Project overview
Aims
The research aims to reframe the paradigm of forced migrants’ arrival as a policy framework and discursive realm. Taking the idea of unfolding crisis as background, the project will develop around different research strands. We will investigate how refugees’ action and agency are shaped by and shape the infrastructure of arrival in different locations. We will examine specific housing choices and dwelling strategies that occur under conditions of constraint within the humanitarian systems of care. We will try to understand how different spaces of refusal or acceptance, care and repair, can be opened up to go beyond binary approaches of power/resistance, or humanitarian myths of self-reliance and resilience.
Research questions
Within the entangled crisis, in this post-covid, post-Brexit, post-Arab spring context – how do forced migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Italy navigate their way through public space, transports and (hostile) housing? How do Ukrainian care workers live the home when this is both a place of work, exploitation and safety? How do Syrian families in London cope with the cost of living crisis, gentrification and eviction? How do migrants and refugees from Syria make housing choices in Istanbul, and how do they respond to local governance encouraging refugee presence in specific suburbs? These are few of the questions that we will examine in Italy, London, Hastings and Istanbul, paying attention to how refugees navigate housing precarity and belonging at the nexus of inclusion/exclusion generated by multiple overlapping crises.
Research territories
In Italy, we will engage with “Interstitial spaces of inhabitation: imperfect trajectories in the urban space”, by examining a) shelters for the unhoused operated by NGOs with limited state support; b) diffused hospitality; and c) makeshift solutions. In the UK, we will examine “Austerity, arrival and dwelling strategies.” Using the concepts of displaceability, deportability and evictability in relation to arrival regimes, in Hastings and London we will explore ‘home’ and homelessness through decontextualizing it from common associations with shelter to allow for understanding and practices of dwelling, the street and territories as a home. In Istanbul, we will assess “Trajectories of displacement and housing choices of refugees in response to governmental policies” and as a result of their own displacement trajectories. In particular, we will evaluate individual housing histories, pull and push factors for multiple relocation (e.g., earthquakes, migration policies, cost of housing, kinship networks) and type of house tenancy.
Approach
In all these locations, the project will examine the topic from three angles: The entanglement of refuge, housing, and the living cost crisis in the context of austerity and how it has evolved since 2015; the role of activist housing networks and migrant-led organizations in responding to increased requests to accommodate migrants, and in strengthening the ‘formal’ state-provided infrastructure of arrival; the multiplicity of forms of ‘dwelling otherwise,’ understood as alternative practices of inhabiting beyond formal accommodation, social housing, and rented properties.
Team
The AHRC Team includes Giovanna Astolfo (UK Pi, DPU UCL), Harriett Allsopp (Research Fellow, DPU), Stefano Mastromarino (Research Assistant, DPU), Estella Carpi (Turkey Co-I, RDR UCL), Negin Darvishahmadi (Research Assistant), Sepehr Roshanshomal (Research Assistant)
The AHRC partners are Solidaunia (Italy) and Refugee Buddy Project (UK).
The DFG Team includes Birgit Glorius (Germany Pi, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany); Annegret Haase (Germany Co-I, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Leipzig, Germany).
Bios
Giovanna Astolfo is Associate Professor, architect by training, and urban researcher with over ten years of experience working at the intersection of housing justice and displacement urbanism at the DPU. Since 2015, her research interest revolves around three core themes. Domopolitics, or how refugees and migrants are often trapped within humanitarian systems that function more as systems of control, turning homes into prisons. Necropolitical infrastructures, or how the arrival, reception, and overall management of refugees in Europe is built on the creation of a racialized subject and their subsequent erosion. Homing and domesticity, or how people create and sustain a sense of home in often hostile environments, whatever "home" might mean to people. In the UK, I am particularly focused on the hostility migrants face and how domesticity persists in such conditions.
