At home in home care? Contents and boundaries of the ‘domestic’ among immigrant live-in workers in Italy

How ‘at home’, if at all, migrants feel in their everyday lives abroad is a neglected research issue, with meaningful implications for immigrant, social and housing policies. Their employment as live-in care workers with elderly clients is a unique site to address it, as this article aims to do, based on an archive of life histories of immigrant women in Italy. Co-residential domestic work foregrounds migrants’ need for a domestic space of their own, within the place of someone else. Building on immigrant women’s narratives, I explore what senses and dimensions of domesticity, or even of home, are negotiated in their routine interactions with older clients and the latter’s family members. Within a dwelling place which conflates work and domesticity, the cognitive, emotional and practical dimensions of migrants’ gendered home experience are nothing obvious. How is home-making – as a set of practices oriented to pursue security, familiarity and control – enacted under these circumstances? Is the cultivation of a sense of home beneficial to the clients only, or do immigrant women themselves feel at home somehow? Different ‘modes of domesticity’ are discussed, at the intersection between continuous expectations of home-making and discontinuous ways of feeling at home.     

Living in the periphery: provinciality and domestic space in colonial Bengal

This article focuses in detail on the domestic architecture of Indian town-dwellers within the context of provincial urbanisation in British colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century. It maps out the complex development of house-forms in provincial towns particularly in relation to rural-urban mobility and new social relationships brought about by the establishment of colonial governmental infrastructure in interior areas of the Bengal Province. Positing these domestic forms to be as important as the much-studied ‘bungalow’ in terms of typological complexity as well as the range of social, political and economic processes that they represented, the article foregrounds them as being significant spatial models of colonial urban domesticity and modernity. It analyses the development of residential architecture in the light of the varied perceptions of provincial towns held by different constituencies among the urban population—such as European officers or Bengali rural immigrants—from a range of socio-economic classes. It argues that urban-rural mobility and the nature of changing but continuing connections between rural and urban locations created an incrementally growing provincial urban domestic architecture characterised by malleable notions of work, home and leisure spaces. This produced a typological flexibility and specific articulations of public and private domains within residential premises.

The chief purpose of the paper is threefold: first, to make a case for Indian agency in the co-production of colonial architecture and urbanism; second, to argue the role of provincial spatial cultures and house forms as key bearers of colonial modernity; third, to explore colonial architectural history through on-ground mapping of everyday domestic spaces of individual families and varied social groups.     

The experience of homeless women: An exploration of housing histories and the meaning of home

The exploratory study with homeless women presented in this paper aims to highlight two shortcomings in the current literature on homelessness, which accompany the predominant conceptualisation of ‘home’ as a place of safety and security, and homelessness as a primarily structural issue characterised by ‘residential instability’. The first is the paucity of research on homeless women in their own right and the second the lack of studies which examine underlying reasons for residential instability from homeless women's own perspectives. An intensive, small sample interview study was carried out with 12 regular women users of a day centre for homeless people (Brighton, south of England). They were asked about their patterns of residence, reasons for moving, definitions of ‘house’, ‘home’, and ‘ideal home’, and they gave their housing histories in some detail. In a quantitative analysis, their patterns of moving and definitions of ‘home’ were compared to those of a group of securely housed women. Number of moves was comparable in both groups, but for the homeless women the majority of moves had been made to avoid abuse and social services relocations. Whilst all of the securely housed women could confidently define a difference in meaning between a ‘house’ and a ‘home’, only 3 of the 12 homeless women did. They equated ‘home’ with safety and security, the same terms used in the literature to define what housing means, and the two most salient features largely absent in homeless women's experience of housing. The meaning of home is further explored in a qualitative analysis, where the themes of safety and security—or rather their absence in abusive relationships—are traced through the homeless women's childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These exploratory findings question an easy equation between ‘residential instability’ and homelessness, and highlight the need to investigate further the reasons why women leave housing, and the relationship this has to an understanding of what ‘home’ means. Whilst current formulations suggest that the homelessness of women is a problem, and housing the solution, this study suggests that housing is the problem—homelessness may well be a solution.     

