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Architectures of asylum: Making home in a state of permanent temporariness
Abstract
Urban research in Germany has started to address the socio-spatial distribution and architectures of so-called collective accommodation for asylum seekers, refugee camps, and new forms of ethnic segregation triggered by refugee movements in recent years. The spatial practices of refugees themselves within these processes have not yet been a subject of substantive research. Combining research methods from social and architectural sciences, this article investigates the physical, material, social and symbolic appropriation processes and the spatial dimension of homemaking by Syrian refugees currently housed in refugee accommodation in Berlin, Germany. What spatial knowledge is mobilized at the place of asylum in order to turn the accommodation into a home? How do spatial practices and knowledge hybridize practices of the place of origin, experiences made during the flight and the arriving and uncertain period of stay at an unfamiliar place of asylum? How do spatial appropriation processes collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management approaches at the place of asylum? With these questions, the article focuses on the ways in which refugees perceive, adapt to, appropriate and alter their new urban environment physically and socially, and how they thereby draw on existing and evolving stocks of urban knowledge, urban experiences and social relationships. It argues that to develop a homelike space in temporary accommodation, arriving refugees mobilize knowledge at the place of asylum which can only be understood as a re-figuration process that is equally at work in the case of other migrants, migration and translocal processes. Studying these urban re-figurations thus helps us to reveal how the interplay of refugees’ agency and their knowledge and the technocratic regime – as a state of permanent temporariness – affects the making of a ‘home’.
... Refugee architecture, the design and construction of shelters and settlements for displaced populations [19], is a field that should not only address immediate needs but also respect and incorporate cultural context, long-term functionality, and potential for adaptation [8,9,13]. By focusing on user needs, it ensures the effectiveness of creating spaces for displaced populations [10], which should evolve through the everyday practices of refugees, reflecting their agency and needs [20,21]. Refugee spaces should be designed to include areas for social interaction, livelihood activities, and cultural expression [21][22][23]. ...
... By focusing on user needs, it ensures the effectiveness of creating spaces for displaced populations [10], which should evolve through the everyday practices of refugees, reflecting their agency and needs [20,21]. Refugee spaces should be designed to include areas for social interaction, livelihood activities, and cultural expression [21][22][23]. ...
... People are the key players in organizing and influencing space through their own social arrangements and behaviors. Factors that influence social behavior in space include creating boundaries, defining territories which refer to controlling what is inside and limiting access or excluding others, practices of place attachment, resistance, solidarity, and engagement in social and cultural activities [12,17,21,26,29,30]. Tayob [23] examines migrant-run markets in Bellville, Cape Town, as complex infrastructures crucial for new migrants. ...
Though refugee camps are by definition “temporary”, many camps endure for decades, where individuals live full lives through childhood, marriage, children, grandchildren, and death. These settlements function no differently than cities in their social life, density, zoning, and operation, yet are “planned” through UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) templates for camps. The Zaatari camp in Jordan for Syrian asylum seekers, for example, holds a population of 80,000. Rather than viewing refugee camps as temporary human warehouses, this article demonstrates that camps are spaces where individuals build social networks and economic activities flourish. As such, the camp planning templates should include adaptive Construction 4.0 technologies for more socially flexible settlements, even if the camps are considered “temporary”. This case study research on the Zaatari camp illustrates how refugees adapt their built environment, identifying adaptation patterns that enhance both livability and sustainability. The work illustrates social and environmental changes that require adaptive housing configurations. The conclusion suggests linking modern tools in the construction industry to empirically derived planning objectives to be efficiently executed in moments of crisis.
... Our research uncovered a form of hybrid, 'frozen' migration status characterised by instability, temporariness and conditionality. In these conditions refugees struggle with perceptions of 'permanent temporariness' (Brun & Fabos, 2015;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020) in relation to host countries. The fieldwork found a lack of regulation or lack of implementation of laws, especially in the case of Lebanon, where there was a policy of 'no-policy' implemented, which echoes findings from the wider literature (El Mufti, 2014;Stel, 2020). ...
... While the EU recognised the problem of migrants being kept in limbo, it did not pursue concrete changes. While it did seek to mitigate these insecurities through financial assistance to non-state actors operating in this space, the 'sticking plaster' character of these humanitarian measures have the effect of, to some degree, 'freezing' the crisis at a certain stage marked by this 'permanent temporariness' (Brun & Fabos, 2015;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). Beyond humanitarian support, the EU also supported civil society groups undertaking rights based advocacy for refugee protection. ...
... This study has larger implications as these concepts could pertain to other fields and geographies, the "frozen" downstream dangers that are characteristics of the condition of Syrians in the three neighbouring countries, is also equally applicable to the conditions of Sub-Saharan Africans in Libya, or the longer-term case of Palestinian refugees in Israel-Palestine's neighbouring states. These migrant communities inhabit this limbo status of 'permanent temporariness' (Brun & Fabos, 2015;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). ...
This article analyses the migration agreements between the European Union (EU) and Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. These international policy frameworks were negotiated in tandem with one another, and all were announced in 2016. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the three countries, the article argues that they fuse humanitarian elements with a bloc‐based security logic in an ad‐hoc mix that lacks substantive legitimacy in the three states, rendering the frameworks unstable. The article introduces the idea of hybrid migration governance which we have developed inductively to conceptualise the empirical findings from our fieldwork, building on existing work on hybridity in the conflict and security studies literature and Nora Stel's conception of governance as the ability to shape the field of action of others. In our usage, hybrid migration governance refers to the efficacy of EU intervention in the institutional management of migration in the three case study countries (‘shaping the field of action’), the ‘frozen’ character of the societal relations formed through this process and their underlying lack of domestic legitimacy. In conclusion, we argue that hybrid migration governance poses problem for the EU's ‘Barcelona’ conception of human security, because rather than expanding the bloc's ‘zone of security’ to the international neighbourhood, these policies have generated downstream security‐risks.
... Each part thus engages primarily, although notably not exclusively, with one of these disciplines. Part I roots itself within refugee studies where debates surround the nature of refugee sorting (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018;Janmyr and Mourad, 2018;Wettergren and Wikström, 2014;Zetter, 2007Zetter, , 1991; Part II turns towards a more explicit architectural discourse around the socio-materialities of refugee spaces especially in the context of the camp (Abourahme, 2020(Abourahme, , 2015Dalal, 2020Dalal, , 2015Katz, 2017aKatz, , 2015Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020), while Part III is embedded mostly in debates in urban studies, including both the humanities and social sciences, that consider how migrants live in and interact with other people in cities (Allport, 1954;Amin, 2002;Bock and Macdonald, 2019;Darling and Wilson, 2016;Vertovec, 2015Vertovec, , 2007Wilson, 2017a). These parts are all underpinned and connected by the thematic lens of infrastructure which has been approached by the aforementioned diverse disciplines and emphasises the need for such interdisciplinary approaches to understand the complexities of such infrastructures and their impact on the process of arrival at various stages and in various contexts. ...
... Historian Andrew Herscher (2017) (Dalal et al., 2018). These ambiguous boundaries are also evident in literature that explores processes of homemaking through spatial practices in the camp (Brun and Fábos, 2015;Hart et al., 2018;Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020). Residents themselves contribute towards the merging of camp and house by exerting their political agency by physically appropriating and realigning domestic space. ...
... The second typology consists of shelters made from shipping containers, which can be subdivided into the two typologies of Containerdorf (container village) and Tempohomes. Like the emergency shelters, the containers attracted particular scrutiny both in scholarship (Baumann, 2020;Dalal et al., 2018;Parsloe, 2020a;Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020) and public media (Hall, 2015;Schönball, 2017;Yu, 2015), as they were created at the height of the so-called crisis when global attention was greatest. As Pascucci (2021) They were consciously designed to be improvements on the container villages. ...
