Migrant emplacement and urban ambiances: fearscapes, ethnoscapes, commonscapes

Drawing on one year of ethnographic observations, informal conversations, fieldnotes, and spatial mapping conducted by two migration researchers in Turin, this paper discusses migrant emplacement through the lens of transforming urban ambiances. Rather than reducing migrant presence to specific neighbourhoods, ethnic infrastructures, or institutional integration, it examines the embodied encounters, tensions, fears, shared practices, and spatial negotiations that emerge in everyday life. Building upon Akhtar’s (1999) psychoanalytic discussion of migration and identity, Bauman’s (1995) reflections on fragmented life strategies and encounters with strangers, and Stavrides’ (2019) approach to urban thresholds and common spaces, the paper reconceptualises the notion of “spatial overflow.” Spatial overflow refers to the ways migrants move beyond spaces explicitly or implicitly allocated, restricted, or rendered hostile to them through the necessities of everyday life. This process reconstitutes the sensory, economic, aesthetic, and social ambiances of the city. In Turin, marketplaces, tourist squares, ethnic businesses, places of worship, and solidarity spaces reveal how diverse linguistic, religious, labour, consumption, and livelihood practices become visible within urban space. Barriera di Milano, a northern district with a history of working-class life and a contemporary multicultural population, is a key threshold for this discussion. The paper addresses the three themes of the session: fearscapes, emerging through criminalisation, racialised surveillance, and anxieties associated with transitional urban spaces; ethnoscapes, materialised through food, commerce, worship, language, memory, and embodied practices; and commonscapes, formed through repeated encounters in markets, streets, squares, and solidarity initiatives such as Sermig – Arsenale della Pace, a former military arsenal transformed into a shared space for peace and solidarity. Akhtar, S. (1999). Immigration and identity: Turmoil, treatment, and transformation. Jason Aronson. Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in fragments: Essays in postmodern morality. Blackwell. Stavrides, S. (2019). Towards the city of thresholds. Common Notions. Migrant emplacement, Urban ambiances, Spatial overflow, Everyday encounters, Turin

How do immigrants navigate the tension between belonging and estrangement in their adopted urban landscapes? Drawing on doctoral research into Iranian immigrants' landscape perception in Manchester, this paper examines how place-making unfolds through embodied, spatiotemporal, and intangible heritage practices within multicultural urban neighbourhoods. Focusing on Rusholme, a culturally layered and diasporic neighbourhood along Wilmslow Road, this paper presents findings from two walking interview methods: Docent-led interviews and Participatory walking interviews. These methods captured how Iranian immigrants across different generations navigate Rusholme's contested ambiences: a space simultaneously evoking childhood memories of Iranian neighbourhoods, cultural belonging rooted in familiar food, language, and community gatherings, yet also provoking unease through perceived neglect, safety concerns beyond the main artery, and ideological tensions around visible markers of religious identity. Informed by Gill's (2010) model of immigrant place-making, the analysis reveals that Rusholme occupies an ambivalent position in participants' cognitive and emotional geographies, functioning as both a cultural anchor for transnational identity and a site of contested heritage, where the place-making of earlier immigrant generations can simultaneously affirm and unsettle belonging for newer arrivals. Sensory encounters, familiar smells from Iranian restaurants, sounds of Farsi, the visual rhythm of a street reminiscent of home, emerged as powerful mediators of attachment, alongside negative perceptions shaped by urban planning, safety, and immigration-related anxieties. By foregrounding the embodied, mobile, and generationally differentiated dimensions of immigrant emplacement, this paper contributes to understanding how multicultural urban neighbourhoods become sites of both heritage inscription and affective negotiation.

This paper begins from the premise that camps are best understood not as isolated or exceptional spaces but as interconnected formations structured by shared logics of governance, control, and humanitarianism. This paper develops the notion of campscapes, conceived as networked formations linking camps across sites, scales, and functions. On a global scale, three overlapping campscapes are identified—a post-war ‘humanitarian’ campscape largely located in the Global South; a ‘crimmigration’ campscape emerging within the Global North from the late 1970s; and a contemporary ‘global frontier’ campscape, a frontline between Global North and South, where practices and processes of care and control converge. The global frontier campscape is itself a machine of many moving parts; this paper sketches the campscapes of contemporary Greece, both on the mainland and on the islands, before examining one specific camp (Ritsona) in greater detail. Ethnoscapes and comonscapes in particular are examined in depth; are the same community relations often seen in an urban setting replicated in a camp environment? What are the major similarities and differences? How does ethnicity figure in terms of individual and collective identities in camps? What is 'community' in such an environment? This paper is multi-scalar in scope, and based on ethnographic field research conducted in Ritsona camps between 2019 and 2022.