Harriet Allsopp has a disciplinary background in IR, Politics and Middle Eastern Studies. Her expertise and experience extend from political-economy to micro level social organisation, with particular focus on global and local integration and exclusion mechanisms, migration and displacement and on the intersectionality of these with racial discrimination and structural inequalities. Her independent research has focused on disputed/border territories and spaces, the organisation of groups with restricted rights and their underlying political and socio-economic relations and geo-political contexts, employing mixed and adaptive methodologies to negotiate challenging research environments. Her research on Syria examined political and social organisation and strategies of Kurdish populations, including post-2011 responses and adaptations to conflict and autonomous governance. At the UCL she has worked on the RELIEF Project and, within the DPU, on HOUSE-IN; EPIC; Curing the Limbo.
Estella Carpi is a social anthropologist, presently Associate Professor of Humanitarian Studies at University College London. She is author of The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023). Estella’s research mostly looked at humanitarianism, forced migrations and identity politics in Lebanon and Türkiye.
Negin Darvishahmadi has seven years of professional experience working with refugees and immigrants in Türkiye. She works as an independent Persian- and Turkish-speaking field researcher for several EU-funded projects and beyond. She completed her masters degree with a focus on irregular migration and Afghan women in Istanbul.
Rossana Leal is founder and CEO of the Hastings & Rother Refugee Buddy Project. Her innovative community leadership work was recognised at the Women of the World Festival in London, and she was awarded The Women on the Move Award in 2019. The Refugee Buddy Project is a refugee and migrant-led organisation that stands in solidarity with people seeking refuge in Hastings, Rother and Wealden. It is a registered charity, supporting the most vulnerable in our community. The organisations works to create a culture of welcome, where people seeking refuge can thrive. It does this through offering advice, advocacy, support and connecting people seeking refuge with volunteer buddies from the community. They also work with local artists, businesses, individuals and community groups through workshops, events and projects that build the culture of welcome and support community engagement.
Stefano Mastromarino is an architect, refugee support worker and PhD candidate at The Bartlett DPU, UCL, funded by an ESRC UBEL studentship. A former research assistant at the Ipraus Lab in Paris for the development of the platform “Architecture et précarités”, he worked and studied Architecture at Politecnico di Torino, ENSA Paris-Belleville and TU Dortmund. Besides academia, he engaged in different forms of migrant support and activism in France, Italy and the UK and worked as a UASC Support Worker for a non-profit organisation providing housing and aid services to young people seeking asylum in the UK.
Sepehr Roshanshomal is a PhD candidate at Halic University, Istanbul. He received his MSc in Architecture from Bahçeşehir University. He primarily works on natural structures and the human-nature relation in architecture and the built environment.
Ammar Alhamidi is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Istanbul. He is the director of Hubban.network, a platform fostering collaborations between expatriate artists and urban planners. Ammar’s creative work includes two documentary films, two poetic films, and three music EPs available on Spotify. His research and art explore themes of identity, forced displacement, and cultural expression through music, visual arts, and film.
Nesrin Jalaby is a PhD candidate at Sakarya University. She received her MSc in Political History and International Relations in the Middle East from Marmara University, Istanbul. She works as a MEAL officer at The Day After organisation (TDA), supporting democratic transition in Syria. She is a researcher interested in social-political issues regarding Syrians and the Syria crisis.
Research territories
This stream of the research focuses on the Pista di Borgo Mezzanone, a so-called "informal ghetto" primarily inhabited by migrant agricultural workers, located in the Apulian Capitanata region in the province of Foggia. The aim of the research is to explore the site beyond its visible form and the dominant rhetoric of extraction and exclusion that often define it. Instead, the focus is on understanding the complex entangled assemblage that sustains this space, one that exists at the intersection of subtractive bio/necropolitics and forms of fugitive existence.
Delving into the specific genealogies of accumulation, labour ecologies, and institutional sheltering prospects in and around Borgo Mezzanone, the project employs a variety of situated approaches, from historical narratives, to interviews with government stakeholders, design and art-based interventions, photography, and cartography.