During the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 German chancellor Angela Merkel made the historic decision to welcome over one million refugees into the country. Throughout Germany municipal governments created a diverse range of temporary accommodations to house the arrivals, most notably in cities due to a lack of affordable housing. At the end of 2019 in Berlin, over 20,000 refugees were still living in institutional refugee shelter. These structures have come to be key mediators of the ways in which these newcomers have arrived in the city. Refugee shelters have primarily been understood in the context of the rich literature that has developed in recent decades around the ‘camp’ as a complex socio-spatial and political phenomenon. Yet the proliferation of different forms of refugee shelters especially in urban areas requires new theoretical lenses to shed new light on these structures. This thesis focuses on an alternative body of literature that considers the way urban infrastructures shape migration. It considers Berlin’s institutional shelters as part of infrastructural complexes to reveal how infrastructures shape the nature of refugee arrival in the city. It engages with emerging theoretical work on infrastructure and migration as well as presents empirical data obtained through eight months of on-site research that focuses on the quotidian experiences of refugees from their perspectives. It consists of three parts which examine the directional, contradictory, and entangled nature of infrastructure through its construction, calibration, operation, and location in relation to refugee arrival. The first part deepens understandings on the diverse ways that infrastructures sort and channel arrival trajectories to undermine the autonomy of refugee newcomers. The second part analyses the internal spatial dynamics of the shelters to explore the ways their contradictory functions as infrastructure blur the conceptual boundaries between camps, shelter, and housing and limit possibilities to inhabit domestic spaces. The third part explores the ways the urban locations of infrastructure shape everyday encounters and the development of relationships between newcomers and the city. While infrastructures can provide the potential to find stability within the city for refugees to move on from becoming forcibly displaced, the thesis argues that Berlin’s institutional shelters operate as infrastructures which undermine this process and exacerbate the uncanny and unsettling nature of arrival. Instead, refugees find the greatest scope for autonomy in their arrival through existing infrastructures of the city, especially the more informal ‘bottom up’ forms created and operated by existing migrant communities.
... The examples demonstrate refugees spending concerted energy to improve and beautify the structures they lived in and the space around them. Regardless of whether they were in a shelter, a camp, or a temporary apartment in a city, or if they had a more permanent place to call home, refugees painted walls, hung up pictures and wallpaper, carpeted floors, and invested time and effort in decorating and going to great lengths to find materials to do so (Brun, 2015;Kim & Smets, 2020;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020;van Liempt & Miellet, 2021). Even in temporary dwellings, refugees' cosmetic acts of beautification began in the first few days after their arrival and continued throughout their stay. ...
... Even in temporary dwellings, refugees' cosmetic acts of beautification began in the first few days after their arrival and continued throughout their stay. These acts eventually became larger home improvements and transformations: roofs became gardens; porches became covered entryways for guests; sterile shelters became personalized homes (El Masri, 2020;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020;Trapp, 2015;van Liempt & Miellet, 2021;Wagemann, 2017;Zibar et al., 2022). The examples demonstrate purposeful decisions and actions to the material world that were meaning-filled and delight-producing. ...
This article seeks to understand the significance of everyday beauty in refugees’ lives and its implications for refugee policy; it is one of the first pieces of scholarship to explore this subject in this context. A review of the existing literature on beauty in refugee contexts followed by a deductive analysis of the literature on refugee homemaking demonstrates how beauty and beautification play an active role in how refugees (re)make home, even in temporary situations. Beauty is used to build hope, celebrate culture, create community, and honour past and present realities, and therefore has significant implications for the objectives of the Global Compact on Refugees. The role of beauty in refugee homemaking suggests challenging the narrow focus on durable solutions to a more holistic framework, transforming language and policy approaches to include refugees as decision-makers, and investing in the quality of shelters, camps, and homes as a more effective way to reduce pressure on host countries.
... Between 2013 and 2022, the majority of the asylum seekers that arrived in Berlin came from Syria and Egypt (average 32%), followed by Afghanistan and Iraq (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, 2022). The asylum seekers are distributed around the city and are placed in different types of refugee accommodation depending on several criteria established by the Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten, and also determined by the available space in the shelters since the mobility of refugees from the shelter to the housing market faces many challenges (Dalal et al., 2021;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). ...
... Since 2015, the Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten has built several types of refugee accommodation, from container-type temporary structures to durable modular buildings called Modulare Unterkunft für Flüchtlinge (Dalal et al., 2021;Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020), scattered around the city. These different types of accommodation can host up to 450 families, and, in many neighbourhoods, the arrival of this large number of refugees has generated resistance from the local residents (Wiedner et al., 2022). ...
In the context of increasing social mobility, extensive global migration flows and the growing importance of understanding the diverse circumstances of urban life, ideas of a homogeneous, and stable social mainstream are decreasingly in line with social reality. Post-migrant studies understand migration as not only a force that shapes society but also as a factor in place-making. This article aims to discuss a different integration paradigm, focusing on the spatial integration dimension from the perspective of the refugees and their experiences of everyday practices. It aims to reflect on the role of the articulation between these practices with local actors that can intermediate and influence the quality of life of the incomers, either positively or negatively. The main research question we address is: Can spatial transformation in the public space foster the integration of and a feeling of belonging by refugees through collaborative processes? This analysis is developed through a critical reflection on the role of institutional actors as potential mediators between everyday practices and long-term solutions and, at the same time, as reproducers of hegemonic power relations. The proposed debate is based on collaborative teaching and research activities conducted in 2021 and 2022 in Berlin, Germany, and Irbid, Jordan, involving different groups of actors—researchers, students, and local and national institutions, as well as refugees and local residents.
... Meanings of home are studied in environmental psychology and other social sciences , but not with direct useful results for architects. Steigemann and Misselwitz (2020) for example, investigated the spatial practices of Syrian asylum seekers in reception centres. They found that people would change what little furniture was there to fit their ideas of daily life, and they would add furniture and furnishings to make the place more like home. ...
A housing shortage has been building up in the Netherlands in the last 30 years. Decreasing the housing shortage takes time, while people need a place to live now. Temporarily transforming vacant buildings into housing could reduce this need by providing the housing market with time to catch up. Can different user perspectives be included in housing design so all residents can easily make their home? A review of literature from housing studies, indoor environmental quality, architectural design and environmental psychology, for students, starters on the housing market and refugees accepted for permanent residency, indicated that using meanings of home could benefit housing design. Six factors were identified using a questionnaire that was developed to identify differences in meanings of home and what activities people engaged in, linked to indoor environmental preferences they had for those activities. Qualitative methods were used to better understand what people do to make a home. Three groups of activities were identified that reflect how home is a place built with meanings, through the use of objects, decorations, and the presence of other people. The results of a workshop with professionals indicated that meanings of home can be organised on three axes and that activities operate on different time frames (continuous, long-term, and short-term, respectively). This means that small actions, too, can contribute to creating a home, though which specific actions help someone and which do not, depend on the individual. The results can be used for housing design when architects and psychologists work together.
... Natuurlijk zijn er de bestaande asielcentra die eigenlijk deel uitmaken van een formele aankomstinfrastructuur. En Lokale Opvanginitiatieven (LOI's) waar veel nieuwkomers een tijdelijke thuis vinden in een kleinschalige setting (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). Toch zorgt het bestaande jojobeleid ervoor dat dat proces van 'home making', een thuis maken, steeds moeilijker wordt (Geldof & Debruyne, 2023). ...
