The Brick Door

The presence of immigration in the European urban landscape contributes to the re-questioning of taken-for-granted use and meanings of the urban texture. In Italian cities, we witness a contemporary struggle between different groups and individuals for the physical and symbolical production and appropriation of public space. The Paper is based on qualitative research in the city of Padua (North Eastern Italy, Veneto Region) on the territory around the railway station where migrants try to seek out symbolic and material resources while using specific spaces. However in the process of manipulating urban spaces migrants are accused of surpassing the ‘upper threshold of correct visibility’. In other words, the level of visibility of their different bodies as well as the unconventional uses of the urban space challenge a ‘spatial order’ which is essentially taken for granted as the ‘right way’. The paper highlights how local policies and the local mass-media create an atmosphere of continuous ‘moral panic’ through the circulation of a stereotypical image of migrants. The paper concludes by calling for a radical shift in the policy making process, that has to be strongly informed by the physical, symbolical and emotional production of urban space. Difference today typifies the urban dimension of Italian cities and the development of contextual and coherent strategies to manage diverse urban societies is now is now of utmost importance.

The presence of immigration in the European urban landscape contributes to the re-questioning of taken-for-granted use and meanings of the urban texture. In Italian cities, we witness a contemporary struggle between different groups and individuals for the physical and symbolical production and appropriation of public space. This paper is based on qualitative research in the city of Padua (North Eastern Italy, Veneto Region) on the territory around the railway station where migrants try to seek out symbolic and material resources while using specific spaces. However in the process of manipulating urban spaces migrants are accused of surpassing the ‘upper threshold of correct visibility’. In other words, the level of visibility of their different bodies as well as the nonconventional uses of urban space challenge a ‘spatial order’ which is essentially taken for granted as the ‘right way’. The paper highlights how local policies and the local mass-media create an atmosphere of continuous ‘moral panic’ through the circulation of a stereotypical image of migrants. The paper concludes by calling for a radical shift in the policy making process, that has to be strongly informed by the physical, symbolical and emotional production of urban space. Difference today typifies the urban dimension of Italian cities and the development of contextual and coherent strategies to manage diverse urban societies is now is now of utmost importance

The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 2021

Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures, 2022

Bick, Tenley. “Porta di Lampedusa, porta d’Europa: Contemporary Monumentality, Entropy, and Migration at the Gateway to Europe.” In Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures, edited by Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos, 151–192 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

Migrants and access to the city Recent events related to the arrival of refugees or asylum seekers and the reappearance of forms of precarious habitat that seemed to have disappeared in Europe call into question the issue of migrants11 access to the city. If these questions are not new and have already been widely debated in the social sciences, we argue for a revisiting of this problem by focusing on the local effects of migrants' appearance in the city, both in countries in the Global North as well as in the Global South; whether migration is from a distance or from more proximate origins. We thus invite authors to question the concept of access – which refers as much etymologically to the approach of urban space as it does the manner in which it " agrees " to welcome migrants – across the sites that materialize this access. Generally the concept of access is understood in terms of mobility and transport in relation to the 'city'; or in terms of resources, difficulties and inequality (see current issue E&S) as when it deals with the subject of 'housing'. As for work on migration, academic works tends to oscillate between two interpretations of migrants, dividing emigration from immigration. This issue of Espaces et Sociétés intends to theorize the problem differently by considering access to the city as both an intermediate step in the flow of migration, and dependent on the type of entry (one time, temporary or permanent) of a person in specific urban spaces. To characterize migrant access to the city, we offer three types of questions: The categorization of access to the city in its relation to the formal and normative city The reality of migration generated public debate using new expressions that come to question the scientific categorization of migrants: The designation of people (migrants, immigrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, inhabitants of the camps, urban refugees); migration management systems (detention center consolidation, camp center, encampment, village insertion, transit center, cited transit), and finally the institutionalization of legitimate standards including sanitary control, insalubrity, adaptation criteria, the 'integration project', etc. The difficulty of stabilizing the terminology invites us to analyze the categorization processes at work, particularly in relation to what would become normalized in an urban context. The authors are invited to examine the forms of habitat resulting from migration in terms of their relationship to the city, which can highlight:-Interstices of the legalized city proper (squatting in slums)-Institutional forms and measures (camp, camping, 'bridging housing', shelters, mobile villages, 'insertion villages', cities of transit). Access to the city: insertion and / or integration We propose to seize access to the city through insertion and integration. These two concepts, strongly used in France, are often mobilized for housing issues (called insertion through housing); or individuals (integration into society). They are sometimes understood as chronological when they describe an individual's course of action (integration would succeed insertion), however we propose to take them as two modes of migrant reception by differentiating them according to their etymological meaning – inserire, meaning " put in the 11 The categories of designation of populations as places were produced by administrations or organizations responsible for these populations, we italicize these terminologies as a methodological caution (the categories are built for convenience and not knowledge).

Citizenship Studies, 2019

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contesta-tion of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.

Migration Letters, 2021

Poor immigrants in cities across the world challenge exclusion by appropriating and transforming urban spaces. Scholars have tended to explore these migrant urbanisms by focusing on low-income, "marginal" districts that remain separate from prime spaces like historic downtowns. This paper widens such a focus by analysing how Bangladeshi immigrants inhabit the touristic centre of Rome, an iconic space designed to normalise-and capitalise upon-dominant constructions of who belongs to the Italian city. Roughly 2,000 immigrants eke out a living in Rome's centre by selling trinkets to tourists. Drawing from observations and interviews, I detail how diverse vendors emplace their own Rome by working, hiding, praying, and relaxing in its iconic landscapes. Contingent, and yet persistent, the urbanisms enacted by the vendors destabilise normative logics of identity and call attention to prime spaces as potential arenas of insurgency.