Racialised dissatisfaction: homelessness management and the everyday assemblage of difference

Abstract

Faced with increased waves of refugees, economic migrants and internal vulnerable groups, the challenge for the contemporary European city is to welcome, assist and manage these populations in ways capable of fostering a positive and productive articulation of difference. The paper tackles this issue by investigating the ways in which difference is perceived, negotiated and performed among Italian and migrant homeless people in Turin, Italy. Through the presentation of detailed ethnographic material, the paper proposes a processual and affective take on the everyday assemblage of race and it questions the role of normative spaces in its making. The notion of racialised dissatisfaction is advanced in this sense, signalling how street-level racism among the homeless poor is deeply connected to the broader machinery of homelessness management and the material and affective components of life on the street. Despite its contextualised ethnographic nature, the paper offers insights that encompass the analysed case and advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of everyday life at the urban margins.

Fragment urbanism: Politics at the margins of the city

“…While I have drawn on a wide range of perspectives, form Lefebvre and Benjamin to Chakrabarty and While exploring different cities may, of course, have revealed a different or wider set of fragment politics, the three forms I have highlighted here resonate with the larger urban literature, especially that focused on politics, urban poverty and the making of collective life in the global South (eg Amin, 2014;De Boek, 2012Elwood et al, 2016;Satterthwaitte and Mitlin, 2014;Graham and McFarlane, 2015;Lancione, 2016;Moser, 2009;Peake, 2015;Ranganathan, 2015;Simone, 2014;Shnitzler, 2013;Silver, 2014;Thieme, 2017).…”

“…From this position, a politics of becoming addresses the transformation of ‘wholes’ that produce fragments as such (for instance through rights, legality and citizenship), while recognizing that the excessive, relational and generative nature of fragment urbanisms requires attending to particular contexts and struggles (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016). Becoming is one route for working through the classic tensions of political action in relation to structure and agency, but does so by bypassing the fixed and clunky baggage of those terms.…”

“…In both Mumbai and Cape Town, as we will see, activists have powerfully connected the fragments of sanitation that residents inherit, work with, and politicize, to a multiple set of concerns around urban poverty and inequality. While the examples I draw upon are inevitably selective, taken together they resonate more widely with research on the politics of inadequate provisions in the city, from work on improvised energy provision, drainage, or water, to studies of inadequate housing, transport or health provisions (eg Amin, 2014;De Boek, 2012Satterthwaitte and Mitlin, 2014;Graham and McFarlane, 2015;Lancione, 2016;Ranganathan, 2015;Shnitzler, 2013;Silver, 2014;Thieme, 2017).…”

Refugee urbanism: seeing asylum “like a city”

“…Second, there has been an emergent interest in whether theories of urban diversity reflect the specificities of how asylum seekers and refugees interact with cities (Darling, 2017). This demands a move beyond generalized accounts of urban migration patterns, to situate the specificities of refugee subjectivity in relation to a range of urban issues, including housing informality (Sanyal, 2014), racialized inequality (Lancione, 2016;Picker, 2017), contestations over urban resources (Maestri, 2017), and the rise of urban sanctuary movements (Bagelman, 2016;Bauder, 2017;Darling and Bauder 2019).…”

Editorial: Emotional geography and Transactions

“…Emotions surrounding (not) belonging and racism are the focus of several other papers recently published in Transactions on refugees and migrants. For example, Shubin () explores the experiences of Eastern European migrants living in north‐east Scotland, while Lancione () examines the treatment of homeless refugees in Turin. Both papers highlight aspects of vulnerability, deprivation, and exclusion associated with the performance of migrant identities and note how the emotions surrounding these experiences reflect street‐level and community‐based racism.…”