Keywords

9.1 Introduction

This chapter is inspired by ongoing research on the homemaking practices of migrants dwelling in informal settlements located in rural contexts. This is part and parcel of a broader research project on the nexus between home and migration, also being a further step along a path of a personal research which has led me to address this issue from multiple angles (Belloni et al., 2020; Fravega, 2022).Footnote 1 Within this framework, I will draw some lessons from my fieldwork, showing how home in informal settlements is a multifaceted research object. It reveals both migrants’ agency and the symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2003) they are exposed to. It shows the complex and multifarious patterns of social interaction that permeate home-making practices, as well as the intricate interweaving between labour market structures, social exclusion and segregation which are at the heart of practices of “housing from below”.

Before getting to the core of these questions, it is necessary to articulate the underlying methodological approach. The decision to investigate migrants’ informal settlements came during the pandemic crisis, as an attempt to develop a better understanding of the interplay between migrants’ homemaking and covid-19 official prevention measures.Footnote 2 With a view to achieve this I first organized three online focus groups. These were attended by operators of several NGOs (Caritas, CUAMM Doctors for Africa,Footnote 3 Emergency, Intersos, MEDU Doctors for Human RightsFootnote 4) providing social and health care for migrants in informal settlements in various regions of Italy (Piedmont, Lazio, Sicily, Calabria and Apulia). After that, aiming to expand on the main issues emerging from the focus groups I carried out an ethnographic study of migrants’ informal settlements in the province of Foggia. This was no accidental choice, as this area includes some of the oldest and most populated migrants’ informal settlements in the country. I spent several weeks there during summer and winter 2021, staying in and wandering across the densest settlements – Ex-Pista of Borgo Mezzanone, Gran Ghetto of Rignano, Ghana House in Borgo Tre Titoli – as well as accessing some micro-settlements in isolated farm houses across the countryside. I got access to the field following my contacts in CUAMM Medici con l’Africa, and Caritas, joining their activities across various informal settlements, and through my own personal acquaintances. Furthermore, some of the people I met decided to become my informants and gatekeepers. All the empirical materials I use in this chapter are taken from my own ethnographic diary.

My access to migrants’ informal settlements involved crossing a “color line,” or indeed an “immigration line” (Back, 2007), thereby questioning several dimensions that define positions of power and privilege in society. A multiplicity of markers related to physicality (gender, skin colour, strength, dexterity and other external signs of the habit of accomplishing heavy jobs), social class (education, clothes, health and wealth, etc.), and culture (language, religion, lifestyle, etc.) defined my “otherness”, relative to the migrants dwelling there. Such markers affected the whole research process and shaped my access and permanence in the field (Manning, 2018; Reyes, 2020). Yet, as Knorr-Cetina (1988; 24) pointed out, individuals are far from “stable and unproblematic sources of social action.” Ethnography happens in a dynamic social context which evolves through social interaction. As a result, my field positionality changed over time, shifting from simple visitor to guest, and from guest to friend (to someone), depending on the possibility to establish mutual trust relations. The time I spent together with migrant daily labourers, from late afternoon – when they got back from work – to late night, was crucial in this regard. It actually enabled us to find commonalities and build strong personal relationships.

Although this work is still ongoing, it already affords to advance some key reflections on migrant homes in informal settlements. I first introduce the research context, including the social and economic conditions that account for the proliferation of migrant informal settlements in Italy. Work has a crucial role in this perspective, both as a human activity and a key component of the organisation of the agro-industrial production chain. In the following section I discuss the main aspects of housing in informal settlements. This means to highlight the poor housing conditions experienced by migrants in these places and their limited access to so-called “civil infrastructures” (electric power, water and wastewater management, waste collection, transport, etc.). In the third section I elaborate on the inherently social character of the idea of home in migrants’ informal settlements. Finally, I briefly reflect on what researchers should expect when they look for homes in similar settlements.