Between urban and national: Political mobilization among Mizrahim in Israel’s ‘development towns’

In the face of persisting deprivation, marginalized ethno-classes generally mobilize against their governments and/or against rival groups. Two key arenas of such mobilization are extra-parliamentary protest and local electoral campaigning. The paper examines these arenas in Israel’s peripheral ‘development towns’, established during the 1950s, and populated primarily by “Mizrahim”—Jews who migrated to Israel from the Muslim world. The public protest by Mizrahim in the towns has been consistent, though not intense. Generally, it voiced ‘external’ demand to the state for a fairer share of public resources, falling within the ‘legitimate’ boundaries of Zionist political discourse. In local elections, however, the Mizrahim raised a more militant political voice, focusing mainly on their competition against the large number of ‘Russians’ immigrants who arrived during the 1990s. Local election campaigns often transgressed the acceptable boundaries of Zionist discourse, by questioning the core values of immigrant absorption and Jewish unity. In explaining the different agendas and discourses, we argue that the answer is rooted in two related phenomena. First, on a national level, Mizrahi identity at the Israeli periphery has been ‘trapped’ by the settlement agendas of the Zionist project. The local election discourse, however, demonstrates the centrality of place for the Mizrahim in both their communal identity and political power. While the towns were created as peripheral and impoverished places in the attempt to Judaize the land, they have now become a significant, and threatened, ethnic and political resource. The external and internal discourses therefore combine as two key ‘layers’ in the making of the peripheral Mizrahi ethno-class.     

‘Fourth places’: the contemporary public settings for informal social interaction among strangers

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’. Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces.     

Housing supply and residential segregation in Ireland

The article examines the role of housing supply in ethnic diversity and the residential segregation of Asian, African and eastern European immigrants from Irish nationals in Ireland. Housing supply is defined as the proportions of new housing, private rental accommodation and social housing among all housing units in an electoral district. Multivariate regressions reveal that, among all three housing supply variables, the proportion of private rentals had the largest effect on ethnic diversity and immigrant— Irish segregation. Areas with higher proportions of private rental units were more ethnically diverse, had greater presences of Africans, Asians and eastern Europeans (as opposed to high concentrations of Irish nationals) and exhibited greater integration between each of the three immigrant groups and Irish nationals. The article concludes with a discussion of immigrant assimilation and questions whether the patterns of residential integration observed would further facilitate other forms of social inclusion for immigrants in Irish society.     

(Re)conceptualising the boundaries between home and homelessness: the unheimlich

A burgeoning cross-disciplinary literature signifies a move towards diversifying understandings of the meanings of ‘home’. Homelessness is inextricably bound up in these definitions. While earlier work has considered meanings of homelessness, attempts to advance understandings of the relationship between home and homelessness have been sporadic. This article attempts to reinvigorate discussion around the home–homelessness relationship by problematizing the binaries in current understandings and poses a different way of theorizing the interplay between the two concepts. Drawing on interviews with women accessing homelessness services in the North of England, discussion interweaves women’s meanings of home and homelessness with the Freudian notion of the ‘unheimlich’. The ‘unheimlich’ captures the uncanny process of inversion whereby the familiar domestic sphere of the house turns into a frightening place; and a typical space of homelessness—the hostel—is considered home. The article seeks to contribute more adequate theoretical tools for future research to better understand and articulate the complexities of home and homelessness.     

Ethnic Neighbourhoods in Auckland,New Zealand

Using the 2006 New Zealand Census data, we examine the spatial clustering of the four largest ethnic minority groups—Chinese, Indian, Māori and Samoan—in Auckland. To guide our analysis, we employ three theoretical models—the immigrant enclave, ethnic community and place stratification models—that have helped explain the residential patterns of ethnic minority groups in immigrant destination countries. The results of spatial autocorrelation analysis show that all four ethnic minority groups form ethnic neighbourhoods. Indian neighbourhoods are more reflective of the immigrant enclave model as these neighbourhoods are socio-economically impoverished and have a higher percentage of foreign born. On the other hand, Chinese neighbourhoods are better explained by the ethnic community model, which describes an ethnic neighbourhood based more on preference than economic necessity. While the overall findings conform to patterns found in other countries, the severely socially deprived characteristics of Samoan and Māori neighbourhoods are reflective of the place stratification model.     

