There is a great and yet quite commonplace mystery. All people share in it, everyone knows it, but few think about it. Most people just accept it and don’t wonder a bit about it. This secret is the time... Time is life. (Ende, 1973)

Michael Ende’s novel Momo (1973) is the story of a girl who stands up to the regime of the “Grey Men,” mysterious creatures who steal the people’s time, which they roll into fat cigars and smoke to stay alive. Momo lives on the outskirts of a nameless town in an abandoned amphitheatre, and no one really knows where she is from. When the Grey Men come looking for her, they destroy her hut, but Momo manages to escape. She disappears into the interstices of the Grey Men’s regime, and, with the help of a friend, she preserves her “own” time. I was reminded of this story when reading Shahram Khosravi’s (2010, 2019) accounts of how the border regime steals migrants’ time. With Momo, Michael Ende shows that time entails a subjective dimension even in powerful regimes and that the temporalities of control can be re-coded through quiet, almost invisible practices of subversion, which I will refer to as appropriations.

While Momo is a story of upheaval and resistance, it is also a story of violence and exclusion, of marginalization and loneliness, and it demonstrates how modes of othering function to create “out-timers.” Momo can thus serve as a metaphor for the argument that this article seeks to make, highlighting the incorrigibility of migrant subjectivities and the relation between temporalities of control and informality in the Italian reception regime. I will explore informal camps as ambiguous spaces between coercion and subversion, which can become loopholes to evade control, deportation, and detention, and to pursue migration projects. Through practices of appropriation, migrantsFootnote 1 regain not only time and space but also rights that have been denied to them. In doing so, they contest the temporalities of control, demonstrating that time can be “taken” through endured limbo, but that it is still relative and can thus be recoded.

Temporalities are a key element of the Italian reception regime: deadlines, waiting times, and limited durations of stay link safe housing to temporal and normative preconditions. As a result, those who cannot cross these “temporal borders” (Tazzioli, 2018a) are stuck in informality, outside of reception, and beyond the temporal nomos of the asylum system. Their temporality is marked by waiting, by being stuck in increased im-mobility, cut off from protection mechanisms, and in a vicious circle of illegalization.

This article seeks to shed light beyond the reception infrastructures, on the spaces where the temporalities of migration materialize. By showing that informality is an integral part of the limbo to which migrants are subjected, it demonstrates that informality is also inherent to the reception system and the temporalities of the migration regime. As “temporalities of uncertainty” (Ramsay, 2020, p. 388) become the norm in the global capitalist era, I follow Georgina Ramsay’s call to not limit research to the precariousness, insecurity, and temporality associated with displacement of migrants, lest we contribute to the othering we are writing against. In that spirit, I explore informal settlements not primarily as sites of hardship and marginalization (which of course they also are), but as spatio-temporal appropriations where migrants struggle to “regain control over their own lives and subjectivities” (Della Puppa & Sanò, 2021a, p. 519; Storato et al., 2021).

To analyse the intersections between informality and temporality, I complemented a literature review with ethnographic data collected during field research on migrant informality and irregularization between 2018–2019 and 2022–2023.Footnote 2 Linking practices of “re-claiming time” (Della Puppa et al., in this issue) with claims to space, and eventually rights, this article seeks to integrate the “perspective of migration” (Hess, 2013; Römhild, 2009). To this end, and through a critical border regime analysis (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2007), I draw attention to migrants’ practices of appropriation, taking into account the ambivalences of these practices and foregrounding the incorrigibility of migrant subjectivities (Hess & Tsianos, 2010; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013).

The article is structured as follows: Part 1 briefly reviews the role of time and temporality in the migration regime, focusing on two aspects that are reflected in the emergence of informality: temporal modes of control and waiting as one of the dominant notions when it comes to migrants' temporalities. In Part 2, I will describe informality as a housing condition for migrants and give an overview of this vast but fuzzy phenomenon in Italy. Here, the links between informality and temporality become apparent, and thus the need to study them as intertwined issues. To this end, Part 3 will present the theoretical framework with which I link these two dimensions of bordering, understanding informal encampments as appropriations of space and time, followed by a short methodological note in Part 4. Using this framework, I will explore the relationship between the reception system and informality in Part 5, highlighting the reasons for the emergence of the latter due to temporal borders and deplorable living conditions.Footnote 3 In Part 6, I will focus on how informal camps present themselves as sites of ambivalent struggle, where migrants reinscribe their presence and their freedom of movement in the border regime, but which are also increasingly marginalized hideouts violently contested by the authorities. Thus, in the last section, I discuss the findings, reiterating the ambiguity that informal encampments embody, but also arguing against a romanticization and trivialization of the phenomenon.

The Chronopolitics of Migration: Temporal Borders Versus Migrants’ Time

In the politics of time, the chronopolitics, of the global capitalist system, time has become a form of biopolitical control, leading to forms of spatio-temporal injustice such as the informalization of migrants’ lives, which shall be analysed in this article (Adam, 1998; Bear, 2016; Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2021; Sharma, 2014; Wallis, 1970).Footnote 4 In relation to migration, temporalities cover the multiple subjective experiences of time and the speed of change across different aspects of bordering (Cwerner, 2001; Little, 2015, p. 431). Using temporality as an analytical lens allows us to focus on multiple interfering layers. After years of focusing on the spatial aspects of bordering, the rediscovery of the temporal perspective has brought enriching and critical perspectives to migration research in recent years (inter alia: Andersson, 2014; Cwerner, 2001; Griffiths et al., 2013; Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2021; Khosravi, 2021; Stronks, 2022).

The Temporalities of Control: Time as a Tool to Govern Migration

The European migration regime has evolved as a system of “temporal governance” (Griffiths, 2017), in which time is an omnipresent administrative tool. The modes of migration control are sustained by a complex web of rapidly and constantly changing temporal conditions (Griffiths, 2017, p. 57). These “temporalities of control” (Tazzioli, 2018a) are constitutive elements of the ways in which borders are performed (Daminelli, 2022). Borders, in turn, play a key role in the regulation of time, synchronizing different experiences of time to make them regulable and manipulable (Awan, 2020; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 135).

