1st Edition
Migration Landing Spaces Processes and Infrastructures in Italy
This book looks at migrant landing spaces, exploring the processes and infrastructures which people encounter as they navigate urban spaces along the central Mediterranean route.
The book argues that there remains a theoretical and practical difficulty in grasping the complexity of migrant arrivals. Migrants are often unsure whether they will stay or leave, their mobility is uncertain. Despite this, they face rigid binaries and categories within administrative policy and planning which tries to pin them down as either permanent or temporary. Drawing on extensive original research in southern Italy, this book suggests that we should instead think of ‘landing spaces’: parts of the city that work as infrastructures for landing, that allow for an open and dynamic use of the urban space and provide opportunities for encounter and information exchange as migrants consider their next steps.
Combining an ethnographic gaze with insights from urban planning, architecture, geography, social sciences and migration studies, this book invites us to look closer at the interactions between people, practices and places as migrants land in Europe.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1: A renewed interest on arrival (or landing?)
1.2: A perspective on migration that turns to urban planning, architecture and spaces
1.3: Methodological notes
Chapter 2: Landing as an open-ended process
2.1: From arrival to landing
2.2: Temporality
2.3: Territoriality
2.4: Populations and uses
2.5: Insightful experiences
Chapter 3: Palermo as crossroads in the central Mediterranean route
3.1: The development of the central route
3.2: Palermo, a ‘sponge city’ and a ‘base point’
Chapter 4: Urban spaces as landing infrastructures
4.1: Plural uses, plural spaces
4.2: Geographies beyond planning logics
4.3: The space as physical setting and object of regulation
4.4: How does landing spatialize?
Chapter 5: Working perspectives
5.1: Rethinking the city starting from its uses
5.2: Regulatory frameworks, public action and spaces
Biography
Martina Bovo is an architect and postdoc researcher at KU Leuven, with a PhD in Urban Planning, Design and Policy obtained at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). Her research focuses on the territorial dimension of migratory arrival processes, and broadly on urban and welfare policies and ethnographic approaches to urban analysis.
