Paper short abstract:

The paper identifies the ways in which uneven development trajectories intersect and are reproduced in the rooms of hotels, houses, schools and apartments used as reception centres for asylum seekers in a central Italian province.

Paper long abstract:

Framed by and expanding the widespread perception that contemporary borders are vacillating and multiplying, scholarship in the field of borders and migration studies has cast its analytical attention away from borderlines towards the assemblage of procedures and regulations, physical infrastructures and modular components that defines the social life of bodies and things in circulation. In this logistical landscape, migration infrastructure become important loci in the articulation and conditioning of the spatialities and temporalities of human movement, as they channel, facilitate and contain, accelerate and decelerate it.

These perspectives illuminate about the ways in which migration infrastructures make possible, and are in turn made significant by, human circulation. Yet, in defining infrastructures exclusively as the functional by-product of the governing logics that dis/enable human movement, they seem inadequate to unpack the ways in which migration infrastructure are deeply connected to patterns of uneven development. The paper addresses this inadequacy through an ethnography of the Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers set up by the Italian government in 2015, in a central Italian province. Such ethnography foregrounds three trajectories of uneven development that are reproduced in the rooms of these Centres: a global one, explaining the structural context in which migration to Europe takes place; a regional one, emphasising the uneven process of integration of European peripheral states; a national one, underscoring the significance of uneven incorporation of Italian regions into the national space. The paper draws from postcolonial and feminist conceptualisations of 'place' to develop these points.