The European border regime enacts control through different layers of temporality; deadlines, waiting times, and limited periods of stay are just some of the pervasive tempo-normative conditions that affect migrants’ everyday lives and geographies. These “temporal borders” are constantly evolving, multiple, and heterogeneous in nature (Tazzioli, 2018a, 2020, p. 62). They serve to exercise control through time and over time, which means that time is both controlled and used as an instrument to exercise control (Tazzioli, 2018a, p. 17).

Since the “long summer of migration” (Kasparek & Speer, 2015) in 2015, and in the wake of the hotspot system, more and more temporal borders have been installed, which — as I will argue in this article — affect access to asylum, protection, or reception. Through the strategic use of temporal borders, migrants’ temporalities are disrupted and stratified under the timelines of bureaucracy and state immigration administration. They are also subjected to a “relative rapidity” (Tazzioli, 2018a, p. 14) in that they can be both rapid — like immediate obligations to be fulfilled, such as fingerprinting, fast-track asylum decisions and ad-hoc illegalizations — and slow, manifested in limbo and waiting. The combination of coercive temporal discipline, imprecise temporal restrictions, and periods of waiting consume migrants’ (life)time and fragments their journeys (Andersson, 2014; Hess, 2022, p. 94). In this sense, the politics of time are closely intertwined with migration governance; temporalities are crucial elements of the border regime and tools to control migrant subjectivities in transit.

Being Out of Time: the A-synchronicity of Migrants’ Time

Displacement causes migrants to fall out of the temporality of the social and political system to which they once belonged; in that sense, displacement always implies “a sense of temporal dispossession” (Ramsay, 2020, p. 385). Upon their arrival in Europe, the precariousness of their legal status, or the total absence of one, coupled with the unclear perspective of illegalization produces a condition of non-arrival, and confines them to a “threshold temporality” (Fontanari, 2017, p. 47). Forced to live in the liminal spaces between legality and illegalization, between deportability and belonging, migrantsFootnote 5 fall out of time and live in their own temporalities (Leutloff-Grandits, 2021, p. 427). Through the production of unending precariousness in legal interstices, time is instrumentalized to nurture a view of non-citizens as “subjectivities out of time” (Fontanari, 2017, p. 48; Griffiths, 2017, p. 57).

Migrants’ temporalities are thus often framed as disparate, running in parallel but not simultaneously with the “dominant temporality” (Clayton & Vickers, 2019) in which they are located. The temporal requirements with which migrants must comply can be understood as components that perpetuate, exclude, and externalize their temporality. This implicit differentiation of temporalities, the lack of synchronicity between citizens and "others", is a cornerstone of the migration regime.

The dualism of temporal spheres also carries with it an inherent racial categorization, as Khosravi (2019) shows: while the rhythm of life for (white) European citizens is determined by a “white time,” the “no time” is made up for racialized subjectivities from the “colonial time” beyond the Mediterranean (Khosravi, 2019, p. 417). In this “racial time” (Hanchard, 1999, p. 253), the inequalities of the temporalities of the border regime converge, pointing to the perpetual belatedness of the migrant subject (Khosravi, 2019, p. 417).

Between Stasis and Strategy: Waiting as a Migrant Condition

The time of migrants is reflected in continuous and overlapping cycles of waiting. These re-circulations, the “border waiting” (Khosravi, 2021, p. 203) of racialized non-citizens, include all times of waiting and do not necessarily take place at state borders. Waiting is stratified by different deadlines and tasks, which can also impose further temporal boundaries and prolong waiting to said recirculations (Griffiths, 2014; Leutloff-Grandits, 2019, p. 421). Kristen Biehl’s (2015, p. 57) research has demonstrated that waiting (with limited knowledge and for an unpredictable legal status) is central to the experience of asylum seekers and migrants. Waiting is used to “demobilize, contain and criminalize” migrants, creating a state of “protracted uncertainty” that is presented as a requirement for security and “normalized as a bureaucratic necessity” (Biehl, 2015, p. 57). Through the usurpation of time, the histories, and possibilities for an autonomous life of those who wait are erased (Tsagarousianou, 2022, p. 10).

Accounts of waiting and temporal exclusion are the dominant narratives of migrant temporalities. As such, they run the risk of perpetuating understandings of time as something that either goes straight on and on (for most), or is on hold, standing still, for those who can only wait for “their time” to come. What is more, they risk casting migrants as passive, subjected to temporal regimes they cannot control, deprived of agency. This subjectedness is of course an essential part of control through time, but migrants and their support networks also employ their own tactics to regain control of their situation (Daminelli, 2022).

Thus, Francesco Della Puppa and Giuliana Sanò (2021a, p. 513) “attribute to waiting a nature that is not necessarily negative” and re-conceptualize it as a practice that can take on the role of a tactic, which implies the ability to decide to either wait and remain in a space or situation or to mobilize, unite, and strategically navigate and re-centre themselves in the border regime. Waiting at the border is thus “not a static condition, but rather a process and a practice” (Khosravi, 2021, p. 206), involving acts of struggle to participate and claim rights. Thus, we should focus our attention on the forms of resistance that migrants develop in times of waiting (Bissell, 2007; Brun, 2015; Rotter, 2016; Schwarz, 2015).

My article seeks to complement this body of literature, shedding light on the spatial dimension of waiting by conceptualizing these practices of engaging with the factuality of temporal borders as appropriations, with which migrants renegotiate what is their time and space.

Informality: Understanding a Ubiquitous Phenomenon

Despite its pervasiveness, informality is difficult to define. It is the sphere that lies outside the regulated or official. With regard to migrant housing, it describes structures that are not part of the reception system and are not set up by a public or private actor, but by migrants themselves, in an unmanaged and unplanned way and of a temporary nature (Agier, 2002; Corsellis & Vitale, 2005). The nature of this informality is best understood by Mubi Brighenti’s (2016) analysis of it as an interstice, as a spatiality “in-between”: informality is the interstice between the “quasi-carceral life of the camp and ordinary life” (Altin & Minca, 2016, p. 38); it is not only of a spatial and legal nature, as described by Elena Fontanari and Maurizio Ambrosini, 2018, p. 594), but also of a temporal one. As such, it is widespread across Europe; sometimes rather invisible, sometimes hard to overlook.

