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According to the law, the people who have talked to us are “aliens”, irrespective of whether they have legal papers or not, they have no formal “right to the city”. But their regular and embodied presence and practices in the neighbourhood and beyond create space for them. Gender differences come out prominently in this respect: it is women rather than men who engage in those everyday routines which contribute to form familiar spaces in the unfamiliar city.
Women walk the streets of the neighbourhood and cross the square innumerable times in order to go to work and do their daily chores, they take children to school, to the day care, to the doctor, they take frequently to the square their own children, they escort some elderly person they may be looking after as live-in carers, they do the shopping in local shops and super markets, stop at the bakery or the local kiosk, they share time with neighbours.
