Marginal Mobilities and Civic Agency among Second-Generation Migrants in Northern Italy

This study investigates civic engagement and spatial agency among second-generation migrants in Cuneo (Northern Italy), a peripheral city marked by housing inequality, constrained transport infrastructures and institutional invisibility. Using qualitative methods—life-history interviews, narrative mapping, and ethnographic observation—it interrogates how African-descent youth negotiate belonging, emplacement, and everyday mobility across stigmatized spaces and bureaucratic borders. Conceptually, the paper bridges the mobilities paradigm and urban emplacement (Sheller & Urry 2006; Glick Schiller & Çağlar 2011) with a relational account of agency as temporally embedded practice (Emirbayer & Mische 1998). It analyzes informal practices of solidarity—community events, peer networks, small-scale mutual aid—as localized resilience (Norris et al. 2008) and infrastructural citizenship enacted in low-visibility settings (Lemanski 2019). It also traces ‘everyday bordering’ and territorial stigmatization that contour access to services, public space, and political voice (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019; Wacquant 2007). By foregrounding a non-metropolitan European locale, the study extends migration and mobility debates beyond major cities, demonstrating how postcolonial governance and spatial marginalization persist in overlooked territories. Attention to affective atmospheres and emotional geographies clarifies how fear, dignity, and aspiration organize movement and emplacement in daily life (Anderson 2009). Findings contribute to MIMEC themes on migration, mobilities, emplacement, and environment, offering an interdisciplinary account of situated agency and non-institutional belonging.