The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia

This paper critically examines the socio-technical assistance practices and design politics involved in the eradication of migrant farmworker ghettos in Capitanata, southern Italy, with particular attention to the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone. In a context shaped by migratory regimes of control and agricultural labour exploitation, government-led interventions are sustaining projects aimed at the ‘overcoming of informal settlements’ in the area. Drawing on long-term ethnography and activist research, the paper interrogates the technocratic logic and depoliticizing frameworks underpinning such interventions and reveals how they fail to account for the social, economic and political complexity of these territories. By confronting the epistemological and operational assumptions behind the project of ‘overcoming’, we call for design politics rooted in accountability and adjacency. The case of the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone serves to question dominant spatial imaginaries, highlighting how these settlements function as spaces of precarity and exclusion, but also of belonging, shaping imagined futures.