The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities

This article explores residency, a form of municipal membership that plays a strategic role in Italy. Residency is a formal status and a means to have access to rights. Therefore, it is a sort of local citizenship that, at least in part, equalises citizens and non-citizens. Due to its strategic role, many local authorities have paid serious attention to it recently. Municipalities have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or introduced new requirements. Stressing the different mechanisms of exclusion from residency, this article explains that they often work as administrative borders. These are bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to regulate, symbolically and sometimes materially, the composition of the people living within municipal territories and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As such, administrative borders fragment individual statuses and provoke an increase in civic stratification.