Limits and opportunities of ICT in access to the housing market for the migrant population. Considerations starting from the Bologna case in the MICADO project

This contribution is focused on the relationship between migrants, housing issue, and new technologies and is part of a broader reflection developed within the European Horizon 2020 project MICADO started in 2019 and ends in June 2022. In the first part of this contribution, we will show how the housing issue is crucial to the success of any integration process. But obtaining housing for migrants within the European context, as the literature has shown, calls into question contextual factors and individual characteristics that in many cases represent a major barrier to housing integration. Secondly, starting from the research material collected during the first two years of the project, we will focus on the case of Bologna, a city that was part of the four pilot cities involved in the project (together with Hamburg, Madrid and Antwerp). As we will show, the processes of facilitating the housing integration of migrants through the use of new technologies, however promising they may be, show structural limits, i.e. not attributable to the researchers’ choices and possibilities, but due to greater causes, such as the availability and ownership of data on available housing, which has an important impact on the possibility of updating them automatically, or the presence of strong forms of stigmatisation of migrant living and of real racist attitudes towards them; up to the issue of social housing, which sees a strong process of digitalisation of application procedures, procedures that clash with the not always sufficient level of technological skills of migrants applying.