Denken en handelen op de naad van circulatie en verblijf Pascal Debruyne 1 1. De ruimtelijke dimensies van migratie Migratie heeft een ruimtelijk verlengstuk. We zien dat aan de tentjes langs het kanaal in Molenbeek, ter hoogte van het Klein Kasteeltje. Ook het kraakpand in Schaarbeek met de (ondertussen) ironische naam 'Palais des Droits' is verankerd in de ruimte en daardoor ook in ons geheugen. Die specifieke plaatsen zijn vervlochten met een meer globaal raamwerk van migratie. Om ze te begrijpen hebben we 'een global sense of place' nodig; een bewustzijn van hoe concrete plaatsen verweven zijn met bre-dere-en vaak globale-netwerken en andere plaatsen (Massey, 2008). In tijden van migratie, wordt sociaal werk binnen en buiten overheids-verband geconfronteerd met een ruimtelijk complexer verhaal over bur-gerschap, insluiting en sociale mobiliteit (Dalakoglou, 2016; Isin & Nielsen, 2008). Wanneer we het hebben over de toegang tot sociale rechten zien we volgens Könönen (2018) dat het uitgangspunt van uni-versaliteit in de welvaarts-en verzorgingsstaat, wordt vervangen door dif-ferentiële inclusie, afhankelijk van het verblijfsstatuut en de dito positie als migrant. Bovendien worden sociale rechten afgewogen tegenover het aanzuigeffect om sociaal toerisme te verhinderen (Ataç & Rosenberger, 2018). Op dat moment worden sociale rechten instrumenten van migra-tiebeheer; wat ook de lineaire logica doorbreekt van 'het stapje verder'. De regels voor nationaal behoren zijn sterk veranderd tegen de achter-grond van toegenomen migratie.
... If home becomes unhomely in a granted apartment in the city center, homemaking practices can still be found in the unexpected space of the refugee camp (see also Brun and Fábos 2015;Hart, Paszkiewicz, and Albadra 2018;Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020), a space clearly bordered and defined as "outside" the urban space. ...
... Bureaucracy, thus, appears as a mechanism of governing through routine practices. The feeling of "permanent temporariness," as research into refugee experiences in Germany (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020;Tize, 2021) and other countries (Bekkering et al., 2017;Oesch, 2019;Olwig, 2023) has demonstrated, is the precise outcome in every individual of a protracted state of awaiting decisions about the future. In this case, waiting becomes an emotionally tangible manifestation of uncertainty and, as Conlon (2011) points out, a dynamic effect of international geopolitics and a lived facet of social structures. ...
While German migration policies aim to provide temporary protection and integrate Ukrainian refugees into German society as early as possible, the procedures and ideas of integration might be perceived differently by the beneficiaries. The feeling of “permanent temporariness” has been persistent among Ukrainians since March 2022. In this situation, some of the refugees renounce their agency and put responsibility on decision-making onto the state, while others oppose the idea of “being integrated” since they see their time in Germany as temporary, and their future in Ukraine as soon as the security situation allows them to return.
Drawing on the experiences of single Ukrainian women who received protection in Germany, the paper presents an anthropological perspective on person–state interactions in the context of refugees’ future-planning. How do German policies for supporting Ukrainian refugees impact their “stay or return” decision-making? Do the policies address their needs now and allow them to make investments for the future, or, on the contrary, contribute to their decision to return to Ukraine, which appears to be “simpler” and “more predictable”? How does the experience of going through bureaucratic procedures contribute to the sense of having agency and being capable of shaping their today and tomorrow? To answer these questions, I am going to present the reasonings and emotions concerning bureaucratic procedures that are closely intertwined with the planning of their future by Ukrainian refugees in Germany.
... The blurred line between temporary and permanent has been conceptualised in different ways by a variety of authors. They include "prolonged involuntary transit" (Missbach and Tanu, 2016: 297), "long-term temporariness" (Mares, 2017), "permanent temporariness" (Boersma, 2019;Collins, 2011;Tize, 2021;Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020) and "permanent transience" (Isin and Rygiel, 2007). These concepts encompass both a legal status and a subjective state between transience and permanence, marked by uncertainty, precarity and exclusion. ...
The article argues that the dynamic of migration on the Balkan route is changing into something more than transit. Croatia is presented as a case in point of a site where former migration aspirations are redefined as migrants encounter various types of bordering mechanisms that decelerate migration and begin developing relations with other residents. We argue that the dynamic of mobility and immobility and the ways it entangles localities en route are crucial for understanding the changing migration patterns in the Balkans. We overview concepts such as “stuckness”, “waiting”, “permanent temporariness”, “limbo”, and “liminality”, which describe the ways in which migrants navigate between temporary and permanent states of movement and residence. Additionally, the article develops the concept of “precari¬ous emplacement” in order to move beyond transit and to capture the ambiguities between moving and staying, temporariness and permanence, and inclusion and exclusion. The concept highlights that the practices related to settling, along with the social interactions with other residents associated with them, occur in conditions of uncertainty and social marginalisation. Precarious emplacement encompasses the ways precarity permeates migrants’ experiences and the fabric of post-war and post-socialist urban spaces and relations they move through and come to inhabit. The article concludes by arguing that, given the heterogeneity of migrants’ life trajectories, the concept of a “transit migrant” may obscure the vulnerabilities migrants experience during periods of immobility, and it advocates for a more nuanced conceptual approach.
... [6] Considering "home" a multifaceted spatial phenomenon and the realization of what Brah called "homing desire," we might draw on recent research in the context of transnational (forced) migration to define "home" and "homemaking". Sociologists Anna Steigemann and Philipp Misselwitz (2020), for instance, argue that home should be conceptualized as the localized idea of "bringing some space under control," even temporarily, and therefore they "operationalize home as a set of concrete spatial practices" . In the same vein, they define home as a "permanent or temporary space where refugees achieve a sense of dignity, safety, [and] comfort through self-provisioning practices" (631). ...
Cuban diasporization and the geographies of Cuban homes in-and outside Cuba are at the core of the novel Days of Awe (2001) by U.S. Cuban writer Achy Obejas. The novel discusses the tensions experienced from a Cuban diaspora perspective between the "desire for a [remembered and imagined] homeland" and a "homing desire" (Brah 1996), between the global currents of de-and reterritorialization, and the protagonist's attempts to appropriate different spaces as home. The aim of my article is to explore how "home" is performed as a spatiotemporal phenomenon in Obejas' novel, on which scales "home" is produced (global, national, local) and how the tension between remembered homes and the current locale of living is elaborated. Proposing to define home as a social space, a negotiation between homing practices, concepts of home, and lived experiences on different geographic and temporal scales, I particularly focus on the practices of homing and remembering in the urban spaces of Havana and Chicago and in the micro space of the family home/house as both a social and material space.
... Μέσα από τις καθημερινές πρακτικές της κηπουρικής και της καλλιέργειας, τη συνεχή φροντίδα και αισθητηριακή επαφή με τη γη, θα μπορούσε κανείς να υποστηρίξει ότι οι πρόσφυγες οικειοποιούνται τον ανοίκειο χώρο του καταυλισμού μετατρέποντάς τον σε ένα χώρο με σημασία (Feldman και Stall, 1994: 172). Μελέτες που επικέντρωσαν το ενδιαφέρον τους στις οικείες χωρικότητες των προσφύγων, και πιο συγκεκριμένα σε πρακτικές στέγασης και καθημερινές δραστηριότητες, όπως την ετοιμασία φαγητού, την υποδοχή καλεσμένων, τη διακόσμηση, συσχετίζουν τις μορφές ιδιοποίησης του χώρου με τη διαδικασία συγκρότησης ενός σπιτικού και αναδιαπραγμάτευσης της οικιακότητας στα συγκεκριμένα ιστορικά και πολιτικά συμφραζόμενα (Steigemann και Misselwitz, 2020). Ακολουθώντας τους Brun και Fábos (2015), θα μπορούσαμε να θεωρήσουμε ότι οι ανθισμένοι κήποι μπολιάζοντας την προσωπική αισθητική, το γνωστικό και μνημονικό κεφάλαιο, τις πολιτισμικές αξίες και τις επιθυμίες των προσφύγων -που καλλιεργούνται στο πλαίσιο πολλαπλών δια-εθνικών επαφών και σχέσεων εξουσίας-μαρτυρούν την καθημερινή διαδικασία ανανοηματοδότησης και δημιουργίας ενός «σπιτιού» -σε επίπεδο υλικό, συναισθηματικό, κοινωνικό-σε συνθήκες παρατεταμένου εκτοπισμού. ...
