BiG City Life. Ethical Sieving and Professional City-Making in Milan’s Conditional Housing

This article analyses everyday professional mediation in Milanese social housing as a city-making practice. At the Borgo Intergenerazionale Greco (BiG), a restored farmstead organised around a collective courtyard, residents under thirty-five access below-market apartments contingent upon performing ten monthly hours of civic volunteering. Through twelve months of ethnography, the article proposes the concept of ethical sieving to describe the continuous discretionary process through which two professional figures assess and recalibrate residents’ adherence to a model of moral citizenship whose criteria remain deliberately unarticulated. Unlike punctual gatekeeping or initial sorting, ethical sieving operates ceaselessly across the housing trajectory. The central finding – zero contract non-renewals for non-compliance – reveals governance operating through the ambient possibility of exclusion, sustained by unceasing professional repair work.