Conference Program

The large-scale expansion of student enrolment has contributed to increasing diversity within the student population. This analysis aims to investigate how differences in students’ backgrounds shape their everyday university experiences by focusing on housing patterns, a topic that has attracted significant debate in the Italian context in recent years. Housing, as an essential infrastructure of daily life, an enabling node for the exercise of other rights, and at the same time a constitutive element of a city’s (and university’s) ability to be inclusive (Bricocoli & Peverini, 2023) - plays a central role.

Difficulties in accessing the housing market are particularly evident for students with a migratory background, who face a combination of different forms of vulnerability. The housing experience of students of foreign origin is indeed at risk of being marked by heightened exposure to the so-called “malpractices” of the rental market (Frangioni & Costa, 2024), as well as outright discriminatory and stigmatizing practices that limit access for those who do not embody the profile of the “ideal tenant” (Costarelli et al., 2021). This partly explains the greater reliance of international students, compared to their Italian peers, on the solutions offered by private student residences (PBSA): in the absence of a local support network or university-provided services, and in order to avoid scams found in advertisements and online listings, renting housing in private residences can almost be considered an obligation rather than a choice, despite the higher associated costs (Gainsforth, 2022). However, international students are not a socially homogeneous group: they often come from middle-class families in contexts with lower purchasing power than in Europe (Lipura & Collins, 2020).

These difficulties therefore strongly influence students’ housing experiences, often translating into higher levels of dissatisfaction, greater forced mobility, higher rental costs, and a more frequent desire to move. In other words, the power asymmetries that characterize the field of student housing appear even more pronounced for students of foreign origin, who are required to adopt strategies of adaptation and negotiation within contexts that reflect longstanding patterns of inequality in access to housing (Fang & van Liempt, 2021).

To investigate the main housing patterns of off-site university students with a migratory background, attention will be focused on a case study: the University of Bologna. Drawing on findings from an online survey conducted within the project LINUS – Living the University City – during the 2024/25 academic year, several dimensions of interest will be examined, including the main characteristics of housing arrangements, the methods and timing of the housing search, the difficulties and discriminatory practices encountered, the costs incurred, and overall satisfaction with one’s housing situation.

Understanding the differences that characterize the housing experiences of international and foreign students, and comparing these with the experiences of Italian students, is extremely useful for grasping the forms of student agency exercised within a housing market deeply shaped by the distortive effects of rising residential values, characterized by stringent structural constraints, in which the public sector continues to play a marginal role.