Focusing in particular on the Italian case, this research examines the evolution of the city as a ‘social factory’ and the social movements’ protests related to this transformation. Here, the city as a social factory is understood as a system underpinned and propelled by capital and profit, in which production is no longer limited to the workplace but extends to society more generally. This extension is enabled through the commodification of the spaces in which urban life unfolds, thereby fulfilling the broader objective of reproducing labour power, that is, of making people productive.This thesis argues that, in order to understand the social factory, it is necessary to focus on the passage from Fordism, when the city was produced according to the factory, to post-Fordism, when the city itself became the space of production. Within this shift, creativity played a pivotal role. During the 1970s, it functioned as a means through which workers reclaimed autonomy; later, it was appropriated by a system that abandoned Fordism while embracing the values propounded by creative subjects. As a result, spaces dedicated to the production of creativity came to play a key role in urban planning and in the exploitation of freelance labour.Within this framework, Italy represents a particularly intense laboratory, with the Italian Autonomia movement producing extensive theoretical and political discourse on the subject. Over the decades, the pursuit of autonomy took many forms: mass-worker struggles in the 1960s, the refusal of work and self-valorisation in the 1970s, and, in the 1980s, the occupation of abandoned buildings and the emergence of Centri Sociali, where culture, politics and creativity found support. Ultimately, the thesis investigates the role of urban policy in enabling a network of spaces capable of challenging capitalist extraction and producing a specifically creative form of welfare.

Enrica Mannelli is an architect who graduated in Rome in 2008 and completed the Housing and Urbanism MA at the Architectural Association in 2017. She has worked across practices of different scales and methods, including Cino Zucchi Architetti in Milan and Lynch Architects in London. She later completed her PhD by Design at the AA. Her work combines professional practice and research across Rome and London, with a strong interest in housing, urbanism and spatial practice.