This stream of research consists of a longitudinal examination of different forms of hosting, holding hostage, and housing between metropolitan London and the coastal city of Hastings. It is an extended inquiry into spaces of domesticity, homing, and disturbance—exploring how people escape capture, live, and create a sense of home, whether on or off the grid. The project also delves into the history and contemporary practice of modern banishment (the unmaking of citizenship) and the creation of penal colonies, analysing how the UK, in connection with other European countries, makes arrival an impossibility for many migrants.
In London, the research focuses on how people build life, space, and home while being banished and stripped of their right to the urban environment. It is situated at the intersection of arts and politics, a potent space where research (what we know or don’t know) can intersect with advocacy (what we believe should be). The project rests on the principle that research and knowledge are inherently political, but art—specifically theatrical performances—creates a unique space of visibility that more effectively challenges power asymmetries and exclusions. Through performance, the project seeks to convey acts of refusal and resistance, serving as a form of critique against dominant systems of control, detention and deportability.
In Hastings, the project collaborates with the Refugee Buddy Project to understand and address the barriers to housing and houselessness faced by asylum seekers and refugees locally. Using the concepts of displaceability, deportability and evictability in relation to arrival regimes, in Hastings we will explore ‘home’ and homelessness through decontextualizing it from common associations with shelter to allow for understanding and practices of dwelling, the street and territories as a home. Through the voices and testimonies of those directly affected in Hastings, the project generates a body of housing stories, knowledge exchange activities, and local policy recommendations aimed at reframing housing as a reparative infrastructure of care. By resituating housing within this framework, the project advocates for more just housing policies.
On Turkey, this case study will look at how migrant and refugee groups (which we know speaking Arabic or Persian primarily) make mobility and housing choices and the extent to which that is determined by disasters (getting prepared for future earthquakes or as a result of past ones). We will also examine the extent to and the modalities in which such groups influence each other in such choices. We endeavour to identify their patterns of mobility from overseas to Türkiye and their Istanbul district and the extent to which that happens on a group basis. Methodologies used include large-scale survey, one-to-one interviews, one nationality-based and one mixed focus group. The goal of this research stream, theoretically is to: a) Contribute to tracing the inter-cross between migration and disaster in the literature as well as on the ground (policies and governmental/municipal spatial/housing politics); b) Contribute to carve out a collective social psychology of disaster preparedness within and across the groups considered.
The goal of the research stream, practically is to advocate for municipalities to integrate their afet bilinci egitimleri with group-focused histories and peculiarities (such programs are now merely providing technical information, and if ever, are simply translated into other languages. We need more than mere translations to get the migrant and refugee segments of a society in which most of them tend to be vulnerable prepared vis-à-vis earthquakes).
Upcoming events
Stitch For Change is a textiles, embroidery and storytelling project series, hosted by The Refugee Buddy Project, Hastings since 2020. It aims to promote the healing benefits of hand stitching and to provide a method of connection and sharing. In 2025, the project will see the creation of a giant patchwork of individual stories, experiences and names, on and about housing and arrival, stitched together into one quilt – a record of shared narratives of movement and settlement. The finished piece will be displayed in a local exhibition space for the public to view during Refugee Week 2025.
The Istanbul listening workshop will be organise to receive testimony from all interested parties around housing choices vis-à-vis future disasters in Istanbul, and to discuss the strategies migrants and refugees have been developing to make themselves safe and settled. They will share their mobility stories and have exchanges about housing choices and policies.
This is a one-week series of events, talks, presentations and ex tempore artistic interventions, and installations that will occur in Pista di Borgo Mezzanone and surrounding areas. It will involve the collective of activists and Pista’s inhabitants Dar Assalam, local associations and networks, artist Luigi Coppola and the collective of architects and artists Colletivo TOMA.
This is a one-week workshop that will be held between London and Hastings on the Refugee Week 2025. It will involve a number of sharing moments, talks and dialogues between partners, researchers, local policymakers, migrant organisations.
Panel for ‘Current shifts in discourses on migration’ (IMISCOE conference, Paris, 4-9 July 2025).
