REFRAME: Reframing the paradigm of arrival. Transnational perspectives, governance and policy

Within the entangled crisis, in this post-covid, post-Brexit, post-Arab spring context – how do forced migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in the UK or Italy navigate their way through hostile or lack of housing? How do Ukrainian care workers in Italy 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 make housing choices in Istanbul, and how do they respond to local governance encouraging refugee presence in specific suburbs?

Challenge being addressed

In Italy, the project will engage with ‘Interstitial spaces of inhabitation: imperfect trajectories in the urban space’, by examining different accommodation/housing including: 

• Shelters for the unhoused operated by NGOs with limited state support
• State-led diffused hospitality operated by NGOs
• Makeshift solutions by refugees with support from activists and NGOs

In the UK, the project will examine ‘Austerity, arrival and dwelling strategies.’ Using the concepts of displaceability, deportability and evictability in relation to arrival regimes, in Hastings and London, the project will explore how ‘home’ and homelessness are lived. The project will also try to decontextualise these notions from common associations with shelter to allow for a wider understanding of different practices of dwelling, the street and territories as a home.

In Turkiye, trajectories of displacement and housing choices of refugees and migrants in response to governmental policies will be explored. 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 (from rented to owned property to makeshift solutions). 

Aims and objectives

The project aims to achieve the following: 

• Investigate how refugees’ action and agency are shaped by and shape the infrastructure of arrival in different locations
• Examine specific housing choices and dwelling strategies that occur under conditions of constraint within the humanitarian systems of care
• 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

Funding: AHRC and FDG

Project duration: 1 Feb 2024 – 31 Jan 2027

Principal investigator: Dr Giovanna Astolfo 

Co-applicants: Dr Estella Carpi, Professor Camillo Boano, Ms Harriet Allsopp

Co-Investigator on REFRAME:

Estella Carpi is a social anthropologist, presently Associate Professor of Humanitarian Studies at University College London. She is the 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.

Research Assistants

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.

Ouaees Hommous is an Architect and Urbanist, currently pursuing an MA in Sociology at Ibn Haldun University. He aims to leverage his expertise to foster positive social, political, and spatial change through activism and policy-making initiatives, with a current focus on migrant communities and host societies.

Sepehr Roshanshomal, 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.

For more information, see the UCL News story about the project launch.

Image: TOKI buildings in Esenyurt (Istanbul), August 2022. Photo credits: Estella Carpi.