The Feminist Occupation of the Women´s Asylum in Turin: Reclaiming Deviancy and Rearticulating Spatial Governance

Abstract

This chapter examines the 1979 feminist occupation of the former Women’s Asylum in Turin as a situated intervention into the spatial organisation of care, memory, and reproductive labour. Centred around the slogan A casa non ci torno — I won’t go back home — the occupation articulated a refusal of domestic confinement and a collective reimagining of welfare as a shared, politicised infrastructure. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and feminist historiography, the chapter traces three temporal trajectories: the short-term reorganisation of the asylum through practices of inhabitation and mutual aid; the medium-term disruption of urban rationality through feminist spatial knowledge; and the long-term challenge to the governance of reproductive life under capitalism. Our analysis reconstructs how the occupation gave rise to a self-managed ecosystem of kitchens, clinics, childcare, and political education, framing welfare not as service provision but as the reproduction of struggle. In doing so, it proposes the ex-asylum as a spatial prototype for collective autonomy fugitive, materially grounded, and organised through shared use rather than institutional control. This chapter contributes to feminist urban theory, historiographies of care, and broader critiques of spatial governance under capitalist modernity.