9.2 On the Structural Constraints to Housing and Homemaking

In order to grasp what home means for migrants dwelling in informal settlements, it is imperative to understand its entanglements to housing (Handel, 2019). It is equally important to figure out the complex social and working conditions migrants experience daily, as they also shape their housing and home-making practices. In this optic, dwelling is no standalone issue, which might be considered out of its historical, economic, and cultural context. It is rather a matter of embodied experience, rooted in structural conditions (Lancione, 2020). Following this premise, migrants’ houses/homes in informal settlements are constituted and permeated by power relations that shape up a specific and racialised housing regime (Clapham, 2018; Ruonavaara, 2020).

Importantly, migrants’ informal settlements are increasingly widespread in the Italian ruralscape.Footnote 5 Informal rural settlements in Italy are a phenomenon rooted in time – the first of them date back to several decades ago. Their diffusion is due to the particular importance of a cheap labour force for an underdeveloped agro-industrial production chain. Moreover, migrants’ informal settlements are fundamentally shaped by work, both in a physical/material sense and in a cultural and social one. These dwelling infrastructures are the outcome of the combination between housing practices “from below” and institutional strategies that oscillate between measures of control, or containment, and practices of abandonment.

An extensive literature has shown the crucial role of the migrant labour force in the Mediterranean agro-industrial production chain (Caruso & Corrado, 2021; Caruso, 2018; Corrado et al., 2016; Gertel & Sippel, 2014; Palumbo & Corrado, 2020). Yet, the use and circulation of migrant labour, within and across the national borders of Italy, Spain, France, Malta, and Greece, has made it possible to cope with some of the structural weaknesses of agro-industrial economies in Southern Europe. This holds in particular for the population decline in rural districts (Caruso, 2018) and for the underdevelopment of agricultural production techniques. Following the harvests seasons, a large number of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and “dubliners”Footnote 6 move after the peaks in labour demand, thereby evoking the idea of an “industrial reserve army” (Castronovo, 2018; Colloca et al., 2013; Corrado & D’agostino, 2018; Dines & Rigo, 2015; Ippolito & Perrotta, 2021; Perrotta, 2017). However, they also dwell across the countryside, creating temporary shelters to meet their social reproduction needs, and making them grow and consolidate across time. This scenario somehow evokes the literary topoi of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

According to Corrado (2018), the proliferation of migrants’ informal settlements in Italy is a consequence of a rururbanization process (McAreavey, 2018). This is due to the accumulated effects of several factors: (i) the 2008 economic crisis, which uprooted many migrants, previously working and dwelling in Northern urban centres; (ii) the multiplication of migration flows during the European “migration crisis” (2011–2016); (iii) the geographical dispersion measures of asylum seekers, involving the opening of extraordinary reception centres and hotspots across the whole Italian territory.

As a result, a growing migrant population has been settling in the regions with a stronger demand for unskilled labour in agriculture, to be employed in a variety of seasonal, precarious, and often illegal jobs. The area of Foggia is a case in point. This has triggered a significant repopulation of the countryside (Castronovo, 2018; Corrado, 2018; Corrado & D’agostino, 2018; Dines & Rigo, 2015), but also the growth of settlements where migrant workers can stay, or be temporarily hosted (Colloca et al., 2013; Perrotta, 2017). As Schierup and Jørgensen (2016) remark, migrants experience unsafe and vulnerable working and housing conditions. Even so, they are not superfluous. This resonates with the idea of informal proletariat as a stealth workforce for the formal economy and with the crucial role of subcontracting networks (Davis, 2017).

Within this framework, informal settlements reproduce a pervasive condition of spatial and material precariousness. Many of the informal settlements around Foggia are located far away from urban centres, with poor public transport connections and civil infrastructure networks. Still, they occupy a barycentric position, relative to the location and organization of the main agricultural districts. For instance, the Gran Ghetto of Rignano is about ten miles away from any inhabited centre around. At the same time, it is placed amid a limitless extension of tomato fields, vineyards and olive groves. In short, the progressive growth of informal settlements appears to be tolerated, or encouraged, due to the interests of specific groups that benefit from exploitative relations with low paid agricultural workers in the area (Kellett, 1997). From this standpoint, the location of informal rural settlements is revealing of the close interdependence between processes of social segregation and of exploitation of migrant labour.

