Paper short abstract:

Based on two ethnographic projects on accommodation for illegalized migrants, we discuss how spatial rules are broken, negotiated, or reproduced through the creation of spaces of narrowed potentialities.

Paper long abstract:

“Irregular migration” calls notions of borders and national territoriality into question: by their mere presence, illegalized migrants break national spatial rules. Their precarious administrative position also translates into limited access to resources and notably the formal housing market. Contesting this residential segregation, some social movements challenge European migration and border policies through the creation of alternative dwelling places. Disrupting the nation state’s apparatus, those contested territorialities rely on specific moralities, visions of a better future and call for spatial justice. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the potentialities of these spaces are narrow and that the materialization of such heterotopias are entangled in divergent and contradictory motivations represented by the diversity of the stakeholders. We argue that those spatial struggles oscillate between practices of micro-resistance and (re)production of tropes of the nation state.

In this paper, we compare and contrast two anthropological projects on a squatters’ mobilization in Switzerland and on citizen-organized emergency accommodation in Belgium. On the basis of participant observations and interviews at these two sites, we ask how the legitimacy to break spatial rules is developed, negotiated or contested. Furthermore, we scrutinize the enactment of such social movements and ask if and how dominant forms of territoriality are also reproduced.

Neither victimizing nor romanticizing deviance, this paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the capacities of an impoverished population and civil society initiatives to challenge European migration and border policies by creating spaces of narrowed potentialities.