In informal migrant camps, issues related to the temporalities of control materialize, as areas of waiting, they are the spatial counterpart of being out of time. Informal camps are a result of the temporal hurdles of the border regime; they emerge where movement is restricted and where or when people on the move must stop for whatever reason. Makeshift camps are the places “where people wait pending their departure for their next destination” (Katz, 2016, p. 18).

In Italy, informal camps are a countrywide phenomenon; in the southern regions of Calabria, Puglia, and Sicily, they represent important housing solutions for migrant workers in the agricultural sector: large tent villages and semi-permanent camps, ghettoized and far from any infrastructure (Borri & Fontanari, 2015; Cristaldini, 2015; Peano, 2022; Piro & Sanò, 2017a, b). In Rome and other cities, informal migrant housing takes place in squats and tent aggregations (Belloni, 2016; Korac, 2003; Puggioni, 2005). Informal border camps can be found in Sicily, on the borders with France in Ventimiglia and Val Susa, with Switzerland in Como, with Austria in Brenner, and with Slovenia in Trieste and Gorizia (Altin & Minca, 2016; Aru, 2021; Benedikt, 2019; Menghi, 2018; MSF, 2018; Storato et al., 2021).

The population in informality is hard to quantify and was estimated between 7.500 and 10.000 in 2018 (Mendola & Busetta, 2018; MSF, 2018). The number could be much higher now after the strategic downsizing of the Italian asylum system during the last years. Legislative developments regulating access to protection and reception after the infamous Salvini Decree have irregularized thousands of migrants and created a mobile and disenfranchised population outside official housing structures, making “camplessness” (Benedikt, 2020) a pervasive phenomenon (Della Puppa & Sanò, 2021b; Tazzioli, 2018a, p. 29; Tondo & Giuffrida, 2018; Uzureau et al., 2022). With the recent passing of the so-called Cutro Decree that shrinks access to protection even more, the situation is estimated to further worsen (ECRE, 2023). These amendments to the asylum system are the formulations and justifications of everyday forms of deliberate ignorance, which can be conceptualized as “active abandonment” (Aru, 2021), “violent inaction” (Davies et al., 2017), and “slow violence” (Mayblin et al., 2020; Nixon, 2013).

Relevance: Recoding Temporality in Informality

By asking how questions of temporality and informality are connected and mutually reinforcing, this article seeks to connect the fields of camp literature and migration studies.

Despite their ubiquity, informal migrant settlements in Europe have not received much attention in camp and mobility studies and have mostly been implicitly considered (Aris Escarcena, 2018; Aru, 2021; Dembour & Martin, 2011; Fontanari, 2019; Martin et al., 2020; Menghi, 2018; Minca, 2015; Picozza, 2017; Queirolo Palmas, 2017; Tazzioli & Garelli, 2018; Tazzioli, 2018b). The existing research focusing on informality has highlighted the living conditions or the lack of shelter, but without exploring the temporal dimensions associated with the phenomenon (Alarcon et al., 2016; Benedikt, 2019, 2020; Davies & Isakjee, 2015; Davies et al., 2019; Mendola & Busetta, 2018; Pasquetti & Picker, 2017; Sanyal, 2017).

Scholarship engaging with migration and temporality in turn mostly focuses on waiting, uncertainty, the temporalities of control, and temporal borders or the perspectives of migrants’ lives in relation to time (Andersson, 2014; Brun, 2015; Jacobsen et al., 2021; Khosravi, 2019; Tazzioli, 2018a; Tsagarousianou, 2022; Turnbull, 2016). It has predominantly focused on official camp settings, where waiting plays a crucial role (Papoutsi, 2021; Schwarz, 2015; Tsagarousianou, 2022; Turnbull, 2016; Walters, 2017), and neglected the temporal dimension of informality.

While forms of resistance in situations of encampment have been studied in official camps (Farah, 2009; Pasquetti, 2015; Sperling, 2022; Tazzioli, 2018b; Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, 2017), notions of hardship prevail in works on informality, and practices of subversion have received less attention or are mentioned en passant (Amigoni et al., 2021; Fontanari, 2019, 2021; Fontanari & Ambrosini, 2018; Lo Cascio, 2022; Peano, 2021, 2022; Queirolo Palmas & Rahola, 2020; Sanò et al., 2021; Storato et al., 2021). I consider it important to move beyond the victimizing subtexts of descriptions of migrants as out-timers who can only accept their containment. I pursue this by paying attention to migrant strategies that undermine immobility and waiting, to “acts of resistance, however small and mundane these may be” (Brun, 2015; Daminelli, 2022; Rotter, 2016; Sampson et al., 2016; Tsagarousianou, 2022, p. 13). To this end, this article aims to promote a view of informality not only as a multifaceted interstice, but also as a dimension where liminal temporalities can be recoded and where time, space, and mobility can be appropriated (Storato et al., 2021). To understand the temporal density and ambiguity of informality, it is necessary to move beyond a perspective of migration control or governance. Following Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, I direct the focus of this paper towards a “perspective of border crossings and struggles” (2013, p. 166), to see not only like a state (Scott, 1998), but also (and not instead) like a migrant. Against this backdrop, I interrogate both my own fieldwork and the existing literature on temporality and informality, to grasp the disobedient appropriations of space and time.

The Theoretical Framework: Thinking Beyond the Autonomy of Migration and Adopting the Gaze of Appropriation

The concept of appropriation has a long tradition in intellectual and artistic practice and has been reconceptualized differently in the social sciences in recent decades (Blume et al., 2013; Butler, 2011). In cultural and postcolonial studies, appropriation identifies everyday subversive practices that take advantage of loopholes and inconsistencies to achieve productive forms of agency aimed at reversing and shifting cultural hegemony (Blume et al., 2013, p. 154; de Certeau, 1988).

Appropriation as an analytical vantage point has recently been rediscovered in critical migration studies to strengthen reflections on the autonomy of migration and to further differentiate migrant practices as unsystematic, selective, and creative processes (Scheel, 2018, 2019, p. 182). However, and therein lies the strength of the concept, it allows to locate moments of incorrigibility and excess “in the subjective practices of embodied migrants, instead of attributing them to the anonymous, dynamic force of migration, as in the existing [autonomy of migration] literature” (Scheel, 2019, p. 213).