... Μέσα από τις καθημερινές πρακτικές της κηπουρικής και της καλλιέργειας, τη συνεχή φροντίδα και αισθητηριακή επαφή με τη γη, θα μπορούσε κανείς να υποστηρίξει ότι οι πρόσφυγες οικειοποιούνται τον ανοίκειο χώρο του καταυλισμού μετατρέποντάς τον σε ένα χώρο με σημασία (Feldman και Stall, 1994: 172). Μελέτες που επικέντρωσαν το ενδιαφέρον τους στις οικείες χωρικότητες των προσφύγων, και πιο συγκεκριμένα σε πρακτικές στέγασης και καθημερινές δραστηριότητες, όπως την ετοιμασία φαγητού, την υποδοχή καλεσμένων, τη διακόσμηση, συσχετίζουν τις μορφές ιδιοποίησης του χώρου με τη διαδικασία συγκρότησης ενός σπιτικού και αναδιαπραγμάτευσης της οικιακότητας στα συγκεκριμένα ιστορικά και πολιτικά συμφραζόμενα (Steigemann και Misselwitz, 2020). Ακολουθώντας τους Brun και Fábos (2015), θα μπορούσαμε να θεωρήσουμε ότι οι ανθισμένοι κήποι μπολιάζοντας την προσωπική αισθητική, το γνωστικό και μνημονικό κεφάλαιο, τις πολιτισμικές αξίες και τις επιθυμίες των προσφύγων -που καλλιεργούνται στο πλαίσιο πολλαπλών δια-εθνικών επαφών και σχέσεων εξουσίας-μαρτυρούν την καθημερινή διαδικασία ανανοηματοδότησης και δημιουργίας ενός «σπιτιού» -σε επίπεδο υλικό, συναισθηματικό, κοινωνικό-σε συνθήκες παρατεταμένου εκτοπισμού. ...
Edited volume In greek
Η Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση δομείται στη βάση θεμελιωδών αρχών και αξιών, που στοχεύουν μεταξύ άλλων στην προάσπιση της δημοκρατίας, του κράτους δικαίου και του σεβασμού των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων. Σε περιόδους «κρίσης», όπως αυτή που συντελέστηκε το 2015 με την άφιξη ενός εκατομμυρίου και πλέον προσφύγων, το θεμελιακό υπόβαθρο της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης φάνηκε να κλυδωνίζεται. Η ιδέα της ενωμένης Ευρώπης ως εγγυήτριας των δικαιωμάτων όσων αναζητούν προστασία αμφισβητήθηκε, καθώς η αλληλεγγύη, ο επιμερισμός των ευθυνών και η προσφορά φιλοξενίας δεν προσεγγίστηκαν ούτε προσεγγίζονται έως σήμερα με τον ίδιο τρόπο από τα κράτη μέλη. Παρότι οι ευρωπαϊκές αξίες εμφανίζονται στο δημόσιο διάλογο ολοένα και περισσότερο, η ερμηνεία τους διαφοροποιείται. Η ελαστικότητα στην απόδοση του ακριβούς νοήματος τους επέτρεψε και συνεχίζει να επιτρέπει την επίκλησή τους συχνά με ένα ασύμβατο φάσμα πολιτικών. Αυτή την ιδιαιτερότητα επιχειρεί να αναδείξει η παρούσα έκδοση. Υιοθετώντας μια διεπιστημονική προσέγγιση, οι συγγραφείς του τόμου, επιχειρούν να φωτίσουν την αντίφαση μεταξύ του προβεβλημένου αξιακού πλαισίου και της μεταναστευτικής πολιτικής που εξακολουθεί να εφαρμόζεται, τόσο στην Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση όσο και στην Ελλάδα. Φιλόσοφοι, πολιτικοί επιστήμονες, κοινωνιολόγος, κοινωνικοί ανθρωπολόγοι, διερευνούν με ένα πρωτότυπο συνδυασμό κοινωνικής επιστημονικής ανάλυσης και νομικής και φιλοσοφικής θεωρίας το θέμα των αξιών και αρχών, στην εφαρμογή πολιτικών φιλοξενίας, υποδοχής, και προστασίας της περιόδου 2015-2021.
Συγγραφείς: Σάμυ Αλεξανδρίδης | Ρόζα Βασιλάκη | Φιλύρα Βλαστού-Δημοπούλου | Αναστάσιος Γιουζέπας | Αγγελική Δημητριάδη | Λουκία Κοτρωνάκη | Κώστας Ν. Κουκουζέλης | Χάρης Μαλαμίδης | Ρεγγίνα Μαντανίκα | Κωνσταντίνος Α. Παπαγεωργίου | Εύα Παπατζανή | Χαρίλαος Πλατανάκης| Νίκος Σερντεδάκις | Αλεξάνδρα Σιώτου | Αννα Τριανταφυλλίδου | Αναστασία Χαλκιά | Πάνος Χατζηπροκοπίου
... The one narrator who did travel independently, requesting asylum upon arrival in a UK airport, was well aware of the procedures which he would be subject to as his communication with his fiancée throughout the journey kept him well-informed. Despite this divergence in routes, the narrators who applied for asylum from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq share with other Syrian refugees the centrality of waiting and disinformation in the asylum process(Betts, 2006;Andersson, 2014b;Oka, 2014;Pinelli, 2018;Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020). ...
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Syrian refugee narratives (in original oral history interviews, memoirs and news media), the thesis carries out a discourse analysis of a variety of texts to examine how subjectivities and global relations of power are discursively produced and cited. Following Carolyn J. Dean’s ‘survivor-witness’ figure, the thesis proposes the ‘survivor-witness-messenger’ as a role through which to interpret the complex and contesting demands made upon Syrian refugee narrators. This suggestion builds on Dean’s term by emphasising the interlocking relation of movement, survival and the deliverance of testimony in existing discourses around Syrian refugees as well as within their own stories. The thesis is concerned with possible interpretations of the texts which read for citations of this figure, whether through occupying the role, explicitly rejecting it or engaging with it ambivalently, and how such citations produce the narrators as international political subjects. The first half of the thesis focuses on how the narrators discursively produce certain spaces as having a racializing and gendering effect of dehumanisation upon displaced subjects as well as on the contested and complex narrative explorations of the politics of gratitude as a producing a pressure to narrativize suffering for Western audiences. In the second half, the thesis’s argument for the possibility of reading for such discursive engagements with space, gender, race and humanity through the ‘survivor-witness-messenger’ figure turns to the intertextual relations between the texts analysed, other Syrian refugee narratives and wider international discourses on refugees, violence and testimony. From metaphors comparing regime oppression in Syria to scenes of domestic violence to the genres coalescing around narrators based on gender and age, these chapters argue for a recognition of an inter-connected network of international actors involved in the production and commodification of Syrian stories with a multiplicity of implications for the discursive shaping of categories such as refugee, witness and human.
... These multi-scalar dimensions of the home have been observed to be deeply relevant to refugees, who struggle to find a balance between the various scales and levels of the home: from the immediate, to the institutional and the national (Brun and Fábos 2015). Indeed, many scholars have followed this reactive and almost automatic terminology, and refugees' appropriations have consequently often been addressed as 'homemaking' practices (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020;Hart, Paszkiewicz and Albadra 2018). This is of course valid and serves a purpose, yet it can prove challenging when attempting to scale up the findings: What does the home then mean in relation to housing and its architecture? ...