I’m about twenty minutes in advance to the scheduled time of the meeting at the headquarters of the CGILFootnote 7 workers’ union in Foggia. The two entrances are quite crowded with people waiting to enter; almost all are Africans. I’ve been in town for a few days by now, but I had never seen so many foreigners all together. Indeed, while strolling around, including when watching the European football championship matches in some public space, I was impressed by the very little presence of migrants. The people I am about to meet at CGIL will later confirm my impression: there’s a clear-cut distinction between the living and working places of Italians and migrants. Yet, as they tell me, the crowds out of their offices on that particular day are due to the fact that the asparagus harvest has already ended and the tomato harvest is still to come. So, they can come to town to attend to bureaucratic issues. Most migrants in the Foggia area live far away from town, in those places they themselves call ghettos, or in abandoned farm houses scattered in the countryside. (Excerpt from ethnographic diary, July 2021)

In this case, the boundary between urban space and countryside is also a mechanism to separate “whites” from “blacks”. Following Davis (2017), this is a process of a space reorganisation that involves a drastic decrease in the intersections between the lives of local and immigrant populations. Migrant workers themselves evoke a separation from the surrounding environment, calling ghettos the informal rural settlements where they happen to dwell.

The concept of ghetto refers mainly to urban contexts. It is often used as a rhetorical device to activate the blame toward a stigmatised group or category (Wacquant, 2013, 2016). Yet, if we stick to its “classic” meaning as a homogeneous enclave, it seems a suitable conceptual tool to understand migrants’ rural informal settlements too. Such settlements are inhabited by an extraordinary homogeneous population. This holds both from a racial point of view (most of them are Sub-Saharan people) and, unsurprisingly, from a social class point of view (most of them are daily laborers in the agricultural sector).

As for the first aspect, the unofficial topography of rural informal settlements across the Foggia area has much to tell about their story, as well as their ethnic composition. Apart from Gran Ghetto – a label that points to its large dimensions, both in population and in number of nationalitiesFootnote 8 – Ghetto dei BulgariFootnote 9 (in Pozzo Monaco) and Ghana House (in Borgo Tre Titoli) reveal the role of specific national groups in founding, crowding, and organising a rural informal settlement. Regarding social class, only the most populated settlements (Ex-Pista of Borgo Mezzanone and Gran Ghetto of Rignano) include a noticeable presence of people that are not employed in agriculture. These are mainly sex workers, traders/merchants, cookers, artisans, along with some religious personnel (both Christian and Muslim). Race and class conflate in the production of the settlement space (Lefebvre, 1996). The widespread “ghettoization” of migrant workers in the Italian countryside seems to operate both as a system of storage and distribution of the labour force, and as a system of concealment and reproduction of migrants.

It would be misleading, however, to see informal settlements merely as the product of housing practices “from below”. The notion of informal settlement suggests also an extraneity from the surrounding territories. As a matter of fact, self-construction housing practices escape both from the grid of urban planning legislation (Cutini & di Pinto, 2018), and from the meshes of political control of residence and settlement policies (Saitta, 2015). Yet, for the same reasons, informal settlements can be considered as sites of disenfranchisement (Appadurai, 2004).

The dynamics from which these places originate are not exclusively attributable to the sphere of informality. Instead, “informal” and “formal” aspects are combined with each other, and hybridize each other (McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Roy, 2009). For instance, the Ex-Pista of Borgo Mezzanone was raised alongside (and in relation to) the ex-CARA,Footnote 10 (re)using its abandoned structures and growing close to its porous borders. The Gran Ghetto of Rignano, after a succession of fires, evictions and reorganizations, juxtaposes a “container village” (with housing modules connected to electric power network, water plants and toilets) and a makeshift ensemble of shacks cut aside from any public infrastructures. Still, the unbearable housing, health, and sanitation conditions of these places are very well known to local authorities, which carry out only minimal interventions. Put differently, the production of informal spaces is made possible, and at the same time fuelled, both by a selective and institutionally supported suspension of laws and rights (Peano, 2017), and by the pitfalls of housing policy measures. These push migrants into the difficult private housing market. As critical are the shortcomings of the rental market, which are amplified by the lack of sanctions against illegal renting (Coin, 2004; Dotsey & Chiodelli, 2021; Tosi, 2017).

