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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how migrants engaged in circular mobilities across Europe enact placemaking practices. Focusing on a ‘transit’ squat on the French–Italian Alpine border that became an intermittent home, it shows how mobility and immobility co-produce contested yet enduring forms of emplacement.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the entangled dynamics of mobility and immobility in a short-lived squat situated in a small Italian village close to the Alpine border with France. Founded by a group of anarchist activists as a 'space of transit' for illegalised migrants, the squat was conceived mainly as a temporary stopover for irregular cross-border movement. However, some residents, primarily Moroccan men, gradually transformed it into a space of intermittent, yet long-term dwelling. Through ethnographic engagement with their experiences, I trace how mobility, displacement, and homemaking converged in the daily life of a marginal place. Drawing on recent debates on (im)mobilities and the politics of placemaking (Winters et al., 2024), the paper challenges dichotomous understandings of mobility as uprootedness and displacement, and immobility as stasis.

Migrants’ circular, open-ended trajectories in and around the border squat reveal instead how emplacement and displacement were co-constituted, with placemaking practices of solidarity and conviviality turning a space defined by illegality and temporariness into one of affective attachment and sociality - even as structural precarity, racialisation, and the threat of eviction persisted.

By situating the squat within broader European ‘regimes of mobility’ (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013), the paper connects intimate, embodied practices of placemaking to the multi-scalar configurations of governance that regulate movement and fixity. In doing so, it illustrates how ‘errant homes’ like the squat reconfigure ‘spaces of transit’ into contested, yet enduring forms of home amid ongoing displacement.