Imported but not delivered: the construction of modern domesticity and the spatial politics of mass housing in 1930s' Ankara

The social history of the ‘modern house’ in the early years of the Turkish Republic has predominantly been told as the story of the affluent. This group's residential, professional and entertainment culture became a prime marker of modernisation whereas Turkish architectural historians have limited their research largely to the ‘cubic style’ single family houses built for and by the upper and middle classes. But can these models explain the complexity of the ‘modern house’ in 1930s' Turkey? How did architectural layouts, when transferred to different social, cultural and spatial contexts, contribute to the production of gendered divisions? My article adopts domesticity, gender and class as a framework to identify the emergence of ‘indigenous’ forms of modern architecture and urbanism in early republican Ankara. Analysing the Workers' Houses Settlement (1938), I argue that although individual units were characterised by minimalised spatial configurations, the layouts significantly deviated from Western models. Furthermore, by appropriating localised building traditions and living with extended families, lower-income residents shifted the widely disseminated image of the middle-class ideal of domesticity imported from Central and Western Europe, which has become integral to Turkey's official discourse of modernism since the 1930s.     

Towards a progressive home-making: the ambivalence of migrants’ experience in a multicultural condominium

Following the rhetoric of globalisation and hyper-mobility, the ideas of placelessness and detachment from place seem to be the essential features of contemporary cities. This conceals the human necessity to constantly create new senses of home and new home-making practices. Starting from ethnographic research in a multicultural condominium (called Hotel House) in Italy, the paper uses the urban experience of migrants to look at different home-making practices by analysing them as multidimensional (spatial, social and emotional) processes. Firstly, migrants living in Hotel House produce ‘home’ by imbuing domestic spaces with their own memory and meaning and creating public and collective spaces characterised by ‘homely relations’. In both cases, they produce material, emotional and symbolic resources. Secondly, the paper analyses the ‘dark side of home-making’, inasmuch as the social density of the home-making practices in Hotel House’s domestic and public spaces also favours strong forms of social control, particularly relevant for women and young people. Thirdly, the paper analyses how the sense of home sustains a collective intercultural mobilisations against Hotel House’s institutional abandonment and stigmatisation that reveal the threshold-crossing capacity of ‘home’. Home, in conclusion, is not a romanticised, fixed and bounded place to protect. It is a plural and conflictual field of action that can support social exclusion but can also open new interconnections and possibilities of peoples’ empowerment.     

The role of ethnic retailing in retrofitting suburbia: case studies from Toronto,Canada

Today’s immigrants to Canada are increasingly and directly settling into suburban areas of major cities; a trend that has resulted in new retail opportunities: suburban ethnic shopping centres are a growing phenomenon in areas with major immigrant settlement. This paper discusses the development and retrofitting processes of three suburban Chinese shopping malls in the Toronto area. The paper explores how these malls successfully regenerated areas once affected by business decline and how they can act as a catalyst to develop a new urban form that makes the suburban landscape less uniform and more sustainable. Various perspectives from key players involved in ethnic retail activities and developments were collected, including surveys with entrepreneurs and shoppers, and semi-structured interviews with city councillors, city planners, developers and an architect. The paper suggests that municipalities could invest in established ethnic retail places as an innovative means of “retrofitting suburbia.”     

Defining and Measuring Displacement: Is Relocation from Restructured Neighbourhoods Always Unwelcome and Disruptive?