Outputs
Mastromarino, S. And Grimaldi, M. (2024), "Progettualità in contrasto? La sfida delle nuove residenzialità e delle istituzioni incorporate nella Pista di Borgo Mezzanone (FG)" [Italian] trans. "Conflicting projects? The challenge of new residential and institutional facilities in Borgo Mezzanone (FG)", IX Convegno SISEC, Pavia (Italy), 31 January 2025.
Carpi, E. (2024) “Fy Intizar al-Karitha. Khayarat al-Muhajirin wa al-Laji’iyn al-Sakaniyya fy Istanbul” [Arabic], trans. “Waiting for Disaster? Housing Choices and Disaster Knowledge Among Migrants and Refugees in Istanbul's Southwestern Districts”, al-‘Araby al-Jadeed, 26 April, 2024. Read here
Mastromarino, S. (2024) [GA1] “Borgo Mezzanone. Prospettive istituzionali, contro-archivi e condizioni di possibilità future” [Italian], trans. “Borgo Mezzanone. Institutional prospects, counter-archives and future conditions of possibility”, Belluno, Italy: Mediterranea Saving Humans, 28 September 2024.
Allsopp, H “The UK-Rwanda deal: a cruel experiment in inhospitality”
On 23 April 2024, the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act was passed. By writing into law that the Republic of Rwanda was a safe third country, it gave legal provisions for the deportation to the African state of people seeking asylum in the UK. The Act and the UK-Rwanda treaty that it supports have taken the UK’s “hostile environment” policy a dangerous step further than other deals that offshore asylum processing. By transferring both asylum claims and refuge, even successful asylum seekers will not return to the UK where they sought asylum but will only be eligible to stay as refugees in Rwanda.
Carpi, E., Ghaffarian, S., Hommous, O., & Johnson, C. (2024, April 17). Waiting for Disaster? Housing Choices and Disaster Knowledge Among Migrants and Refugees in Istanbul’s Southwestern Districts. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science.
This study documents how disaster knowledge among Arabic- and Persian-speaking, Türkiye-based migrants and refugees residing in Istanbul’s southwestern districts (namely Avcılar, Zeytinburnu, Küçükçekmece, Bakırköy, Bağcılar, Fatih, Esenyurt, Bahçelievler, Başakşehir and Beylikdüzü) cannot fully reflect their housing choices. The paper is the outcome of a different project but it creates a knowledge substrata upon which the AHRC project will build
Inappropriable is a repository of collective investigations and archives set out to interrogate practices of inhabitation, infrastructures of life and fugitive wording, focusing on labour ecologies in territories of migration. It is led by a research collective of architects, anthropologists, artists and geographers from Politecnico di Torino and UCL staff involved in the AHRC Reframe project.
Short doc by Alaraby Aljadeed (Arabic version) that presents Estella Carpi's Istanbul research with Saman Ghaffarian & Cassidy Johnson and includes a part of her interview with them (27 July, 2024).
Artistic interventions
The project will intervene in various locations through situated, art-based interventions that critically interrogate aspects of habitability, domesticity, hostility, deportability, and more. The interventions question the linearity of the notion of arrival in its spatio-temporality, while addressing the presence of visible and invisible broken, ruined, and repaired infrastructures.
Azioni apripista (per lo spiazzamento) is a participatory public art intervention in the so-called "Pista di Borgo Mezzanone" (Foggia, Italy). Conceived by artist and agroecologist Luigi Coppola, funded by the REFRAME project, and developed together with the collective Inappropriable, the project consists of the creation of tree-lined squares. These spaces are conceived as places of gathering, shade and shelter for the inhabitants of the settlement and the extended community. The project is being implemented in three identified junction areas (a first, near the church; a second, near the mosque; a third, in a residential area).