In Zaatari camp, Jordan, thousands of Syrian refugees were sheltered in tents and caravans, which they steadily appropriated and turned into dwellings that responded to their social and cultural needs. In this book, Ayham Dalal takes a closer look at this remarkable transformation. He draws on the tension between 'the shelter' and 'the dwelling' to unravel how new spaces unfold in between them, where refugees become architects and the camp is dismantled and reassembled. From Shelters to Dwellings is the first study to uniquely combine ethnographic observations with new architectural research methods, to illustrate in detail how refugees inhabit shelters. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how camps and shelters are transformed by the powerful act of dwelling.
... These multi-scalar dimensions of the home have been observed to be deeply relevant to refugees, who struggle to find a balance between the various scales and levels of the home: from the immediate, to the institutional and the national (Brun and Fábos 2015). Indeed, many scholars have followed this reactive and almost automatic terminology, and refugees' appropriations have consequently often been addressed as 'homemaking' practices (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020;Hart, Paszkiewicz and Albadra 2018). This is of course valid and serves a purpose, yet it can prove challenging when attempting to scale up the findings: What does the home then mean in relation to housing and its architecture? ...
In Zaatari camp, Jordan, thousands of Syrian refugees were sheltered in tents and caravans, which they steadily appropriated and turned into dwellings that responded to their social and cultural needs. In this book, Ayham Dalal takes a closer look at this remarkable transformation. He draws on the tension between 'the shelter' and 'the dwelling' to unravel how new spaces unfold in between them, where refugees become architects and the camp is dismantled and reassembled. From Shelters to Dwellings is the first study to uniquely combine ethnographic observations with new architectural research methods, to illustrate in detail how refugees inhabit shelters. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how camps and shelters are transformed by the powerful act of dwelling.
... They want to feel -perhaps temporarily -at home in the city and become full members of the local community (cf. Steigemann /Misselwitz 2020;Van Heelsum 2017). They aspire to fully integrate in society. ...
In this study, we take the concept of arrival infrastructures as a starting point to explore refugees’ home-making processes in Amsterdam. This concept allows us to look beyond formal infrastructures set up for refugees and to take a closer look at all (f)actors playing a role in refugees’ processes of “starting all over again”. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research in a community centre for refugees, we describe the role of institutional as well as personal infrastructures in material and affective terms and show how these are related to refugees’ sense of belonging in the city. We illustrate that refugees become entangled in a web of reception/asylum seekers centres and civic integration requirements that facilitate and constrain their home-making processes in a new place. It is more the informal, personal infrastructures that enable refugees to build social and affective ties in the city. Nevertheless, refugees are still struggling with social isolation and a lack of participation due to their limited opportunities and the relatively closed character of Dutch society. This impacts their sense of belonging and comes at the cost of their integration in the city. These insights raise not only questions on the current organisation of arrival infrastructures for refugees, but also show the need to move towards a multidimensional integration model that includes the role of (civil) society in the destination society in the refugees’ integration processes.
* This article belongs to a special issue on "Refugee Migration to Europe – Challenges and Potentials for Cities and Regions".
... [19] See the insightful analysis of residents' spatial appropriation and reconfiguration practices described by Steigemann and Misselwitz (2020), who have studied the 'practices of homemaking in a state of permanent temporariness' in German refugee camps. Their research is part of the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center CRC 1265 'Re-Figuration of Spaces', which has developed a theoretically much more sophisticated concept of reconfiguration than the one we use in our research (see Knoblauch and Löw 2020). ...
After more than 50 years of civil war, the lack of a clear itinerary, unanticipated crises, and contingencies are seriously affecting the termination of the longest-lasting internal war in Latin America. The 2016 Peace Agreement signed between former guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) and the Colombian Government established the ex-combatants’ reinsertion into civilian life as key to the quest for pacification. Doubtlessly, after their demobilisation, the fighters’ relocation and reintegration posed major challenges in this ongoing path to conflict resolution. The fragile implementation process is accompanied by countless practical obstacles, severe political obstructions, and vital insecurity problems. From 2017 to 2020, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in several demobilisation camps (Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación or ETCR), including the collection and analysis of photos, videos, and documents. In this article, we reconstruct the landmarks in the reinsertion process by focusing on the modifications of the use, and the symbolic production of spaces in two of these camps. Our research illuminates they ways in which the ex-combatants reconfigure their personal and social space. The results demonstrate that self-initiated spatial reconfiguration practices play a crucial role in the ex-combatants’ reintegration into Colombian civil society. These changes are embedded in the interaction with adjacent local communities, public authorities and national or international institutions. Our case study yields insights for research on transitions from war to peace in cognate contexts.
... We will therefore focus on two common practices observed in camps, which highlight the ways in which camp residents reappropriate, upcycle or trade aid infrastructure and humanitarian commodities: the creation of makeshift gardens, and the informal economies shaping and shaped by materiality. All these practices must be understood as both material and social (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020). ...
... We will therefore focus on two common practices observed in camps, which highlight the ways in which camp residents reappropriate, upcycle or trade aid infrastructure and humanitarian commodities: the creation of makeshift gardens, and the informal economies shaping and shaped by materiality. All these practices must be understood as both material and social (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020). ...
Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representing disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, contemporary archaeology, curatorial studies, history and human geography. The ethnographic nature of the chapters and the focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the broader conditions and tangible experiences of migration.
... Akcan's discussion of the immigrant inhabitation of the postmodern IBA housing of the 1980s might be compared to a recent article on ' Architectures of Asylum' , which focuses on the more recent production of collective accommodation for asylum seekers in Berlin (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). Although they do not use this particular term, Steigemann and Misselwitz point out that the architecture of container housing is not 'open' . ...
... Akcan's discussion of the immigrant inhabitation of the postmodern IBA housing of the 1980s might be compared to a recent article on ' Architectures of Asylum' , which focuses on the more recent production of collective accommodation for asylum seekers in Berlin (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). Although they do not use this particular term, Steigemann and Misselwitz point out that the architecture of container housing is not 'open' . ...
Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.
... (1992, 10; see also Boer 2015, 500 f.) In previous work, we revealed that spatial practices are also key to urbanizing refugee camps and turning them into homes (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020;Misselwitz 2009). For instance, Romola Sanyal (2011) has explained how, despite the policing practices and attempts to maintain the temporal nature of the camp, refugees most often manage to urbanize their accommodations through the incremental practice of building under cover of their tents and bribing policemen. ...
This paper explores what everyday digital assemblages of care do to the spatio-temporal experience of claiming asylum under political landscapes characterised by hostile governance affects. Drawing upon one year of participatory ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reimagines a wide range of smartphone practices – playing online games, using YouTube Kids or making WhatsApp chats – as assemblages of care which disrupt what it feels like to live within the UK's asylum application system. This paper presents these forms of care as practices of (re)mediation , highlighting the potentiality that digitally mediated care has in sustaining affirmative forms of living alongside, within, and under hostility. Sketching out three relations of flourishing – countering isolating urban infrastructure, becoming as a form of selfhood, and shifting cosmopolitan imaginaries – the paper sets out an account of affirmative living that emerges in an everyday posthuman assemblage between the human and smartphone. Where the intended consequences of hostile affects are disrupted (even where unremarkable, ephemeral, fleeting, or mundane), I suggest we are confronted with an updated reading of political theory – of various attempts to categorise forms of Othered life as bare, unliveable or unvalued – that must take seriously novel forms of digital flourishing.
This chapter focuses on translations of home arrays. The ethnographic case studies in this chapter have in common as the underlying fact that material objects and arrangements are vital in gaining a sense of security, familiarity and control in asylum reception situations as conceptually laid out in section “Translations of Home Arrangements” in Chap. 2. The first case study centers around the homing attempts of an Iraqi family in an improvised emergency shelter where the assembled makeshift materials provide a minimal domestic normalcy. Second, the beautifying and artistic engagements of a young Gülen member from Turkey in decentralized reception are discussed, which are an instance of defiance and processing in the face of impending deportation. Third, I examine the case of an Iranian family and their adaption of unfamiliar domestic items in reception. In the last part I look into how things of home serve as a means to negotiate the paradox between prestige and refugeehood and tension in reception.