Current regeneration policy has been described as ‘state-led gentrification’, with comparisons made with the ‘social disruption’ caused by slum clearance of the 1950s and 1960s. This article takes issue with this approach in relation to the study of the restructuring of social housing areas. The terms ‘forced relocation’ and ‘displacement’ are often too crude to describe what actually happens within processes of restructuring and the effects upon residents. Displacement in particular has important dimensions other than the physical one of moving. Evidence from a recent study of people who have moved out of restructured areas shows that although there is some evidence of physical displacement, there is little evidence of social or psychosocial displacement after relocation. Prior attitudes to moving and aspects of the process of relocation—the degree of choice and distance involved—are important moderators of the outcomes. Issues of time and context are insufficiently taken into consideration in studies and accounts of restructuring, relocation and displacement.     

Different effects of ethnic diversity on social capital: density of foundations and leisure associations in Amsterdam neighbourhoods

This article examines the effect of ethnic diversity on social capital in Amsterdam neighbourhoods by looking at the effects of the ethnic diversity of a neighbourhood on the social networks that underpin civil society. A distinction is made between homogeneous, more individually oriented social networks, on the one hand, and horizontal heterogeneous networks on the other. The density of foundations—i.e. the number of foundations in a neighbourhood—is used as the indicator for the first type of networks and the density of leisure associations for the latter type. In addition, the study looks at the effect of a changing context in Amsterdam in which ethnic diversity has increasingly come to be perceived as problematic by inhabitants and local politicians. The results indeed show that ethnic diversity has a different effect on both forms of civil society: the horizontal heterogeneous networks suffer more from ethnic diversity than the homogeneous networks.     

Ethnic origin, local labour markets and self-employment in Sweden: a multilevel approach

We investigate the importance of ethnic origin and local labour markets conditions for self-employment propensities in Sweden. In line with previous research, we find differences in the self-employment rate between different immigrant groups as well as between different immigrant cohorts. We use a multilevel regression approach in order to quantify the role of ethnic background, point of time for immigration and local market conditions in order to further understand differences in self-employment rates between different ethnic groups. We arrive at the following: The self-employment decision is to a major extent guided by factors unobservable in register data. Such factors might be, that is, individual entrepreneurial ability and access to financial capital. The individual’s ethnic background and point of time for immigration play a smaller role for the self-employment decision but are more important than local labour market conditions.     

New Spaces of (Dis)engagement? Social Politics,Urban Technologies and the Rezoning of the City

This paper discusses the changing nature of urban space and urban technologies, using various conceptions of engagement in social politics to illuminate contemporary understandings of cultural change and social exclusion and the role of housing within this. The progressive reorganisation of urban space, which is at least partly a result of global economic changes, is producing complex forms of social politics organised around newly emerging varieties and scales of engagement and disengagement. These are cross-cut by a number of cultural themes that play out differently in different spaces. Thus ‘fear’ is universally significant, but perceived ‘differentially’ according to space, culture and socio-economic status. ‘Excitement’ is also an important theme, though more for some groups than others. The capacity to use resources—material, cultural, technological—and particularly the reflexive utilisation of these resources, also affects the nature of social politics and the specific nature of proactive and defensive (dis)engagement. The paper argues that the social scientific analysis of housing would do well to take cognisance of these debates if it is to continue to produce nuanced analyses able to take account of the socio-spatial, cultural and political realities of informational capitalism.     

Residential Experiences and the Culture of Suburbanization: A Case Study of Portuguese Homebuyers in Mississauga

This paper examines the housing experiences of immigrants to Canada through a survey of first-generation Portuguese homebuyers in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. The survey focused on the push/pull factors leading to their decision to live in the suburbs, their housing search strategies, and their use of services in Mississauga and in the initial area of Portuguese immigrant settlement in downtown Toronto. This study uses data from a questionnaire administered to 110 Portuguese homebuyers in 1990, shortly after their first move to suburban Mississauga; a sample of those respondents were re-interviewed in 2003. The evidence indicates that these immigrants were ‘pulled’ into relocating to Mississauga because of their desire to live in a single-family dwelling in a good neighbourhood. Their housing search relied extensively on ethnic sources of information, particularly Portuguese real estate agents. In general, this group of immigrants expressed satisfaction with their move. The Portuguese community in Mississauga is characterized by a form of voluntary segregation, which seems to be partly a result of their reliance on their own ethnic community for information, language barriers to participating in non-Portuguese activities, and a cultural preference for living near people of the same ethnic background. One consequence of this re-segregation process, by which Portuguese people recreate a Portuguese ‘homeland’ in the suburbs, has been the limitation of their social contacts with members of other ethnic communities that have also settled in suburban Mississauga.     

