Recent socio-political situations in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in a large number of refugees searching for new places to settle. To understand how a new place could become a home, the authors conducted qualitative research in the Netherlands. The study looked at the home experiences and (micro)homemaking practices of young Syrian refugees in an innovative housing project in Amsterdam. In this project, Dutch and Syrian young adults are housed together to foster integration. This article also looks at Boccagni’s model for understanding immigrant live-in workers’ homes. The authors further develop the model by introducing a mobility lens, which offers the possibility of elaborating on theoretical notions between now-and-then and here-and-there and the empirical findings derived from this study.
Incremental housing is a gradual process whereby residents incrementally improve or extend their houses by themselves, whenever funding or time becomes available. This approach has attracted attention as an affordable way of improving poor living conditions in slums often with sites-andservices scheme. In many cases, this approach is coupled with an emphasis on self-help sweat equity, which can be strengthened by active community involvement. This study seeks to suggest a way of combining a scheme of empowering self-reliant communities with incremental housing. Based on the lessons from previous slum upgrade projects in Jinja, Uganda, this study points out the necessity of 1) more sustainable approach with self-help incremental housing than one-time grant-based projects, 2) an assisted way of empowering community and providing training schemes, 3) a temporary shelter for original dwellers who are affected by slum upgrade projects, and 4) an inclusive scheme for tenants who are frequently ignored in many slum upgrade schemes. This study proposes a 'Self-Reliance Centre (SRC)', which is designed to function as a space for community empowerment, a training centre, and a temporary shelter for incremental housing scheme in slum upgrade. As an assisted self-help approach, the SRC in incremental housing has a feature of initial involvement by public sector to invite eventual self-reliance of communities for sustainability in incremental housing.
Due to the Syrian civil war, about 1,100 Syrians have applied for asylum status in Korea, and almost all have obtained humanitarian protection status. Receiving refugees is a relatively new phenomenon in Korean society and many refugees may experience a hostile environment. Although a small number of Koreans show empathy to refugees, the majority have expressed serious security and financial concerns about hosting refugees. This qualitative study therefore looks at Syrian refugees’ sense of belonging in Car Town in Seoul, where approximately 50 Syrians have settled. Through interviews, informal talks, and observations, we investigate Syrians’ everyday lives, and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the Korean society and in the local Syrian community. This study offers insights into different elements of belonging and how the politics of belonging and place-belongingness take shape, and in turn impact the sense of belonging of the Syrian refugees in Car Town and in Korea.
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