This section explains “where and how” I conducted the fieldwork for this ethnography. I provide insight into the general situations of my interlocutors—all of them asylum-reception dwellers—the different places and facilities in Germany, such as Hamburg, Friedland and beyond and some general information about reception conditions. Similarly, I will discuss the features of different types of facilities in two main research phases: improvised emergency shelters in northern Germany (March–June 2016), Friedland transit camp in Lower Saxony (November 2019–March 2020) and decentralized shelters or community shelters (both periods). The spatial, material and organizational features of these centers frame the dwelling conditions, opportunities and constraints of homing as well as of ethnographic research. This chapter seeks to contribute to methods-based debates on (forced) migration, asylum reception and home ethnography from a material-culture perspective. Moreover, I reflect on my role as an ethnographer and its effect on the research, which is the subject of the latter part of the chapter.
This paper presents research on design challenges in protracted refugee camps, where “temporary” shelters undergo informal transformations, becoming long-term homes and establishing communities. We develop a shape grammar to investigate this phenomenon, focusing on the evolution of refugee housing units in the Irbid Camp in Jordan from the emergency to the transitional and permanent phases. Our parametric shape grammar analyzes and describes the physical characteristics of these units, revealing their dynamic nature. The corpus of the grammar includes 10 diverse housing units that provide a range of insights and opportunities for refugee housing design and planning. The grammar builds a foundation for developing design solutions that mediate transformations and address long-term implications for sustainable and adaptive environments to anticipate self-build processes and better support evolving resident needs in housing layouts.
In the late 1990s, Moroccan veterans in their 70s and 80s arrived in the city of Bordeaux, hoping to claim the retirement pensions that they were owed for serving in the French army. From then on, moving back and forth between Morocco and France, they entered a dynamic of “over-mobility.” In France, they experienced various forms of accommodation until they were housed in social residences. Using an approach drawn from Material Cultures studies, the investigation of their domestic space reveals divergent trends in their appropriation, manifested through three atmospheres linked to the temporary living conditions of these veterans. Despite their apparent detachment, they fulfil their need for “home” connections by cultivating a familiar atmosphere outside their host domestic space. Semi-directive interviews as well as in situ observations rendered through visual methods translate the particularities of the living conditions of Moroccan veterans in France and the spatial atmospheres resulting from their appropriations and uses.
La mondialisation est souvent associée à l’effacement des frontières entre les États et à la liberté de circuler. En étudiant les évolutions récentes des frontières, Steffen Mau montre que loin de disparaître, elles se sont transformées au xxie siècle en machines de tri. Avec l’aide de la numérisation et des nouvelles technologies de contrôle, elles se muent en smart borders, chargées de distinguer les voyageurs souhaités de ceux qui sont jugés indésirables. Ainsi, seuls quelques privilégiés bénéficient d’une liberté de circulation mondiale, tandis que pour le reste de la population, les frontières restent fermées. En s’appuyant sur des exemples précis, le sociologue analyse ici les formes, les fonctions et les symboliques de ces nouvelles frontières. À rebours de l’image répandue d’un monde contemporain entièrement ouvert, il met en évidence la façon dont elles établissent des inégalités face à la mobilité. Cet ouvrage propose une approche critique, rigoureuse et inédite du rôle des frontières dans le monde d’aujourd’hui. Steffen Mau y déploie sa réflexion dans une langue claire et accessible, et invite les lecteurs à se pencher sur les frontières modernes en remettant en question certains à priori.
The article intends to bring together two perspectives on analysing and understanding societal developments and transformations. It takes infrastructures and migration as cases to discuss how a focus on infrastructures' role in migration processes can inform migration studies and how, in turn, a focus on migration processes can inform studies on and theories of infrastructures. Based on the assumption that studies on infrastructures can be carried out in all fields of society, as we find infrastructures in all societal sectors, and that migration, in turn, affects all fields of society and all its sectors, we shed light on the particular forms that infrastructures take in the course of migration journeys and the actors that are involved; the effects the infrastructures have on migrants and their (im-)mobility; the role they play before, during and after the migration; and how they are co-constituted by actors and co-create social, spatial and physical settings. The article provides the reader with an overview of key strands of research in both infrastructure studies and migration studies and develops an infrastructure-sensitive perspective for research carried out in the field of migration studies.
This article questions the notions of refugee and migrant spaces’ formulations and representations by considering the complex of elements which constitute the refugee camp of Shatila, Lebanon, as articulated by the camp residents themselves. Counter-mapping as methodology and analytical lens serves to reveal, convey, and decodify the proliferating meaning-makings of social, political, and economic relations that uphold the everyday life of the “camp,” determine the shapes of its spaces, and signify its materiality. A reticulated structure of care emerges, described by the notion of migrant infrastructures, from which emanates an invitation to reconsider “informality” of places such as refugee camps as rather extremely developed forms of being and asserting presence.
This article builds on data collected as a part of two research projects to provide a comparative study on the migration journeys of young Brazilian couples in Auckland (New Zealand), the Gold Coast and Perth (Australia). We employ the theoretical lens of multi-stage migration to explore how Brazilian migrant couples plan and pursue journeys across different visa statuses to transition through less precarious forms of migration. Findings suggest that they often plan and pursue their journeys together and that their decision to migrate to Australia and New Zealand is linked to the pathways provided by these countries for more secure forms of migration and visa status. The comparative perspective shows that the trajectories of Brazilian migrants in New Zealand are different to the journeys of Brazilians in Australia in relation to the most protracted stage of their visa journeys. The strategies pursued by Brazilian couples to transit to a less precarious migration status are also particular to each of these countries. This article contributes to the sociological literature on multi-stage migration by emphasising how migrants enact collective agency and navigate restrictive migration regimes together as couples, pursuing joint migration strategies that depend on the maintenance of the relationship.
Housing has always had a close association with refugees but despite this, the knowledge base about housing and its impact in the lives of refugees lacks cohesion. The accommodation of refugees tends to be connected with broader neo-liberal trends, alongside a general animosity towards refugees, culminating in an overt, or implied, ‘hostile environment’. This paper synthesises the available evidence to understand several key issues in the settlement of refugees, including: the role and impact of housing systems and policies, the impact of housing quality, tenure, housing support workers and how the diversity of the refugee population is reflected in the evidence. We also point towards gaps in the knowledge base and call for housing studies scholars to focus on the plight faced by refugees in order to help challenge the wider structural inequalities which constrain their lives. In this discussion, our focus is the United Kingdom (UK), although the paper draws on literature from a wider international perspective.
In Ho Chi Minh City, private complexes of rental rooms designated in Vietnamese asnhtrọform one of the cheapest housing stocks, targeting the working-class, including internal rural migrants. This article combines the insights of both migration and urban studies to analyze the occupation of thenhtrọthrough the concept of temporariness. It addresses the tensions between present constraints and long-term plans of rural migrants as well as their translation into the occupation of the urban space. The method draws upon observations of rental housing and interviews conducted in two suburban neighborhoods of HoChiMinhCity in 2020 and 2021, with migrants coming from deltaic and coastal rural areas of Vietnam. It is found that thenh trọprovide housing for rural migrants who are in a long-term temporary situation, within a tight urban fabric with scarce opportunities for access to urban land ownership. Informants have moved to the city up to thirty years ago. Both the move and the duration are explained by multiple factors, from economic and social mutations to environmental pressures on the deltas and the coast. Relative job stability and trust-based interpersonal relationships in the city may strengthen over time, encouraging migrants to stay. Nevertheless, no matter how long they remain in Ho Chi Minh City, many migrants perceive their stay as temporary before a projected return to the hometown, where their permanent residence registration remains. The occupation of thenhtrọobserved, their adaptations, and the narratives of migrants reveal the relative nature of temporariness in migration and draw the contours of the spatial footprint of low-skilled rural migrants in Ho Chi Minh City.