9.2.1 Residual Housing

Informal settlements evoke the effects of unequal chances to access social resources. At the same time, they reveal migrants’ capacity to establish alternative relations with their habitat, deploying transformative effects on space, and prefiguring unconventional ways to stay together (Vasudevan, 2014, 2015). Accordingly, the materiality of housing has a crucial relevance. It is enough to cast a glance at the materiality of one of the largest migrants’ informal settlements in Europe to realize that “housing talks”.

In the Ex-Pista of Borgo Mezzanone, local inhabitants call the oldest part of the settlement “Colombia”. Here, the makeshift buildings are built with mismatched pallets joined to some window fixtures, only sometimes covered with plastic tarps. All together these unpaired elements define and close the perimeter of the chaotic buildings which compose the area, shaping what we are used to call walls. Inside, one’s feet trample on chipboard panels and old carpets, while the view of the sky is occluded by assemblages of wooden planks, corrugated sheet metal and other recycled materials (see Fig. 9.1). The doors operate also as windows. The roads in this area are dirt, except when it rains, because then they are muddy. On the contrary, the “Somali neighborhood” is built on concrete and the “houses” are mainly made up of old containers crammed with stuff and people. Even “Paris” – an area of Ex-Pista currently under construction – is built on concrete, but here, the “houses” are mainly built with gasbeton blocks. Unlike many other “districts” of Ex-Pista, here many buildings have lodges. Some have been plastered and painted.

Fig. 9.1
The photo of a street in Borgo Mezzanone region.

Ex pista (Borgo Mezzanone): between “Colombia” and “Paris”. (Author’s picture)

Full size image

As Staid (2017) points out, rural informal settlements are inhabited and built by people living at the margins; people who, through housing, give shape to alternative ways of being together and at the same time open new opportunities for interaction and sociability. In this sense, informal settlements break with the so-called modern way of dwelling and lead us back to pre-modern housing models.

Along these lines, the partitioning of the dwelling space operated by modern architecture, which assigns specific functions to different regions of the house (i.e. rooms), loses its meaning in informal settlements. It also loses its relationship with a tradition, a form of authority and a common ideal of household (Baudrillard, 1996).

As Georges Perec (1974) pointed out, space begins with the words that are used to describe, name and trace it. Space can therefore be considered as both an inventory and an invention. However, if we look at housing in migrants’ informal settlements from the inside, it seems that our own vocabulary needs to be revised. In order to grasp radically different housing practices, “as weird as those might seem from the standpoint of the white Westernized middle class doxas through which we operate,” it is essential “to advocate a displacement of our epistemologies of housing” (Lancione, 2020, p. 2). As a matter of fact, we are unlikely to encounter any specific domestic spaces (in terms of a division between bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, etc.) nested within these housing perimeters.

Following Perec again, in order to understand how this housing space is socially produced we should get back to the meanings and functions of housing in migrants’ informal settlements. In the Ex-Pista settlement, the “private space” is generally reduced to a mattress (or a few more) – a bunch of pallets leaning one against the others up to covering almost the entire surface of the containers, or shacks, used as houses. Moreover, people’s need for aggregation is not met through the organization of a kitchen or a living room inside the building. Although many shacks have camp stoves, the need for a common space is more likely to be satisfied by attending one of the many bars or shops that dot the informal urban agglomerations. People meet and spend time together there. They also stroll and meet up along the “streets” that give shape to the urban structure of the settlement. Likewise, the space for intimacy (given that there are very few families) is not necessarily identified through the attribution of the role of “bedroom” to a portion of the inhabited space. It is rather based on the use, ephemeral and exclusive, of a common space as a meeting place or, alternatively, in accessing one of the many recesses used by sex worker women. Given that only a small minority of migrants in these informal settlements live on their own (alone, or with family members), it is remarkable that the lack of a “private space” for specific household functions is compensated either by time-zoning practices (Madigan et al., 1990), or by the spreading of the same functions across the whole settlement. As a result, the same space can be a private space or a workplace, for instance a red-light house, in different time slots. Housing in migrants’ informal settlements, therefore, is scattered out of the dwelling across time, space, and social relations.

