Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice , by Luce Beeckmans, Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh, and Hilde Heynen (Eds), 2022, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 425 pp., $69.50 (paperback), ISBN 978 94 6270 293 6 (paperback)

Abstract

This edited collection of papers was born out of a doctoral workshop and conference held in Brussels, Belgium, in March 2019 and entitled, Displacement & Domesticity since 1945: Refugees, Migrants and Expats Making Homes. This was a themed conference sponsored by the European Architectural History Network (EAHN), The Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (KVAB) and KU Leuven's Faculty of Architecture. Many people, including the editors of this book and many of its contributors, were involved in the organisation of both the workshop and conference. Special thanks go to the organising committee -Alessandra Gola, Anamica Singh, Ashika Singh and Hilde Heynen -for overseeing the conference from beginning to end.At the time, the goal of the organising committee was ambitious but simple: to bring together scholars, activists and architects involved in the (re-)thinking of what it means to imagine, design and create 'homes' in contexts of human displacement. The notion of home itself was placed in relation to domesticity, not with the intention to interiorise or to privatise the concept, but in order to draw attention to spatio-material effects and processes of home-making, which differ from more traditional and idealised associations of comfort and security. Although the origins of this project are rooted in architectural circles, the intellectual agenda was from the start set up as interdisciplinary. Therefore, the conference opened its call to and welcomed papers from the fields of architectural history, theory and practice, ethnography and sociology of space, human and cultural geography, migration studies, as well as post-colonial studies and decolonial criticism, and philosophy. Hence, the conference's goal was to bring together scholars who shared a spatialised and interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of displacement and making of home(s). This objective remains very much the focus of this edited volume.The origins of this edited volume are more than circumstantial. The theme resonates not only with a number of conferences and workshops that emerged around the same time, but also with fraught and ongoing political situations both now and in the past. Among the former, those with a focus on migration, architecture and space include: 'Urban Arrival Infrastructures' (Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, VUB, 2015); 'Inside Out -Outside In: Shifting Architectures of Refugee (In) Habitation' (Max Planck Institute, 2019); 'Infrastructures of Care: Spaces of Refuge and Displacement' (The Bartlett, UCL, 2019); and 'Moving, Living, Investing, and Surviving: Housing and Migrations in Uncertain Times' (IMISCOE, 2020).Many of these intellectual activities arose in response to the so-called European refugee 'crisis' of 2015 and, indeed, there is much to be said and is being said ever greater strain in order to survive and, within this, to maintain a sense of human dignity. And yet, what we believe and hope is that this global experience, however variously it has manifested itself, will open the chapters of this edited vo...