The gaze of appropriation thus allows us to capture practices that undermine the control mechanisms of the border regime without subsuming them under the autonomy of migration or generalizing them as “acts of citizenship” (Isin, 2008). In that way, complex and silent struggles can be portrayed without romanticizing them as overt contestations. Rather, this concept offers ways of looking closely at practices that covertly subvert the subjecting dynamics of the border regime, and the often invisible (and invisibilized) struggles in which migrants engage in.

The concept of appropriation can thus be seen as a complementary framework to be thought alongside, and in succession to the autonomy of migration (Scheel, 2019, p. 214). For me, it is also an attempt to continue to interrogate migrant life and survival, and the incorrigibility of migration in times of tightened borders, policies of racialized exclusion, and omnipresent violence. The autonomy of migration was not conceived as an antithesis to forms of migration governance; rather, it takes the struggles of migration as the epistemological starting point of a heuristic methodological model of regime analysis (Schmidt-Sembdner, 2022, p. 118). To grasp migrant struggles that stand opposite to the (necro-)political developments with which the European states seem to outbid one another, I suggest to widen our focus analytically and epistemologically not only towards these developments and the resistance against power, but also towards the ways in which the elements of subjection are appropriated and recoded in the everyday practices of migration and thus beyond the autonomy of migration.

Following Stephan Scheel (2015, p. 3), I define practices of appropriation as attempts to retake what the border regime denies to migrant subjectivities. Through practices of appropriation, migrants can regain mobility and withdraw from situations of protracted temporariness (Nimführ & Sesay, 2019, p. 2). Appropriation can thus be read as a way of recoding forms of control into practices of freedom of movement (Scheel, 2015, p. 10). This concept provides a tool to examine the ways that migrants open to realize their rights “below the radar” (Schwenken, 2013, p. 10) and thus to capture practices that do not overtly challenge, but rather surreptitiously undercut the regulations of the border regime. Adhering to appropriations as forms of struggle precisely against the attempts of subjugation of the border regime allows for a closer look at the various ways in which the rules of the border regime are secretly transgressed. Silent everyday struggles over temporality, housing, and mobility that take place in informality can thus be analysed in a more nuanced way. The lens of appropriation can help to reflect on the ambivalent nature of informality and the implications of living beyond notions of coercion and victimization.

The appropriation of mobility, space, and, ultimately, time are not exceptional phenomena, but rather the norm along and within Europe’s borders. Surprisingly, they are often overlooked as by-products of migration. Against this background, I argue that it is necessary to sharpen our perceptions of the margins that may have become ordinary to our gaze, and to question the concepts with which we theorize what we see. Migrants sleeping rough and in hyper-mobility between borders and camps are taken as the norm (Scheel, 2015, p. 5), but have we tried to look beyond the conceptualization of migrant informality as the ordinary bad of the European border regime?

Adopting the gaze of appropriation is a way of thinking further about the autonomy of migration and of reframing the scholarly focus on the substandard reception of fleeing people in Europe, questioning the use of temporalities of control and the lack of housing as politics of racist violence, rather than taking them for granted. It helps us to get closer to the perspective of migration, and to examine agency and incorrigibility. By paying attention to the micro-level struggles and the circumstances in which migrants live, this analytical framework can widen our gazes for more nuanced observations of how migrants confront the (temporal) dispossessions they are subjected to, rather than perpetuating one-dimensional and victimizing narratives of informality and temporality.

The Methodological Approach: Doing Ethnography in Informality

To adopt this perspective, in order to reveal what is made invisible or left untold, and what lies beyond “what is usually valued as worth telling” (Binder & Hess, 2013; Foucault, 2000, p. 79), I opted for a qualitative research approach, following the critical border regime analysis (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2007). For this reason, and in order to pay attention to the specificity of informal spaces, I conceive my research as an “ethnography of infamous vanishing spaces” (Tazzioli & Garelli, 2019, p. 407), which seeks to shed light on spatialities that are inherently transitory and thus always intertwined with questions of temporalities.

The ethnographic approach allowed me to combine research techniques such as interviews and participant observation with law and document analysis. With the multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), I was able to “trace” informality over a longer period of time and in different settings, and study practices of appropriation in embodied encounters, enabling a “dialogical exchange between the observer and the observed” (Pajnik, 2019, p. 131) in order to produce scientific value through “knowledge from below” (Fontanari, 2016, pp. 50, 74; Hess & Tsianos, 2010, p. 259).

The research took place between 2018 and 2019 and between 2022 and 2023 in and around makeshift settlements along the “Brenner Route” (Benedikt, 2019) on the border with Austria, in Brenner, Bolzano, Trento, and on the border with France in Ventimiglia, and Val Susa. It was complemented by several visits to the (informal) camp project Baobab in Rome. All of these are constantly evolving, vanishing, and dis-appearing encampments, implicitly a-temporary spaces that foreground the spatial dimensions of temporal bordering (Tazzioli & Garelli, 2019, p. 407).

In addition to participatory observation, the core methods were intensive narrative and problem-centred biographical single and group interviews, informal conversations, and expert interviews (Schütze, 1978; Skinner, 2012; Svašek & Domecka, 2012). Most of my interviewees have been in Europe and/or Italy for a long time, some months, some years, and informality has been an important housing solution for them during all these years. In addition, I also conducted several open and semi-structured expert interviews with activists, volunteers, and NGO representatives, whose engagement reach beyond formal structures. By understanding temporality as something inherently relational and reflecting on my position in the field as a subjectivity that relates to the dominant white time, I also want to highlight the limits and inherent contradictions of such a study, despite all intentions to employ “reflexive activist scholarship” (Hamm, 2013, p. 62).

Informal Camps and the Reception System: Temporal Borders, Exclusion, and Living Conditions

Informal camps are the spatialities where (im-)mobile and irregularized subjectivities wait in limbo. Informality is closely linked to the temporality of bordering and is one of the main effects of the deficient reception system and the chronopolitics of the border regime. In the following, therefore, I will shed light on the circumstances underlying the emergence of informal settlements and relate them to the temporal mechanisms of control of the border regime.

