Massimiliano Crisci

Residential mobility is a key mechanism of urban socio‐spatial change, yet less attention has been paid to the formation of mobility intention preceding actual moves, particularly in Southern European contexts. This paper investigates the socio‐economic, demographic, housing and neighbourhood factors associated with residential mobility intentions in Italy's two main urban regions, Rome and Milan, together with respondents' stated motivations for prospective mobility and immobility. Drawing on data from the 2025 MetroMosaic Survey, we use logistic regression models to assess whether established correlates of mobility intentions operate differently across two metropolitan contexts that share the same national housing system but have followed divergent socioeconomic and housing‐market trajectories. Results show substantial convergence between Rome and Milan: education, employment instability, housing tenure and adequacy, household composition and neighbourhood dissatisfaction are associated with mobility intentions in broadly similar ways. Greater differentiation emerges in stated motivations, with significant differences between the two urban regions concentrated in involuntary/forced and neighbourhood‐related reasons. Overall, the findings suggest that shared institutional conditions structure the opportunities and constraints underlying residential intentions, while contrasting metropolitan contexts emerge in some of the reasons associated with moving or staying. The study highlights the value of residential intentions for understanding how aspirations, resources and constraints interact before residential mobility is realised.

The study analyses the settlement patterns and residential mobility motivations of the two largest extra‐EU migrant communities in Rome—Bangladeshis and Filipinos—combining unique individual‐level population register data with an original survey data. Adopting an intra‐urban and comparative perspective, it explores how sociodemographic characteristics, community background, and neighbourhood context shape (re)location patterns and underlying motivations. Results show distinct spatial trajectories: Bangladeshis display strong clustering in low‐income peripheral areas, driven by ethnic attraction, affordability constraints, and the consolidation of enclave economies in small‐scale trade. Filipinos, by contrast, exhibit greater spatial dispersion, associated with employment opportunities in domestic and care work within affluent households. While Bangladeshi residential concentration reflects both social support networks and structural barriers in the housing market, Filipino settlement patterns highlight employment‐related mobility and long‐term integration in a niche labour sector. The findings underline the interplay between individual preferences, own‐group preferences, and structural constraints typical of Southern European housing and welfare regimes. By linking residential mobility to labour market segmentation and welfare transformations, the study contributes to a broader understanding of migrant settlement processes and spatial inequality in Southern European cities.

This paper investigates how sustainable public procurement (SPP) is operationalised in school catering in the Metropolitan City of Rome and how it reshapes market conditions affecting the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region. While SPP is widely framed as a lever for sustainability and local development, its concrete effects on SME inclusion and supply-chain organisation remain underexplored. Drawing on procurement document analysis and supply-chain reconstruction in the Metropolitan City of Rome, the study examines how sustainability criteria—such as organic quotas, traceability requirements and quality standards—are translated into operational requirements. The findings show that SPP goes beyond the simple performative addition of sustainability requirements to existing markets and actively reorganises market coordination structures and supply-chain relations. Procurement shapes not only what is sourced, but also how logistics, continuity of supply, and coordination are organised across the agri-food chain. SME participation emerges as conditional and capability-dependent rather than automatically enabled by sustainability-oriented procurement. In fragmented agri-food systems, smaller firms often participate indirectly through intermediaries or larger catering operators rather than through direct access to contracts. Rather than interpreting these dynamics as a simple exclusion of SMEs, the paper argues that SPP operates as a form of selective and asymmetrical market-shaping, redistributing participation opportunities unevenly across actors depending on their organisational and coordination capacities. The paper contributes to the literature by conceptualising procurement as a governance instrument whose effects depend on the interaction between procurement architecture, sustainability requirements, and the structural characteristics of the supply base. More broadly, it highlights the importance of aligning sustainability objectives with existing supply-chain capacities and territorial market structures when designing procurement policies.

This paper focuses on residential mobility of Filipino migrants within Rome in the 2000s. The aim is to contribute to explaining the patterns and motivations behind the intra‐urban mobility of ethnic minorities highlighting the role of the socioeconomic background of the neighbourhood. We used an interdisciplinary quanti‐qualitative approach combining descriptive and multivariate analyses performed on original population register microdata on residential moves and ethnographic fieldwork to understand the dynamics of relocations from a multifaceted perspective. Rome is an interesting case study because it is a Southern European metropolis and the capital of Italy, a country with a welfare regime and a housing system that peculiarly affects the residential segregation and mobility patterns of ethnic groups. The findings show that the socioeconomic situation of the Filipinos' previous neighbourhood ‘predicts’ the characteristics of the neighbourhood where they move, with a growing propensity of family groups to head to more peripheral, poorer neighbourhoods with a low–medium concentration of co‐nationals. Moreover, belonging to a socio‐occupational niche influences their choices and motivations for mobility and settlement, therefore the concept of ‘ethnic employment‐driven residential mobility’ is proposed.

