on a rather concrete issue that is perhaps reaching a turning point, that of residential policies in Milan. But one thing must be pointed out: the housing crisis has nothing to do with the lack of university residences, except side by side.