Mass housing constructed during the 1960s and early 1970s in Bulgaria aimed mainly at providing dwellings in the large rapidly industrializing cities. Originally, the estate masterplans envisioned free standing multifamily multistorey apartment buildings and provided large open green areas, usually designed as a common good.
Recently these green and often underused areas have been recognized as an opportunity for solving the rapidly raising demands for parking spaces and additional facilities related to the contemporary demands for urban mobility. The new masterplans for restructuring the mass housing estates from the last decades focus on zoning, defining plot boundaries and reflecting the up-to-date legal requirements. As a result, two important qualities of the urban environment, the mobility and the green infrastructure, are intertwined and the pedestrian accessibility is neglected.
The positive impacts of and the need for green areas in residential estates in Bulgaria have been studied since the 1970s. Mostly approached and understood as landscape architecture with a focus on greenery, the studies neglect the residents’ predominant concern about the pedestrian and recreational areas. As part of URBiNAT, an on-going European project, one of the estates (Nadezhda, Sofia) is subject for the creation of a so-called green, healthy corridor. It re-introduces the perspectives of urban planning and architectural design in the redesign of open green areas in middle class mass housing estates while also introducing the participatory approach to urban regeneration.
This case study demonstrates the application of morphological approach to re designing pedestrian and recreational areas in mass housing estates. It reveals the discrepancy between priorities of landscape design and citizens’ needs through the results of semi-structured interviews and participatory workshops conducted as a part of the process for re-designing of open spaces - greenery, pedestrian paths and alleys, playgrounds and sitting areas.
Since early 2016, in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, a series of accommodation policies for asylum seekers were developed in Greece under the regime of ‘emergency’, consisting of two pillars: On the one hand, the ‘campisation’ of accommodation in the mainland and, on the other hand, urban apartments. This article sheds light on the uneven geographies of accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens, by investigating in a complementary way the aforementioned distinct – yet intertwined – types of accommodation. Through the lens of ‘precarity of place’, it argues that asylum accommodation in Athens reproduces multiple geographies of precarity through (a) filtering mechanisms based mainly on vulnerability categorisations, (b) socio-spatial isolation and segregation, and (c) a no-choice basis and extensive control of everyday habitation. The article explores the impact of the above on the everyday lives, socio-spatial relationships, and processes of belonging of asylum seekers, as well as on how they experience – and sometimes contest – precarity of place. The research, conducted in metropolitan Athens, is based on a mixed-methods approach that includes critical policy analysis and interviews with asylum seekers accommodated in camps and apartments, and representatives of institutional actors involved in the accommodation sector.
With the increase of refugee movements since 2014 in Europe and the Near East, the debate of how to plan appropriate shelters and emergency accommodation has gained a new momentum. Established techno-managerial approaches have been criticised as inappropriate and the professional community of planners and architects was increasingly drawn into debates for alternative solutions. This article traces the “innovations” that promise better, more effective, and more humane emergency shelters using the examples of the “Tempohomes” in Berlin as well as the Jordanian refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq. In both cases, planners were employed to address the ambivalent reality of protracted refugee camps and include “lessons” from failures of earlier solutions. While the article acknowledges the genuine attempt of planners to engage with the more complex needs and expectations of refugees, a careful look at the results of the planning for better camps reveals ambivalent outcomes. As camps acquire a new visual appearance, closer to housing, which mixes shelter design with social spaces and services as essential parts of the camp; these “innovations” bear the danger of paternalistic planning and aestheticisation, camouflaging control under what seems to be well-intended and sensitive planning. The article focuses on refugees’ agency expressed in critical camp studies to interrogate the planning results. While recent critical refugee studies have demanded recognition of refugees as urban actors which should be included in the co-production of the spatial reality of refugee accommodations, new planning approaches tend to result in a shrinking of spaces of self-determination and self-provisioning of refugees.
The lifespan of displacement camps around the globe is often measured in years or decades. Nevertheless, the establishment of camps to house people fleeing political violence is often framed as an emergency measure of limited duration. These are depicted as “temporary” spaces in which people are provided with aid and support until such time that they are able to return to their “permanent” homes. In this article, we focus on the actions and aspirations of camp residents to imbue their dwellings with a sense of home. Our empirical material was generated through fieldwork in two camps in Jordan housing people displaced from Syria. “Homemaking” in this location calls into question the rigid opposition between “temporary” and “permanent”: an opposition that, for diverse reasons, host states, donors, humanitarians, and camp residents may strive to maintain, at least in rhetorical terms. Attending to the creation of dedicated space for receiving guests, we consider the content of homemaking as shaped by residents’ideals of home in combination with the constraints imposed by institutions responsible for funding, hosting, and managing the camps. While this analysis highlights the fragility and contingency of homemaking, it also reveals the agency of displaced people in acting to improve their surroundings and conduct normative social relations.
In the aftermath of large refugee arrivals in 2015, EU regulations and national asylum laws were tightened, especially those regarding reception and accommodation. The current contribution introduces the concept of “campization” to explain the impact of law and policy changes on the socio-spatial configuration and functions of refugee accommodation in European capital regions. Based on qualitative research concerning case studies for Athens, Berlin, and Copenhagen, I argue that refugee accommodation has increasingly been transformed into large, camp-like structures with lowered living standards and a closed character. This is shown by the structural, functional, and socio-spatial characteristics of the accommodation in the three case studies, as well as the political and administrative objectives that determine the campization of accommodation. The contribution lastly highlights changing notions and forms of containment, exclusion, and temporality as part of campization, and links this process to current trends in asylum and urban development.
This article aims to conceptualize home and homemaking for people in protracted displacement.The article serves three purposes: To present an overview of the area of inquiry; to develop an analytical framework for understanding home and homemaking for forced migrants in protracted displacement; and to introduce the special issue.It explores how protracted displacement has been defined-from policy definitions to people's experiences of protractedness, including "waiting" and "the permanence of temporariness." The article identifies the ambivalence embedded in experiences and practices of homemaking in long-term displacement, demonstrating how static notions of home and displacement might be unsettled.It achieves this through examining relationships between mobility and stasis, the material and symbolic, between the past, present, and future, and multiple places and scales.The article proposes a conceptual framework-a triadic constellation of home-that enables an analysis of home in different contexts of protracted displacement.The framework helps to explore home both as an idea and a practice, distinguishing among three elements: "home" as the day-to-day practices of homemaking, "Home" as representing values, traditions, memories, and feelings of home, and the broader political and historical contexts in which "HOME" is understood in the current global order and embedded in institutions.In conclusion, the article argues that a feminist and dynamic understanding of home-Home-HOME provides a more holistic perspective of making home in protracted displacement that promotes a more extensive and more sophisticated academic work, policies, and practices.
Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under‐explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that is still un‐urban. This article challenges this idea of the camp as space of pure biopolitics and explores the politics of space in the refugee camp using urban debates. Using case studies from the Middle East and South Asia, it looks at how the refugee spaces developed and became informalized, and how people recovered their agency through ‘producing spaces’ both physically and politically. In doing so, it draws connections between refugee camps and other spaces of urban marginality, and suggests that refugee spaces can be seen as important sites for articulating new politics.
The author analyzes the political geography of globally expanding urban informalities. These are conceptualized as `gray spaces', positioned between the `whiteness' of legality/approval/safety, and the `blackness' of eviction/destruction/death. The vast expansion of gray spaces in contemporary cities reflects the emergence of new types of colonial relations, which are managed by urban regimes facilitating a process of `creeping apartheid'. Planning is a lynchpin of this urban order, providing tools and technologies to classify, contain and manage deeply unequal urban societies. The author uses a `South-Eastern' perspective to suggest the concept of `planning citizenship' as a possible corrective horizon for analytical, normative and insurgent theories.
