Vol. 15 No. 30 (2025): Teoria queer e scienze sociali: tra sfide e prospettive
Focus Section

Eternal Waiting. Mobility, solidarity and migration in touristified Naples

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  • Andrea Ruben Pomella
Andrea Ruben Pomella
Indipendent Researcher
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-18536

Published 2026-02-11

Keywords

  • Racialisation,
  • Solidarity,
  • Mobility,
  • Naples,
  • Touristification

How to Cite

Pomella, A. R. (2026). Eternal Waiting. Mobility, solidarity and migration in touristified Naples. Cambio. Rivista Sulle Trasformazioni Sociali, 15(30), 229–239. https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-18536

Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Ruben Pomella

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The following article is part of a broader ethnography in which I tried to examine how Naples has become an urban battleground for migrant rights, amid rapid touristification. After three years of fieldwork within my doctoral research, which focused on the intertwining of tourism industry and migration, I was engaged with the social enterprise Senaso led by former migrants in analysing how solidarity and mobility work, and in observing how barrier-borders – from labyrinthine procedures to digital exclusion – enforce a condition of ‘eternal waiting’ (Khosravi 2014) which immobilises migrants in space and time. The fieldwork has exposed the contradictions of a city marketing itself as “beautiful” while its housing crisis, driven by Airbnb expansion and an alleged new governance of tourism affects both locals and migrants. As we will see, in contrast to institutional failures there is the solidarity expressed and the struggles fought by activists and social workers like Pierre Preira and Louise Ndong, whose commitment emerges from lived experience of migration.

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