However, housing is also a node within a wider network of infrastructures. And infrastructures can also be considered means to achieve a sense of permanence (Sheikh & Apurba, 2019). Normally, a dwelling is a terminal point of water, gas, and electric power distribution networks. It is also a gateway for the sewer system. Yet, these places lack adequate connections to these networks and to other essential services, such as garbage collection. How do the informal settlement dwellers compensate (or suffer) for these shortcomings?

When I happened to visit Gran Ghetto with a group of Caritas volunteers, as we were moving back to Foggia, one of the inhabitants asked us to follow him by car. He wanted to let us know the hardships experienced by some of his acquaintances. After driving on dirt and poorly paved roads for about 20 min, we came to a complex of two abandoned farmhouses. Almost twenty people had been living there for about three years. They were used to staying there with no water, either for drinking or washing themselves. They only had one car to reach the closest non-drinking water tank, about five miles away. It was not uncommon that they would arrive there too late, when the tank was already empty. The young man who accompanied us there meant to ask Caritas for some help, and possibly for a water tank to be placed closer to the place where his friends lived.Footnote 11 As I was looking around, I noticed some blue tanks (see Fig. 9.2). These were very much like those I had already seen everywhere, in other informal settlements. However, at that moment I understood that those tanks were far more than tanks.

Fig. 9.2
The photo of a landscape view of blue tanks in Ghetto dei Bulgari region.

Blue tanks in Ghetto dei Bulgari, Pozzo Monaco. (Author’s picture)

Full size image

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is the title of a famous artwork by René Magritte. But it is also the caption under the illustration of the pipe drawn by the artist. This is an iconic artwork going far beyond painting; a reflection which, by playing (seriously) with the relationship between reality and representation, highlights the limits of the conventions we use to interpret the environment we are immersed in. In a similar vein, these tanks can help us to understand a specific dwelling condition. Their almost ubiquitous presence can be considered as a visual marker of an informal housing condition. In other words, blue tanks are not blue tanks. More than this, blue tanks can be considered as the tip of the iceberg; an open window on a lively “infrastructure” (Amin, 2014).

In this regard, sanitation in informal settlements bears the signs of the lack of connections with public services and with the network of civil infrastructures. This recalls the “collapse” of public institutions which, Wacquant (2016) says, is a crucial factor in the transformation of the ghetto into a “hyper-ghetto” with substantive race and class segregation. What happens in migrants’ informal settlements is a dwelling process deprived by the complex exoskeleton through which the body satisfies the need for water, heat, light and so forth (Gandy, 2014).

Although it has been more than ten years since the United Nations recognized the right to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right,Footnote 12 the possibility to meet the needs for drinking water, personal hygiene and care in migrant informal settlements around Foggia does not depend on public infrastructures. It rather depends on a bottom-up process of active participation shaped by (and shaping) sociability and community organization. For instance, washing oneself after a working day is an activity that cannot be taken for granted. It requires the availability of a water reserve, and water must have been previously collected from a cistern, or from a public fountain which, as we saw above, can be several kilometres away from the dwelling place. Furthermore, it must be collected in a sufficient number of tanks, at least for the needs of the day; then it must be carried “home” and made available in a time and space which has been previously identified and dedicated to personal care activities. We are therefore dealing with a creative and compensatory act with respect to the negative affordances (Clapham, 2011; Gibson, 1986; Heft, 1989) ensured by these places. It is a continuous process of negotiation, discussion, and organisation, which Lancione and McFarlane (2016) conceive as “infra-making”.

All this points to the importance of social variables to compensate for the consequences of dwelling in a cramped and residual space. As I show in the next section, social relations are equally crucial to the definition of a home space.