Entitled and Excluded: Asylum Seekers Outside the Reception System

Temporal borders work as mechanisms of exclusion of the reception regime and push migrants into informality. Many first grade or emergency reception centres, where most migrants are accommodated due to the undersized second grade reception system (formerly SPRAR/SIPROIMI, now SAI), only allow migrants to stay for a limited timeframe, as it was the case for HossamFootnote 6:

I met Hossam by chance when I was looking for one of my interviewees, a young man from Pakistan whom I had met a few days earlier. It was an early afternoon in June and the heat was suffocating. With me there was only one other person in the park: a young man on a bench in the shade of a large rose bush. I walked around for a while, moving back and forth between the shadows of the trees and an abandoned and dilapidated building just behind the park, which was now used as an informal shelter. When I couldn't find the guy I was looking for, I sat next to the man on the bench. At first, he did not seem very interested in talking, but when I told him whom I was waiting for, the ice was broken. Hearing me say “Pakistan”, he immediately smiled, and we began to tell each other what we were doing here at the heat of noon.

Hossam arrived in Europe via the Balkan Route in 2015 and lived for two years in a reception center in southern Germany, where he applied for asylum. As he couldn't find a job there, he moved to the north of Germany and worked in a Pakistani-owned pizza place. After almost three years, his asylum application was rejected, and he was facing his deportation to Pakistan. He decided to leave Germany, went to France and then to Italy. He passed through several cities until he found shelter in a CAS center, where he stayed for almost a month, but he will have to leave in the coming days. He has registered with the Questura and applied for asylum, so he is now waiting for a place in the reception system, which he knows could take some time, but he is quite confident that they won’t let him wait for too long. Hossam is aware that in a few days he will be homeless. For now, the park by the river and some of the informal encampments he knows will become his next stations.

For at least a chance of a spot in a reception facility, an application for asylum is required; under EU law, asylum seekers have a legal status and are entitled to accommodation. Normally, asylum seekers are supposed to move to a second-level reception center after reaching the time limit and/or obtaining protection status. But as these are overcrowded, they end up on the streets after being forced to leave a temporary or extraordinary (CAS) reception center.

What is more, filing an application for asylum is not easy. In a conversation with a group of Afghan men in Bolzano, my interlocutors stressed the reluctance of the police to take asylum claims. One of them, Nesar, first went to Milan and tried twice to make an application. The police sent him away instead of processing his request. He had to come back several times. Eventually, he was sent to Pisa, where he faced similar problems. The periods of waiting for new attempts and the increased mobility between different cities were accompanied by sleeping in temporary hideouts. Places in first-grade reception centres are also scarce and many have to wait in makeshift shelters before they can even enter a first-grade facility. Informal camps thus emerge as the waiting halls of the Italian reception system (Altin & Minca, 2016, p. 39). Khaled, a young Afghan asylum seeker who had been in Europe for years and had made several asylum claims, was less sanguine than Hossam: “for us there is a reception accommodation [but] they say waiting waiting waiting; there is no free place.”

My interlocutors were waiting not only for a place in a reception facility but basically for everything they were entitled to and that was out of their reach, like working opportunities or language courses (Group Interview Bolzano). Temporal borders are also used at the micro and everyday level of reception and emergency facilities. An overnight shelter for the homeless in Bolzano, which has become a key site for the reception of migrants as well, closes during the day, forcing everyone back onto the streets. The residents are pushed outside, where they must wait for the shelter to reopen. This makes it impossible for them to relax, study, or take care of themselves in a safe environment: “from eight to eight we have to leave the camp – where do we go?” (Group Interview Bolzano). The time that they could have been spent productively inside is thus taken away or stolen, to use the words of Khosravi (2019). This situation did not change or improve since my first field visits. Shelters for homeless are still used to host migrants who are out of the reception system despite their complex situation and the problems connected to it, which were already highlighted by NGOs years ago (ASGI et al., 2017; MSF, 2018).

These examples illustrate the huge gap between the actual and the theoretical access to reception, which means that many of those who are formally entitled to reception are de facto left in a situation of informality. The uncertainty and arbitrariness that characterize access to reception also evince the (legal) ambiguity and implementational discretion of migration governance in Italy, designed to keep migrants at the margins, which was recently analysed by Karl Heyer (2022) in Sicily. The temporal requirements that regulate, exclude, and limit access to shelter and push into informality are examples of the internal border practices of the migration regime that permeate everyday migrant life.

For those, whose asylum applications have been rejected, and for those who do not apply for asylum and do not possess a residence permit, no access to official reception is given. Those who move clandestinely, without being registered and fingerprinted, cannot access the welfare system and the reception infrastructure. Outside the reception system, they rely on NGO support and private housing structures or, most commonly, on informality. Shelter is often not available for illegalized migrants and informality paves their way through Europe (Ambrosini, 2015; Giansanti et al., 2022; Swiss Refugee Council, 2016). Informal settlements are an integral part of the limbo in which migrants find themselves: of finding a camp, being forced to leave it, seeking asylum, and escaping surveillance (Queirolo Palmas, 2017, p. 225; Storato et al., 2021).

Living Conditions: Hardship Inside and Outside the Reception System

It is not only the shortage of places in the reception system but also the inadequate living conditions in the facilities that push migrants into informality. My informants complained about inadequacies in various reception centres. Abushakar for instance, stayed in a first-grade reception facility upon arrival in Italy, but he left it after a few nights only due to the abysmal living conditions. According to him, there was not even water, it was just too bad to stay there, he iterated.

Some of the CAS or emergency shelters, which are also open to the homeless, do not meet the specific needs of people on the move. The facilities are overcrowded, with rooms filled with up to 20 men, making privacy and refuge difficult (Group Interview Bolzano). Sanitary facilities are inadequate, resulting in the spread of disease. Amir complained about the poor hygienic conditions despite the high level of infections. In Ventimiglia, even when the Red Cross camp outside the town was still open, Said told me that he preferred to stay under the bridge because the camp was not good for him, and Abdel left the same camp after two weeks because the conditions were too bad. Shaqir complained that there was not even enough food and only filthy bathrooms. Accordingly, the Swiss Refugee Council (2016, p. 10) concluded in its reports that the deplorable living conditions and the lack of capacity in the reception system led to informality. To say it with Eleanor Paynter (2018, p. 41): the shortcomings of the reception system push “thousands of migrants into homelessness every year.”