This research studies the residential mobility of Italians and foreigners in Rome from 2002 to 2019. We examine the differences in residential mobility patterns for (1) Italians and foreigners, (2) foreign migrants by selected country of origin, and (3) the effect of intra‐urban mobility on residential segregation. Log‐linear models and segregation indexes are used to analyze unpublished microdata on residential mobility by neighbourhood from the population register of Rome. Results show that foreigners are more mobile than Italians and more prone to move outside the area where they live, but with an increasing process of remaining in their current locations over time. Also, similarities and differences emerge by country of origin. Finally, we find residential mobility has increased the spatial concentration and clustering of foreigners in Rome, whilst reducing the dissimilarity from Italians at the same time.

This paper aims to study ethnic micro-segregation in Rome, namely, high residential concentrations of ethnic groups at the micro-area level within neighbourhoods with low concentrations of these groups, with a focus on specific situations of spatial inequality often overlooked in the debate. The Italian capital is one of the five most populous cities in the European Union and a multi-ethnic metropolis with relatively low levels of segregation. It is an urban context that has been little studied, partly due to the lack of reliable and granular data. This work is based on unpublished individual data from the 2020 population register, disaggregated into 155 neighbourhoods and 13,656 census tracts with average populations of about 18,000 and 200 residents, respectively. The five minority groups considered, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Filipinos, Romanians, and migrants from developed economy countries (DECs), add up to 55% of the total foreign residents and show different settlement patterns. The concept of micro-segregated area (MSA) is central to the scope of the analysis. An MSA is a census tract that shows a strong over-representation of a specific ethnic group despite being located within a neighbourhood where that group is under-represented. MSAs can be considered ‘interstitial’ micro-areas embedded in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Descriptive analysis based on location quotient (LQ) mapping and bivariate logistic models is developed to highlight (a) differences in the settlement patterns of minority ethnic groups; (b) differences in the micro-segregation of minority ethnic groups in terms of socio-demographic characteristics, settlement location, and socioeconomic status; and (c) the particular characteristics of minority ethnic groups underlying these differences. The findings indicate that differences in settlement patterns can be related to the interplay between real estate constraints and labour market specialisation. National specificities in micro-segregation are mainly linked to length of stay, but the models of the Asian groups do not offer any empirical support for the spatial assimilation hypothesis, unlike those of Romanians and DECs citizens. Further development of this research will aim to explore segregation patterns and motivations to move to MSAs using a mixed method approach.

This paper offers an analysis of the supply of Airbnb accommodation in Rome, one of the main tourist destinations in the world, the third-largest city in Europe, by the number of Airbnb listings. The aim is to focus on the recent spatial trend of Airbnb listings, including the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight the main housing and socioeconomic characteristics of the neighbourhoods associated with a strong presence of Airbnb listings. The study is developed with quantitative methods and spatial regression (spatial lag and spatial error using OLS as a benchmark), based on data collected from the Inside Airbnb and Tomslee websites. In the period 2014–2019, the listing trend in Rome has been increasing in absolute numbers. After the start of the pandemic, the trend became negative, and the decline of Airbnb offerings is more substantial for shared accommodation. Airbnb supply is related to the distance from the city centre, the average income of the area, empty apartments, singles and the share of foreign residents coming from high-income countries. A signal of spatial diffusion of Airbnb listings emerges in the coastal area, even if they are increasingly concentrated in the historic centre, where there is amonocultureof short-term renting.

Beginning in the 1970s, the urban core of the Rome Metropolitan Area (RMA) experienced four decades of intense depopulation and urban diffusion, which caused a considerable social impact. On the basis of an original dataset on residential mobility within the city of Rome, this paper aims to show that the RMA is currently experiencing a new stage of reurbanisation resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble after the 2008 crisis. Unlike other European contexts, the RMA repopulation is lacking forms of “urban resurgence” and is taking place in one of the most difficult periods of the city’s recent history. Paradoxically, the trend of private real estate market succeeded to stop urban sprawl where for a long time public decision-maker had failed. This created an opportunity to finally govern the process and steadily halt the urban diffusion, implementing targeted residential densification measures aimed at stabilising the demographic recovery of the urban core and preventing a return to urban sprawl.