9.2.2 The Social Foundations of Home in Informal Settlements

I had access to the Ex-Pista of Borgo Mezzanone for the first time, by invitation. I have spent a whole day together with a group of volunteers from an Italian NGO delivering social and health assistance in migrants’ informal settlements. At that point Karim,Footnote 13 an Ivorian guy joining the team as a cultural mediator, spontaneously told me: “When we are done here, you come with me”. When, about four hours later, we arrived at the Ex-Pista, he took me around almost the entire settlement. We walked for over half an hour. During this time I had the opportunity to know the different neighbourhoods of the settlement, the many commercial and craft activities, as well as its churches and mosques. We then stopped at the outside tables of a little bar. Karim introduced me to his friends and played the music he liked by accessing the club’s Spotify. I was offered food and drinks and we spent the whole evening together talking or commenting on the music. In the following days, I will always meet Karim in the same little bar. (Excerpt from ethnographic diary, July 2021)

At first I did not understand that, while welcoming me in Ex-Pista, Karim was accomplishing the same rituals of hospitality that happen whenever someone enters another’s home. Indeed, the ritual of hospitality always starts with an invitation, or a request to be welcomed in. And this is the preliminary, yet essential step to cross the system of thresholds separating the guest from the host’s physical and social/symbolic space. And it is up to the host to outline the space the guest must move within and respect (Camargo, 2016; Pitt-Rivers, 1997). Visiting the whole settlement to illustrate its peculiarities, finding the best place to stay and wasting time together was, at the same time, the reproduction of a conventional performance of togetherness, a practice of social control, and a way to redefine the borders between “inside” and “outside”, as well as between stranger and friend (Lynch et al., 2011). Importantly, there is no social bond, or culture, without the principle of hospitality (Derrida, 2005). And despite the fact that Ex-Pista is a rather “open” place – crossed daily by many native white-skinned people (NGO workers, activists, local smugglers, etc.) – this approach reframed my position in the settlement. I was no more merely a white guy strolling around and browsing here and there. Instead, I was a guest in Karim’s home.

As a matter of fact, due also to the extremely poor housing conditions, home-making practices “in-the-public” are a key factor in the production of social space in informal settlements. The multitude of bars, take-away restaurants, shops, brothels, etc. does not merely represent the flourishing of informal small businesses in Ex-Pista. These are rather spaces where the imagination seeks to change, appropriate and recreate the physical space by making symbolic use of it, thereby revealing loci of passions, actions and lived experiences (Lefebvre, 1992).

In one of his most recent works, Sennett (2019) highlights the deep asymmetry existing between the ville – to be intended as the “built city” – and the cité, that is a way to express how people live, or experience a place. Although he refers to a rather different type of urban experience – he focuses on a contemporary westernized metropolitan experience and his standpoint is by no means comparable to a migrant one – this remark can illuminate the peculiar relationship linking migrant dwelling in informal settlements to their home spaces. In Sennett’s perspective, in migrants’ rural informal settlements, ville and cité largely coincide. And this coincidence is peculiar to the relationship migrants develop with the ghetto.

In this sense, the crowds of young men who frantically swarm through the streets of Ex-Pista every day after 4 p.m., upon returning from work, are not simply shopping, or strolling. They are actually producing the space they live, as they emplace a variety of home-making practices by joining together, exchanging rituals of deference, exhibiting, and sharing the same cultural, ethnic, or religious codes, and, of course, organizing their own time for social reproduction.

Here, home is conceived not merely as a localized place, but as a site of practices where familiarity, mutual recognition and intimate sociability occur (Botticello, 2007). It is a place whose inhabitants are always in relation with each other. Its atmosphere does not arise merely from the creation of a landscape, but rather from the creation of a multisensorial scape interacting and generating the built environment.