However, the living conditions I encountered outside the reception centres were no better, with even the most basic needs not being met. There are many issues related to the general conditions of homelessness, such as lack of privacy, food, or water (Group Interview Bolzano). Informal encampments are cut off from services, and they lack hygiene, sanitation, and medical support (Group Interview Bolzano). Residents are malnourished and have no access to drinking water. Informality often means sleeping under bridges, on the streets or in parks with only a minimum of protection, exposed to wind and weather, especially cold and rain. Abushakar slept outdoors, without any form of protection even during the coldest months of winter in the alpine north of Italy. Living in informality is to be “always outside, always wet” (Amir/Group Interview Bolzano). Moreover, informal camps offer no privacy; it is impossible to relax and recover. The lack of personal space contrasts with the permanent state of loneliness, of hiding and keeping silent about one’s exact location (Said). Another aspect that can be linked to the lack of a personal, safe space is crime and the lack of security. Especially at night, violent confrontations take place but are ignored by the police, even when someone is robbed, assaulted, or even injured (Group Interview Bolzano). To sum it up, I quote Mohammed and Jamal: “It is very, very hard to sleep on the streets.”

Appropriations of Time and Mobility in Informality

Although they do not offer sustainable and better living conditions, informal settlements are always also the result of migrants’ praxes and their imagination — spaces that are strategically appropriated by their residents to fulfil certain needs, firstly and foremost their freedom of movement. In this section, I will thus portray informal settlements as crucial but ambivalent sites where time can be appropriated for the pursuit of individual migration projects. On the one hand, they become transitional spaces with a silent subversive potential, where time can be reclaimed, facilitating unruly movements in resistance to deportation and confinement. But on the other hand, and as a consequence, they are also highly contested spaces where disobedience and the violence of the border regime culminate, leading to a vicious circle of marginalization.

Informal Encampments as Focal Points En Route

Informal encampments are highly dynamic spaces, built and arranged according to the conditions to which their residents have to adapt. The structure, location and size of makeshift camps depend on subjective or collective needs and are further influenced by the specific circumstances and opportunities encountered, such as geographical features or the attention of the authorities. They are located in pivotal areas that allow to move and return, to work, to connect with others, and to reorganize. They are often hidden, but sometimes tolerated for economic reasons, as evidenced by some of the long-lasting, yet semi-institutionalized informal settlements for agricultural workers (Brovia & Piro, 2020; Lo Cascio & Piro, 2019; Peano, 2021, 2022). In informal spaces, other needs are also met in a more pragmatic way; in Gradisca, in north-eastern Italy, asylum seekers had set up an improvised makeshift site just outside the official camp, where they could “camp, cook, pray and socialize” (Altin & Minca, 2016, p. 39).

Encampments are set up in places of strategic importance for migration projects, often close to the border, from where crossings can be attempted easier, as confirmed by many of the people I spoke to in border areas. For them, the preservation of mobility is particularly important. One of my interviewees in Ventimiglia explained to me that he wanted to cross the border and did not enter the reception center to stay flexible and closer to the border (Mohammed). Like many others, Abushakar left the hotspot to which he was transferred after arriving in Sicily to move on up north. Those who move without being registered and fingerprinted leave no trace in the EURODAC system; avoiding official camps is an important way to avoid contact with the authorities. Abdel, who managed to get a place in a reception center for asylum seekers, told me that informal encampments are particularly important for people in transit and for those who cannot or do not want to enter an official facility.

In these accounts, staying outside of the reception system is also a way of escaping the subjection under the temporal logics and hierarchies of control and containment, the immobilizing biometric surveillance in the reception centres. Designed to provide assistance and relief, reception centres often turn out to be “spaces of control, surveillance and even violence,” as Diana Martin et al., (2020, p. 757) point out. For Abushakar, it was clear that he would have to leave the hotspot as soon as possible, as it was “just too bad to stay there” (trop mal dans le camp). After a couple of days only he managed to get out and to continue to the northern borders of Italy. Informality and irregularity thus become resources to renegotiate controllability, mobility, time, and even collectivity: Shaqir stressed that “before under the bridge it was better,” that the big informal camp that was situated under the highway bridge in Ventimiglia was also a place of togetherness and self-determination because “everyone was nearby.” In makeshift camps, migrants contest their imposed stuckedness and forge “new irregular geographies of mobility” (Martin et al., 2020, p. 766), appropriating “temporary spaces of transit and refuge” that are a consequence of the conflict between migratory movements and state strategies to control and restrict them (Tazzioli & Garelli, 2019, p. 406). Hence, autonomous, and clandestine movements to avoid containment are productive ways to oppose the stealing of time that takes place through detention and endured waiting.

However, it must be noted that the increased surveillance and the tightening of the borders leave migrants stranded in Italy, forcing them to try several ways to reach France, Switzerland, or Austria, as it was the case for Abushakar, who stranded in Bolzano eventually, after having covered the 1500 km from Sicily to Bolzano in 2 days only. By this, the border regime develops other mechanisms to slow down and limit migrants’ time. Experiences of interceptions and pushbacks were the norm for those of my interviewees who wanted to cross northwards. In Ventimiglia, Saqib told me that he had been sent back to Italy despite being a minor. In Brenner I met Hani, who was travelling with the EC train from Bologna to Munich. Just before reaching the border with Austria, he was apprehended by the Italian police and forced to exit the train. For him, this seemed to be a usual experience and it was just another barrier on his journey through Europe. In 18 months of illegalized and precarious mobility, he had not reached his destination and always stayed in informality. Because of closed borders and the difficulty of finding accommodation, informal settlements become long-term structures rather than stopovers. In border areas, this can mean days, weeks, or even months. In urban camps, long-term stays are the norm. In Baobab, most of the people I spoke to had been in Rome for months or years and were planning to stay because they were actually “not in transit” anymore, as one of the volunteers explained to me.

Informality thus emerges as an effect of the measures of containment of the border regime. They are crucial sites in opposition to the immobilization of formal camps, and sites where mobility can be appropriated and realized. Migrants make space for themselves in and around precarious transit zones, which are not only an effect of the border regime, but also of migrants’ objectives to make use of informal work opportunities, networks, or transport technologies (Della Puppa & Sanò, 2021a, p. 513; Hess, 2012, p. 435). This was evinced by many of my interlocutors in the border areas around Ventimiglia and along the Brenner Route. With the strategic appropriation of mostly public spaces, migrants create unforeseen spatio-temporal assemblages and extend the “infrastructures of transit” (Schmidt-Sembdner, 2022, p. 117) according to their needs.

