What was the problem?
Italy has experienced high immigration in recent years, including many immigrants from non-EU countries. The processes for registering and working are complicated and bureaucratic, and the tax system discourages entry into the formal labour market. Many immigrants remain clandestine and work informally.
Parts of Torino are suffering from severe urban decay
In the Province of Torino, home to Fiat, the economy went into crisis from the late 70s with the decline of the mechanical and engineering industries. In the early 1990s, unemployment in the stood at 10.8%, with a declining population and rising immigration.
In Torino’s historical Porta Palazzo area, immigrants make up around 19% of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants, compared with an average of 4% for the city as a whole. In the early 1990s, Torino still lacked a coherent integration policy for immigrants. There were very few services in place to help immigrants gain a foot-hold in the city. Unemployment and crime levels both stood significantly higher than the city average.
What action was taken?
In 1997, ‘The Gate’ project was created to address the physical, social and economic problems of the rundown Porta Palazzo neighbourhood. The neighbourhood features the largest open-air street market in Europe, with over 1,000 vendors and up to 40,000 visitors daily; however the area was decaying. The project targeted local economic development, improvements to security, community cohesion and physical regeneration.
In a separate EU-funded initiative the HORIZON training course was launched in 1998, specifically for those working in the field of immigrant integration and employment. One of the Torino course participants was a man named Joseph Diahoue, a recent immigrant from the Ivory Coast. He had become aware of the critical lack of social services for immigrants in Torino. With other participants, Mr. Diahoue developed the idea of a drop-in centre with its focus on employment. Although immigrants in the city face a multitude of social and legal problems, employment was widely acknowledged as the key driver of successful integration.
In 1999, through a meeting with the director of a major regeneration programme, Mr Diahoue and fellow immigrants were invited to create their own association, Apolié, and run a drop-in centre under the auspices of The Gate programme. The Centre has the core aim of improving employment and enterprise creation rates, primarily among the largely immigrant population of the Porta Palazzo neighbourhood.
Topics associated with this project
Cohesion, Economy, Employment, Housing, International, Neighbourhood, Regeneration, Training