When I cross Ex-Pista a whole ocean of sub-Saharan languages lulls me, while music coming out from bars floods into my ears at incredibly loud volume. At the same time a confusing and overwhelming fusion of smells and fragrances of roasted lamb, fruit, vegetables and spices hits my nostrils. (Excerpt from my ethnographic diary, July 2021)

Within this perspective, music and food are sensuous affordances that allow the reproduction of a sense of home through connections between here and there, present and past (Berger & Mohr, 2010; Bonfanti et al., 2019; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). Soundscapes facilitate the performance of migrants’ belonging by echoing familiar sounds and creating centres of attachment (Alfonso, 2013; Li, 2013; Walsh, 2011). As Berger and Mohr (2010, p. 200) wrote, “music takes hold of the present, divides it up and builds a bridge with it, which leads to the life’s time. The listener and singer borrow the music’s intentionality and find in it a lost amalgam of past, present, and future. Over the bridge, for as long as the music lasts, he passes backwards and forwards. When the music stops, the meaninglessness seeps back”. Music acts at the same time as an identity marker, a generator of nostalgia and a way to emplace home away from home. Within this framework, food – its preparation, distribution and consumption – plays a similar role. It is crucial to home-making practices and it reflects traditions, habits and cultural practices, giving shape as well to senses of belonging and connections across a diasporic space (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Food, then, can be conceived as a message vehiculated by smell and taste, which creates visceral associations between the country of origin and the place where migrants dwell (Longhurst et al., 2009). In a nutshell, it is an affordance for the retention of biographical ties with other times and spaces (Bonfanti et al., 2019; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020).

In sum, as I have shown, both the structure and the appearance of migrants’ homes in rural informal settlements are shaped by the conjunction between extreme housing poverty and a multiplicity of housing practices based on cultural aspects. Furthermore, the boundaries of home as a space are not merely defined by walls but extend to public and common spaces, overlapping between each other (Boccagni & Duyvendak, 2021; Koch & Latham, 2013; Kumar & Makarova, 2008).

This means that the social and affective space of home may reach out to small businesses, along porous boundaries that shift across the daytime. Or alternatively, what was conceived as an economic activity can be recursively transformed into a home. From this standpoint, the boundaries between the public and private space are weak and reveal a transitional space marked by thresholds (Boccagni & Brighenti, 2017) that, in migrant’s informal settlements, are ephemeral and recursive. The space for migrants to feel somehow at home, in these contexts, is highly fluid. Public and private, production and social reproduction coexist inside it (Laguerre, 1994), nested into each other.

Last, and as important, migrants’ rural informal settlements are home to many migrants also because they have a chance to enhance their ethnic social capital there. While these places perhaps offer them the worst dwelling conditions in Europe, they also give access to job opportunities, information, and many different forms of mutual help (Howard & Forin, 2021). In other words, migrants’ informal settlements convey social resources within a familiar socio-cultural milieu, making sense and making home. Along similar lines, Massa and Boccagni (2021), in a study on Somali Swedes in the popular district of Rinkeby (Stockholm), have shown that home-making practices can inform public spaces in which local inhabitants experience a peculiar kind of social proximity. However, this is strictly related to the impossibility to feel free from stigmatisation or discrimination outside of the neighbourhood. In a similar vein, informal settlements in the Italian rural scape are home to migrants, as long as these cannot find any place to call home in the urban space.

9.3 Migrants’ Homes in Informal Settlements and How to Find Them

Summing up, the idea of home for migrants in informal settlements such those analyzed here cannot be taken for granted. Rather, it needs to be explored and (re)defined through research work.

Home, as a concept, is multifaceted and full of meanings. Analysing them can bring crucial advancements in the field of migration studies. As a matter of fact, home sheds light on incorporation processes, both from a micro-perspective revealing emotional geographies and practices of space appropriation, and from a macro-perspective allowing to understand the social, material and economic conditions and processes that structure housing and home-making (Boccagni & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2021). At the same time, home conveys a normative social representation of household, comfort and safety that lies at the core of a white, western and middle-class imaginary. Yet, following Sayad’s (2004) argument on the mirror function of migrations, I can affirm that studying migrants’ homes in informal settlements reveals how Italy give shape to form of differential inclusion (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), combining migrant economic incorporation with politics of abandonment (Stopani, 2017) and a wide array of segregation practices.