Method:
Following an approach that combines ecosystem design with the imaginative potential of art, the process consists of several stages: identification of the planting areas, preceded by moments of dialogue, exchange and evaluation together with some inhabitants of Borgo, especially those who live near the areas in question; collective cleanup of the identified areas and preparation of the soil; planting operation; observation, maintenance and activation of the sites through workshop moments dedicated to, among others, the construction of shading and water recirculation, adopting strategies of sharing, recovery and circularity.
Fast-growing allochthonous species—such as Ficus australis, Melia azedarach, and Jacaranda mimosifolia—have been selected for their ability to regenerate ecosystems. Contributing to soil fertilization and rapidly producing shade and oxygen, these species symbolize Borgo Mezzanone’s promise of resistance, beyond the plans outlined in the PNRR for so-called “informal settlements,” offering a way to rethink its future.
These phases, from conception to design, from implementation to survival, are possible first and foremost thanks to the work and constant mediation of the network of associations, volunteers, collectives and dwellers in Borgo Mezzanone.
“Azioni apripista” is conceived as a strategy to challenge and problematize conventional representations of informal settlements and their inhabitants, many of whom have migrant backgrounds. It serves as a symbolic gesture aimed at improving the habitability of Borgo Mezzanone —one that is meant to evolve organically over time, adopting new forms and fostering unprecedented modes of relationality within and with the place.
Bio (Luigi Coppola):
Luigi Coppola is an artist, agroecologist, and promoter of participatory public art projects. His artistic practice is united by an innovative relationship to the commons, through actions that activate collective potentials and imaginaries. Currently a senior researcher at the Centre for Arts, Design, and Social Research in Boston (USA), Coppola has been a coactivator of the movement linked to Casa delle Agriculture in Castiglione d'Otranto (Lecce) since 2013.
Transformative action, for Coppola, is often channelled through detritus, waste, and abandonment. He works at the margins, confronting both the entrenched extraction of resources and people, as well as the intensive exploitation of territories. His artistic practice unfolds through performances, pictorial works, symbolic actions, and environmental and social sculptures. However, the centre of gravity in his work often moves away from traditional institutional art spaces: the artist’s authorship takes a backseat to the unfolding of the collective body and the temporality of the work, as it becomes extended and evolves.
Coppola has developed public art projects, performances, and exhibitions in various international contexts, including the 7th Lubumbaschi Biennale (DR Congo, 2022), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennale (2020), Matera Capitale Cultura (2019), Fondazione Merz Torino (2018), BAK Utrecht (2018), Kunsthaus Graz (2017), and the Quadriennale Roma (2017).
Artistic Intervention 2 (forthcoming in May 2025) is a project commissioned to the artists and architects collective Grupo Toma, curated by REFRAME researcher Stefano Mastromarino. The project is currently in progress and will take place during a collective moment of reflection and interventions, scheduled for May 12–23, 2025. As part of the intervention, Grupo Toma will reconstruct fragments of domesticity within the settlement through music, agriculture, and playful experimentation. The project is supported by multiple funding sources, including the REFRAME project, and is carried out in collaboration with research groups at the University/Politecnico of Turin.
The theme for this year’s Stitch for Change, implemented from February to May 2025 in Hastings by the Refugee Buddy Project with the support of UCL, is Community Superpower and Housing. The workshop interrogates power, focusing on whose power it is and the power to do what. The culmination of this workshop will be the creation of several manufacts - superhero capes, in which refugee women and other urban dwellers will stitch their stories of power, community, and the process of making home. These capes will be exhibited at the De La Warr Pavilion on June 20, in celebration of Refugee Work Day.
The Book of Complaints compiles testimonies from a series of complaint sessions where participants—especially refugees and migrants—can voice their frustrations, complaints, and anger about housing conditions in a performative setting. Inspired by feminist pedagogy of complaint, these sessions aim to provide liberation through collective expression. The purpose is to challenge the expectation that migrants and refugees should be passive or grateful, instead asserting their right to express anger and demand justice. By compiling these testimonies, the book not only validates individual experiences but also exposes the larger structural injustices within housing struggles. The book launch will be accompanied by a light-touch performance.