Migrant Housing PDF[1]

Journal of Intercultural Studies

In this chapter Mirjana Lozanovska examines how since the 1950s migrants from eastern Europe have adapted the standard housing of Melbourne’s suburbs to make homes that look and feel like home. Migrant houses multiplied in several suburbs in Melbourne, Australia as a result of an influx of immigrants from Southern Europe that settled there in the 1950s and 1960s. While post-war migration occurred from other cultural origins, the houses that resulted from the use, adaptations and expressions of migrants from southern Europe, including Italy, Greece and Macedonia, made a prominent visual impact onto the urban culture of the city. It shared this with other immigration cities, especially Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. The perspective of house behaviour brings attention to the ways houses are appropriated, adapted and consumed as objects of social display, and how they in turn, consume space and culture. The Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that when it comes to taste, and especially aesthetic taste, we enter a cultural battle-field between the dominant class and the everyday practices of ordinary people that result in non-conforming cultural production. So powerful is an aesthetic tradition that one is born into, that taste is internalized and embodied, and can result in both ‘disgust’ and ‘sick-making’ of the taste of others. Significantly in migrant home-cultures, through taste, the oral sense related to language, food and eating, intertwines with practices related to the visual and aesthetic field through the use and adaptation of the home. As basic housing, the migrants’ houses of suburban Melbourne varied from adapted existing worker’s cottages in the inner suburbs to Federation-style houses on larger outer suburban blocks; but both developed different aesthetic expressions to the quintessential brick veneer houses that constituted the Australian suburbs. This distinction raises the questions: why do migrant houses behave differently to ordinary Australian houses? The answer lies in the complex cultural interrelationship within migrant cultures found in the juxtaposition of the visual and the oral which is heightened as the ‘house’ so powerfully mediates the private and secret realm of the inhabitants and the public (and fantasy) realm of the street and neighbourhood. With this theoretical approach in mind this chapter will examine the migrant appropriation of existing housing stock and look beyond the brick-veneer housing typology that appears to dominate the Australian suburb. It will draw upon extensive studies of migrant houses in Melbourne, Australia, and will refer to in-depth analysis of the particular stories of a few houses that have been inhabited for long time by their elderly southern European occupants.

The literature reveals that despite the study of the relationship between human behavior, activities and built form has focused on physical spatial environments at any scale, ranging from built environment to built form, the investigation of micro-scale housing has been neglected in the past. Namely, regardless of the interest to this relationship, direct assessment of the extent to which migrants' human behavior and activities influence and are also influenced by the spatial form of their houses is still rare in the field. This paper focuses on the exploration of the relationship between human behavior, activities and the spatial form of houses built by Italian migrants in post WWII Brisbane. The paper argues that the spatial form of migrants' houses was influenced by two factors: the need to perform working and social activities dictated by culture as a way of life; urbanization patterns present in migrants' native and host built environment.

2015

A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age, edited by Despina Stratigakos (London: Bloomsbury) , 2020

During the twentieth century, the world's population increased more than in any other period in history, from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to over six billion in 2000. 1 The number of new dwellings needed to accommodate this increase is almost impossible to fathom. The sheer variety of dwelling types and styles across the world parallels the diversity of contemporary ways of life. What history accounts for the myriad social practices and materialities of dwelling that emerged in this period? To begin answering this question, this chapter will focus on the major kinds of housing that accommodated the past century's unprecedented population growth and that, in doing so, shaped the vast expansion of our urbanized world.

The research study aimed to understand how first generation Italian migrants in Brisbane have influenced the form of a specific typology of dwelling, the archetypal 'house on a quarter-acre block', in the post WWII period. In order to understand the forces behind and outcomes of migrants' influence on the form of their Italo-Australian transnational houses, qualitative data collected from the testimonies of Italian migrants in conjunction with evidence left from four houses were analyzed. The findings revealed that the architectural form of the house was influenced by architectural traditions, socio-cultural factors and urbanization patterns. It was shown that the form of the transnational house mirrored the cultures derived from the ways of life belonging to two societies. Therefore, the form of houses built by Italian migrants in post WWII Brisbane is the manifestation of the Italian and the Australian cultures. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and critically review the qualitative methodology adopted for the study, the limitations of the study and the recommendations for further exploration and development of both theoretical and applied areas of research.

Consuming Architecture

Journal of New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts| ISSN, 2011

Academia Letters, 2021