To conclude, three questions of broader societal relevance emerge from my fieldwork. These can be succinctly phrased as follows: (a) migrants’ homes in informal settlements blur and entangle the boundaries between public and private space; (b) the domestic space of migrants living in informal settlements is profoundly shaped by sociability; (c) migrants’ housing and home-making practices are ambivalent and cannot be merely conceived as the outcome of their own agency.

For one thing, migrants’ homemaking in informal settlements challenges our capacity to recognize what home is, mainly because it does not merely rest on a shelter. The very idea of home, along with everyday home-making practices, does not overlap with the housing perimeter. It is actually spread across an informal settlement and contributes to shaping both its materiality and its sociality. Within settlements such as those analyzed here there is a variety of sites where one can engage in what we (i.e. white, native researchers) are used to call private behaviour (Kumar & Makarova, 2008). These could be the barracks, the places used to gather together and drink or eat, the places to dance and find some form of intimacy, etc. Home-making in informal settlements, then, is a process of building, domesticating, and giving meaning to specific public spaces. This entails denying and defying a binary conception of space (i.e. private vs. public), while replacing it with a system of mobile boundaries and thresholds. Thus, for instance, in the little bar that Karim attends at the ex-Pista, his personal space is not fixed once for all. Instead, it is defined by a series of social rituals made up of greetings, requests for opinions or favours and small acts of deference. It is Karim himself who decides who can sit next to him. In a similar vein, the public and private spheres in informal settlements are not sharply defined. Rather, they deborder the one into the other, in a relation of continuous interaction and mutual constitution (Boccagni & Brighenti, 2017; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2017; Kumar & Makarova, 2008).

In the second place, the experience of home in informal settlements is deeply shaped by sociability. As I highlighted previously, the informal settlements that have emerged in response to the demand for workforce in the agro-industrial districts of Southern Italy are extraordinarily homogeneous, regarding both national/ethnic composition and class. This allows a manifold set of practices embedded in specific cultural patterns (e.g. food preparation, time use and holidays, ways of being together, etc.). “It seems like Africa, don’t you think?”, said Karim, showing me the goats and rams crowding ex-Pista, ready to be sacrificed, the day before the Eid al-Adha celebration (known also as “Feast of the Sacrifice”). Furthermore, informal settlements facilitate the gathering of communities based on national, ethnic, or religious criteria. As a result, they enable specific forms of comfort and familiarity (Botticello, 2007; Massa & Boccagni, 2021). Thus, within this context home is conceptualized not merely as a place, but as a site of social practices, encounters and relations (Boccagni, 2017; Lenhard & Samanani, 2019).

At the same time, home-making practices are not detached from the social and economic conditions experienced by migrants. Quite the opposite – they are embedded in a specific combination of exclusionary processes that constrain migrants’ access to housing markets and public provisions, while pushing them into forms of labor exploitation. As a result, housing and home-making in informal settlements are ambivalent. On one hand, they can be considered as an expression of migrants’ agency, (self-)satisfying an unmet need of housing (and home). On the other, they are the effect of the economic and social liminality of migrants around Foggia. Along these lines, migrant informal settlements evoke the idea of a gray space (Yiftachel, 2009). This concept allows us to avoid any binary approach to urban margins. These are continuously reproduced through a mix of legal and illegal practices, tolerance and intolerance (see also Holston, 2007; De Genova & Roy, 2020). Such spaces shape an invisible social boundary that reveals how marginalised groups, unable as they are to get access to equal conditions (whether in public housing or in the real estate market), can deliberately disengage themselves by societal mainstream. Their construction of new collective identities is critically mediated by their housing practices.

In sum, as Kellett (1997) pointed out, a complex interrelation exists between the microcosm of the places migrants call and construct as home and the macrocosm of the power conditions that account for their position in the local social hierarchy. In spite of the latter, migrant workers continue to search and build, one day after another, a place where they can feel at home. Home, then, is the node that articulates the communication, as well as the tension, between these two universes.