Disobedient Movements: Re-claiming Time Against Deportation

Mobility is closely intertwined with informality: while formal reception structures aim to discipline migrants’ mobility through containment, informal encampments are the outposts that secure unruly movements. Not all my interviewees were heading north to other EU countries. Three were returned to Italy under Dublin and were awaiting entry into the reception system (Mohammed, Jamal, Saqib). Six came back to Italy after longer periods as asylum seekers in Germany, Austria, or Sweden, where they had worked and studied (Amir, Nesar, Khaled, Noor, Omar, Hossam). When their asylum applications were rejected, their time in Europe was deemed to have expired and their deportation was imminent. They told me that in the notification was issued a time limit of 14 days to comply with the order to leave the territory (in the case for Austria) and that after that, they would be deported. The time and effort they had spent in Europe working, studying, or “trying to integrate,” as neoliberal politicians would call it, as well as the troubles they went through during their flight, crossing countless countries, waiting infinite times, enduring dangerous situations, suffering degrading treatment, and the resources they had invested, were rendered useless. In this sense, they were robbed of their workforce and of what they had acquired. Needless to say, they could not return to their countries of origin.

Informality is a result of the enforcement of EU laws; deportations, pushbacks, and returns under Dublin keep migrants on the run, generating counter-movements, and temporal a-synchronicity. By (re-)entering Italy, Mohammed, Jamal, Saqib, Amir, Nesar, Khaled, Noor, Omar, and Hossam avoided deportation. The semi-permeability of borders (Wonders, 2006), which allows migrants to move more easily north–south than south-north, facilitated the re-entry into Italy. The selective unidirectional porosity of the borders for those travelling from north down south to Italy also has a seasonal dimension, an activist explained me; in spring and summer, there are fewer controls than in winter due to the increased need for cheap migrant labour in the agricultural sector.

By pitting their mobility against their deportability, migrants appropriate time that was already destined to be taken away from them and create a “surplus time”. Geographically and temporally, these counter-movements go in the opposite direction of what was intended; instead of being deported, asylum seekers stay, and instead of stopping, their time in Europe continues. With these inverted mobilities, migrants slow down the logistics of deportation and reverse the chronopolitics of the migration regime, setting their “intrinsic incorrigibility” (De Genova, 2010, p. 101) against their deportability. Out of informal settlements, irregularized migrants manifest their disobedient presence, which evolves in opposition to the temporal and spatial borders that were designed to reduce, limit, and obstruct their existence in Europe. Navigating through the loopholes of the temporal and spatial borders, they appropriate time that has been denied to them.

The story of Ibrahim, whom I met in Rome, illustrates how long and tortuous the paths of “deportable” migrants can be, and how their incorrigibility always defeats the enforcement of restrictive policies. Ibrahim lived and worked in Europe for 9 years before he was deported to Algeria. It was in 2008 that he first arrived in Europe. After 7 years in Greece, he moved to Germany. After another 2 years, he was deported. Despite his removal, he decided to return to Europe and sought to pick up his previous life. By disembarking in Italy anew, he reversed the forced erasure of that part of his life. His unruly presence contested the geographical and temporal classification to which he had been subjected and constitutes the appropriation of lifetime, of a life (in Europe) that had been denied to him.

Informality embodies the endured mobility, the quest for freedom of movement, for protection, and the claims of racialized migrant subjectivities for their rights. In the spatio-temporal appropriations of informality, migrants contest the modes of confinement with mobility and withdrawal, regaining freedom of movement far from hyper-surveillance and dependency. Informal migrant camps are thus also “spaces of resourcefulness and agency” (Katz, 2016, p. 17).

Informal Camps as Contested Spaces

Informal settlements are however not only spaces in which, through the appropriation of space, the needs and fundamental freedoms of migrants are renegotiated, but they have also increasingly become contested spaces, where the struggle to control unruly mobilities and the struggle for a (safer) life in Europe interfere and are fought out at the micro level. They are actively targeted by the authorities; their destruction and the forced relocation of their residents are common practice, especially in northern and western Italy. For my interviewees in Bolzano and Ventimiglia, evictions were a recurring problem, and the fear of harassment and deportation was always present (Group Interview Bolzano, Abdel). After the evictions of the encampment under the highway bridge in Ventimiglia in 2017 and 2018, many had disappeared or were hiding in remote places because those who slept outside were caught by the police, and brought to the hotspots in the south of Italy, as Shaqir and Abdel explained to me.Footnote 7 After the forced evictions, the encampments are put under surveillance and made uninhabitable, sealed off with fences, signs, and other constructions aimed at preventing any form of habitation. Forced evictions and internal transfers are tactics used to discipline irregular movements, rendering the time spent travelling useless.

Over the course of my research, I observed the increasing marginalization of informal settlements. In the last few years, makeshift camps have become places of segregation, isolation, and precariousness. Places where people used to sleep rough have been sealed with concrete. Parks where migrants used to gather are empty now. Evictions are faster and more rigorous, and the creation of new settlements is made more difficult, especially in urban areas, as Silvia Aru observed (2021). Informal settlements are now located in remote areas, hidden and kept secret by their dwellers.

But, despite all efforts to control and restrict them, informal camps exist and persist; they are still ubiquitous and constantly (re)created by those on the move. Their re-appearance proves that migrants’ aspirations can override state policies and control mechanisms, making informal settlements a spatialization of their incorrigibility and deportability at the same time, and places in which subjectivities are explored and temporary homes are made (Storato et al., 2021, p.149).

Synthesis: Informal Camps as Ambiguous Spaces Between Abandonment and Autonomy

For the study of informality, chronopolitics play a key role. Questions of time were omnipresent for my interlocutors; they found themselves in informality because of temporal borders and were in recurrent phases of waiting. They were waiting for their allocation to a reception center, which some had never entered. They were trying to cross borders, waiting for an attempt to be successful. Some were planning to stay; others were seeking protection in Italy again after returning from other countries where they would have faced deportation.