The paper draws on critical urban theories (CUT) to trace the working of oppressive power and the emergence of new subjectivities through the production of space. Within such settings, it analyzes the struggle of Bedouin Arabs in the Beersheba metropolitan region, Israel/Palestine. The paper invokes the concept of 'gray spacing' as the practice of indefinitely positioning populations between the 'lightness' of legality, safety and full membership, and the 'darkness' of eviction, destruction and death. The amplification of gray space illuminates the emergence of urban colonial relations in a vast number of contemporary city regions. In the Israeli context, the ethnocratic state has forced the indigenous Bedouins into impoverished and criminalized gray space, in an attempt to hasten their forced urbanization and Israelization. This created a process of 'creeping apartheid', causing the transformation of Bedouin struggle from agonistic to antagonistic; and their mobilization from democratic to radical. The process is illustrated by highlighting three key dimensions of political articulation: sumood (hanging on), memory-building and autonomous politics. These dynamics underscore the need for a revised CUT, which extends the scope of spatial-social critique and integrates better to conditions of urban colonialism, collective identity and space, for a better understanding of both oppression and resistance.
Most writing on sociological method has been concerned with how accurate facts can be obtained and how theory can thereby be more rigorously tested. In The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss address the equally Important enterprise of how the discovery of theory from data-systematically obtained and analyzed in social research-can be furthered. The discovery of theory from data-grounded theory-is a major task confronting sociology, for such a theory fits empirical situations, and is understandable to sociologists and laymen alike. Most important, it provides relevant predictions, explanations, interpretations, and applications. In Part I of the book, "Generation Theory by Comparative Analysis," the authors present a strategy whereby sociologists can facilitate the discovery of grounded theory, both substantive and formal. This strategy involves the systematic choice and study of several comparison groups. In Part II, The Flexible Use of Data," the generation of theory from qualitative, especially documentary, and quantitative data Is considered. In Part III, "Implications of Grounded Theory," Glaser and Strauss examine the credibility of grounded theory. The Discovery of Grounded Theory is directed toward improving social scientists' capacity for generating theory that will be relevant to their research. While aimed primarily at sociologists, it will be useful to anyone Interested In studying social phenomena-political, educational, economic, industrial- especially If their studies are based on qualitative data. © 1999 by Barney G. Glaser and Frances Strauss. All rights reserved.
This volume introduces a strategic interdisciplinary research agenda on arrival infrastructures. Arrival infrastructures are those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated. Challenging the dominance of national normativities, temporalities, and geographies of "arrival," the authors scrutinize the position and potential of cities as transnationally embedded places of arrival. Critically interrogating conceptions of migrant arrival as oriented towards settlement and integration, the volume directs attention to much more diverse migration trajectories that shape our cities today. Each chapter examines how migrants, street-level bureaucrats, local residents, and civil society actors build-with the resources they have at hand-the infrastructures that accommodate, channel, and govern arrival.
City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process - an "anticipatory politics" - that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.
There is a long history of cultural assumptions regarding children’s special affinity or bond for certain places, much of it antedating modern psychology. Within psychology, the subject is more ambiguous. The term attachment evokes a long history of theory and research that has measured the degree to which young children seek to keep a primary caretaker in sight and hearing, showing distress at separation and joy at reunion not merely for the sake of the satisfaction of physical needs but for the value of her presence (Maccoby & Masters, 1970; Sears, 1972). Much of this work has been inspired by the psychoanalytic theory of object relations. A naive reader might suppose that this literature explores people’s relations with objects—with things—which must involve things in their places; but a reader schooled in psychological jargon knows that in this case “object” almost invariably means “mother.” Yet the confusion is not merely naive, as object relations theorists have usually assumed that a child’s feelings for places and things develop as an extension of its relations with its mother. As a result, it has not been clear whether place attachments should be considered merely secondary effects of social attachments, or whether they have an independent existence.
This paper explores humanitarianism in the practice of Frontex-assisted Greek border police in Evros and of Frontex at their headquarters in Warsaw. Building on the increase in humanitarian justifications for border policing practices as well as the charges of a lack of humanity, the paper analyzes the relations between humanitarian responses and border policing where humanitarianism is used for framing and giving meaning to institutional and operational practices. In offering an interpretive view of border policing undertaken by people in their working lives across sites and scales, it builds on the critical literature addressing the multifaceted nature of border control in Europe today. At the same time, it speaks to wider debates about the double-sided nature of humanitarian governance concerned with care and control. It argues that while humanitarian motivations have implications for operations in the field and help to frame “good practice” at the policy level, humanitarianism should not be seen as additional or paradoxical to wider border policing operations within forms of governance developed to address the problems of population. Conflict arises in the paradox of protection between the subject of humanitarianism and policing, the population, and the object of border control, the territorially bounded state or regional unit.
This article examines the relationship between migration and identity by complicating our notion of what ‘home’ means, both for the narrative of ‘being at home’ and for the narrative of ‘leaving home’. It offers, not a migrant ontology, but a consideration of the historical determination of patterns of estrangement in which the living and yet mediated relation between being, home and world is partially reconfigured from the perspective of those who have left home. This reconfiguration does not take place through the heroic act of an individual (the migrant), but through the forming of communities that create multiple identifications through collective acts of remembering in the absence of a shared knowledge or a familiar terrain. The article interweaves a variety of different texts: short stories by Asian women in Britain, autobiographical reflection, theoretical constructions of migrancy and literature from two very different nomadic or migrant communities, the Global Nomads International and the Asian Women’s Writing Collective. The article provides a critique of recent theories of migrancy - and nomadism - as inherently transgressive, or as an ontological condition (where what we have in common is the loss of a home). The author argues that it is through an uncommon estrangement that the possibility of migrant communities comes to be lived. That is, it is the uncommon estrangement of migration that allows migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common.
Crisis is normally conceived of as an isolated period of time in which our lives are shattered. It defines the loss of balance and the inability to control the exterior forces influencing our possibilities and choices. The phenomenon is seen as a temporary disorder, a momentary malformation in the flow of things. Yet, for a great many people around the world crisis is endemic rather than episodic and cannot be delineated as an aberrant moment of chaos or a period of decisive change. For the structurally violated, socially marginalised and poor, the world is not characterised by balance, peace or prosperity but by the ever-present possibility of conflict, poverty and disorder. In this introductory article I examine the social and experiential consequences of chronic crisis and investigate how it challenges and furthers our analytic apparatus. Instead of placing crisis in context I argue that we need to see crisis as context – as a terrain of action and meaning – thereby opening up the field to ethnographic investigation.
Agier offers an assessment of contemporary humanitarianism and appeals to humanity that juxtaposes a survey of camps with ethnographic reportage. According to Agier, contemporary humanitarianism must be understood as a new and unprecedented form of government that nevertheless leaves room for unsuspected political action.
In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
In recent years there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. Although many researchers now understand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflection and critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse, even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examines the dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. It raises the question whether or not home is (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home. In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and experience of home each of these themes are briefly considered in this critical literature review.
The inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the
popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa’s most urbanized
settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins—of ruined urbanization, the ruining of
Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be
happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but
also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is
capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of
economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means.
This essay is framed around the notion of people as infrastructure, which
emphasizes economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from
and immiserated by urban life. Infrastructure is commonly understood in physical
terms, as reticulated systems of highways, pipes, wires, or cables. These modes of
provisioning and articulation are viewed as making the city productive, reproducing
it, and positioning its residents, territories, and resources in specific
ensembles where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and
accounted for.
The Production of Space
- H Lefebvre
Double articulation: A place in the world
- D Massey
Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government
- M Agier
A duty and a burden on Jordan
- S Al-Kilani
Rehabilitating Camp Cities: community driven planning for urbanised refugee camps
- P Misselwitz
Syrian refugees in Jordan: A reality check
- L Achilli
On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today
- M Agier
Angekommen in Berlin: Gesamtkonzept zur Integration und Partizipation Geflüchteter
- Senate
- Berlin