Negotiating an Asiatown in Berlin: Ethnic diversity in urban planning

Cities are increasingly affected by migration which raises new questions for urban development and planning. In the paper at hand, this issue is addressed from two perspectives: First, we stress the high social, representative as well as economic potential of ethnic economies and the emerging neighborhoods, showing that they serve migrant communities as well as urban development. Second, we bring in perspectives from the ‘planning for diversity’ and ‘multicultural planning’ discourses into the German debate. This paper takes the planning conflict on the development of the Dong Xuan Center (DXC), Germany's largest Vietnamese-run trade center, into an Asiatown as empirical basis. It examines legal implications for the German context and therewith contributes to the ‘planning for diversity’ discourse from a non-multicultural setting.     

Spatial Assimilation in Denmark? Why do Immigrants Move to and from Multi-ethnic Neighbourhoods?

In most European countries ethnic minorities have had a tendency to settle in certain parts of cities—and often in social housing—together with other immigrants in so-called multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. An explanation for this could be low income combined with lack of knowledge of the housing market and discrimination, which limits the housing possibilities for ethnic minorities. Another explanation could be that for different reasons immigrants choose to settle in so-called ethnic enclaves where they can find an ethnic social network, which can support them in their new country. In traditional research literature about immigration it has been shown that for many immigrants living in enclaves has been a temporary situation. The ‘spatial assimilation theory’ says that this situation ends when the family has become more integrated in the new society and then moves to another part of the city. This paper provides evidence to support both explanations of why ethnic minorities move to and from multi-ethnic neighbourhoods.     

Just for Starters: Commercial Gentrification by Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Amsterdam and Rotterdam Neighbourhoods

Many large European cities are now displaying clear social, ethnic and spatial divisions. These different types of cleavages tend to overlap. Governments try to chase away this spectre of an increasingly divided city by embarking on various policies. These policies generally neglect the (potential) role of immigrant entrepreneurs in improving neighbourhoods. In this contribution, we have focused on the immigrant business start-ups in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrants indeed turn out to show relatively higher rates of immigrant businesses than other neighbourhoods in these two cities. Immigrant entrepreneurs, may, therefore, strengthen the local economy of these neighbourhoods and offer not only specific goods and services but also jobs, nodes of information and role models. Urban policies should, hence, explicitly target their policies to this kind of immigrant-driven process of commercial gentrification by creating cheap commercial properties in these neighbourhoods.     

Who leaves rental housing? Examining possible explanations for ethnic housing segmentation in Uppsala,Sweden

Swedish cities are not only segregated but also segmented along ethnic lines; i.e., different ethnic groups are unevenly distributed across the different tenure segments in the housing market. Immigrants are generally overrepresented in rental housing and underrepresented in home ownership and tenant–owner cooperative housing. In this paper, an attempt is made to evaluate the importance of socioeconomic resources in explaining this segmentation, using the Uppsala housing market as a case. By means of binary logistic regression an evaluation is made of the relative importance of socioeconomic resources and ethnic background, while controlling for demographic factors, in explaining whether a person leaves rental housing for home ownership or cooperative housing or remains in the rental segment. The results show that the socioeconomic situation of the individual is indeed very important. A high income and a stable position in the labor market seem to be crucial in order to advance in the housing market. Demographic and socioeconomic factors cannot, however, fully account for the differences found between Swedes and immigrant groups such as Africans and Eastern Europeans. The results imply that ethnic discrimination cannot be ruled out as an explanation for the underrepresentation of immigrants in the cooperative and owner-occupied segments.