From a temporal perspective, the informality of their living situation appears as a twofold phenomenon: on the one hand, it is the result of temporal limits and the ensuing phases of waiting, but on the other, it is the result of practices that precisely counteract the temporalities of control. Informal camps are not only a consequence of but also a response to temporal borders, built to counter the liminality to which migrants are subjected. Informal camps not only offer an alternative housing solution, but also a way of satisfying needs. By providing “refuge” to thousands of migrants, informality is a hidden complement to the dismal Italian reception system. Given the high numbers and the state's practice of “active abandonment” (Aru, 2021), it is obvious that informality is also part of the migration control system aimed at deterrence and demoralization. Informal camps are the sites where the uncertain and prolonged “border waiting” (Khosravi, 2021, p. 203) that characterizes migrant temporalities takes place. In these interstices, the temporalities of the racialized “out-timers” run out in detrimental living conditions.

In informal settlements, migrants shape time-spaces (Zeiträume) that contain visions of a temporality far from precarity and otherness. They are the epitome of the various borders that migrants encounter, but also expressions of their creative transformations. With Ruben Andersson (2014, p. 807), Informal encampments can thus be understood as a part of what Ruben Andersson (2014, p. 807) called “side effects” that emerge in spite of increased migration control, invented to “overrun the workings of the illegality industry” and to reclaim temporal debts. Here, migrants challenge the linear perceptions of time, demonstrating that time can be “taken” from them through an enforced limbo, but that it is still relational and can thus be re-coded. Through silent and subversive appropriations, migrants transform public space and no-man’s-land into sites that reflect the violent ignorance with which migrants are received. Making room for manoeuvre, migrants re-organize the inherent power hierarchies of the border regime and fight their abandonment with forms of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985). In this way, informal camps become sites of spatio-temporal resistance where political subjectivities are formed (Martin et al., 2020, p. 760). The mere existence of makeshift camps and their “enduring visible physical presence” transform migrants from a timeless and “transparent unwanted population into people with a political demand.” (Katz, 2015, p. 85).

Paradoxically, informal encampments are a trap that keeps migrants away from protection and the temporal nomos of the asylum system, but at the same time, they are the spatial assemblages where biopolitical control, detention, and deportation are circumvented and contested. Through practices of appropriation, migrants regain time and seize rights that have been denied to them. By re-negotiating their deportability and.

by appropriating resources like housing […] illegalized migrants render Europe a vast borderzone of political struggles over mobility because they constantly transgress the residency laws that construe their very presence as ‘illegal’ (Scheel, 2019, p. 203).

However, there is no reason for romanticizing the practices of appropriation of time, space, and mobility that take place in informality. They are met with overt forms of state violence — forced evictions were a recurring issue during my research – and the living conditions are dangerous and harmful, especially in border areas. Despite the tacit commotion highlighted here, informal settlements are humanitarian emergencies, where human rights are at stake, and where migrant populations are languishing and made invisible. While being tackled by the authorities, informality is re-produced and re-localized in ever more marginalized environments, further disrupting migrants' multiplicities, mobilities and, ultimately, temporalities.

After all, informal camps, from the large hubs in areas of agricultural labour exploitation to the smallest and less stabilized makeshift shelters, “are both a reaction to and extension of the violence of contemporary borders” — and “they are here to stay” (Davies et al., 2019, p. 229).

Conclusion

In this article, aware of the risk of reproducing migrants as racialized and waiting subjects, I approached informality through the lens of the critical border regime analysis. Elaborating the analytical framework of appropriations allowed me to grasp informal encampments as interstices in which migrants renegotiate both their temporality and their mobility, and to see the ways in which migrants transform stasis into practices of non-waiting. This perspective affirms the subjective dimension of time, and that temporalities of control are always responded to with the autonomy of migration, or rather with appropriations that counter the temporal dimensions of exclusion.

I explored informal migrant settlements in Italy as ambiguous spaces that emerge out of coercion and necessity. By explaining how informality is created through different forms of (temporal) borders, I tried to show how the temporalities of control lead to increased marginalization. Makeshift camps are emblematic of the European border regime, characterized by ignorance and indifference, human rights violations, racist categorization, segregation, and immobilization. However, informal settlements are more than just what happens when states fail in their duty to provide shelter; they can become places of refuge in time and space that allow migrants to circumvent experiences of subjugation, infantilization, and victimization (Fontanari, 2017, p. 45; Griffiths, 2014, p. 1999). They are assemblages of subversion and freedom of movement, where migrants undermine the control mechanisms of the border regime and struggle to realize their rights.

But while informal spaces can be set against the disenfranchising procedures of the migration regime and its pervasive borders, they are also sites where the instruments of control and discrimination are reinforced. In the spatio-temporal arrangements of informality, this becomes very clear, as the lines of differentiation, whether they are a statement of autonomy or a further victimization of migrants, are often blurred. Despite being arenas of collective renegotiation, informal settlements are ultimately also humanitarian emergencies, subject to politics of violence and abandonment, where human rights do not seem to apply. The lack of dignified reception and the increasing marginalization of informal camps prove that the life of migrants is always made temporary and precarious, with an uncertain future; it can end up on the streets at any time. Even those who have been in Europe for years cannot expect dignified housing, nor should they feel safe.

Like Michael Ende in Momo, this article tells a story of struggles for time and autonomy, and of an omnipresent, dominant power stealing time. It is a story of violence and submission, but also of resistance. Momo represents the disobedient figure who manages to navigate through the loopholes of the regime of temporal borders, enduring dangerous situations and living as an out-timer, far from society in informality. Her struggle is one of empowerment, of the disobedient appropriation of time that was meant to be stolen and, ultimately also a race against time. Whereas in Momo time is stolen from everyone except Momo herself, here it is only the time of non-citizens, of migrants and racialized subjects, that is stolen. Perhaps this is why, unlike in the novel, there is no happy ending. What remains is the perspective that both stories share: nothing grows out of subjugation and temporal dispossession, except coldness. To return to the first part of this article, and to recall the quote from Reza Tsagarousianou (2022, p. 13), it remains to affirm that from “acts of resistance, however small and mundane these may be,” a small force does indeed grow, strong enough to put the dominant time into perspective, and to conclude with Michael Ende:

A person is much more than the time that is in her.