Scholarship on migration policies and humanitarian action often frames newcomers as passive recipients of services. However, the ways in which migrants claim their right to the city and enact practices of urban commons remain insufficiently explored. This paper examines established urban atmospheres in relation to the newcomers’ collective and solidarity practices, investigating their potential to decolonize the national(istic) urban atmospheres in the case of Thessaloniki. In the early twentieth century, Thessaloniki was a multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman metropolis. Following its occupation by the Greek army during the Balkan Wars, processes of national homogenization—often implemented through violent means—targeted the city’s population, but also living memory, and the urban space. In recent decades, however, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new populations from the Balkans and the former Soviet Union have settled in the city. Even more recently, Thessaloniki has emerged as a key transit hub for thousands of people on the move from West Asia and Africa, traveling from Turkey toward central and northern Europe. Having crossed the violence of national borders, newcomers encounter invisible borders, as “other” bodies are often perceived as not fitting within the city’s established atmospheres. Drawing on urban ethnography conducted in past research endeavours but also in the context of a newly started research project, this paper focuses on instances in which these atmospheric borders are traversed through collective practices, relations, and uses of space. In so doing, newcomers actively contribute to the emergence of new transnational atmospheres that destabilize national atmospheric borders and open up possibilities for the decolonization of the city.

Positivist research in migration and urban studies, seeking “objective” truth in observable and measurable “facts”, has long been challenged, complemented or countered through the proliferation of qualitative methodologies. Nevertheless, qualitative research methodologies are still dominated by the prevalence of text, speech, narrative or discourse, as the research process’ “raw material” and hence as primary sources of knowledge production. Yet, in interviews and focus groups, people commonly talk about their experiences, practices, perceptions, or feelings. However important, textual and discursive material alone may not be sufficient enough to methodologically approach and empirically grasp urban ambiances, involving sensorial, emotional and affective dimensions of the urban experience, alongside relational and material ones. Relevant scholarly contributions in recent years (e.g. Mendoza & Morén-Alegret 2013; Desille & Nikielska-Sekuła 2024; Pegorer 2024) have proposed a number of ethnographic fieldwork techniques to complement these, including observational and walking methods, photo/video/audio elicitation/documentation, sketching or drawing, but also non-representational, subjective and participatory cartographic methodologies, as in the tradition of mental maps, psychogeography and counter-mapping. Drawing on our first encounters with fieldwork in the context of a recently-started research project, this presentation interrogates methods for studying the interconnections between urban ambiances and migrant emplacement in Greek cities. It particularly focuses on the three atmospheric landscapes that lie at the core of the session’s interests - fearscapes, ethnoscapes, and commonscapes – discussing ways of tracking these by “living the field”, alongside and together with research participants, yet under time constraints and resource limitations. It specifically aims at exploring methodological pathways (a) to trace established ambiances in Athens and Thessaloniki, (b) to map how these may be sensed, felt, perceived and lived by newcomers, and (c) to investigate how, in some cases, the migrants’ very presence, practices and relationships interfere, alter and reshape those ambiances, leading to the emergence of new ones.

This thesis, entitled "In-between Places the case of Ioannina: Invisible Communities and Hybrid Identities in Space through the Lens of Social and Spatial Resilience", investigates how migrants in Ioannina constitute in-between places of encounter, solidarity, and creation that often operate outside official frameworks. The central hypothesis asks how migrants' spatial and social strategies produce hybrid identities and resilience networks, presenting the city as a dynamic field of continuous social negotiation. The study is grounded in an interdisciplinary framework combining: a) Henri Lefebvre's critical spatial theory, particularly the socio-spatial dialectic and the distinction between conceived, perceived, and lived space; b) Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity and the Third Space as a field of identity negotiation; and c) contemporary approaches to socio-spatial resilience, understood not as a return to equilibrium but as a dynamic process of adaptation and transformation. Methodologically, the thesis adopts a qualitative approach based on the case study of Ioannina. Data collection includes semi-structured interviews with experts, collective members, and residents; on-site observation in gathering places such as squares, informal meeting spots, and local collectives; and secondary analysis of statistical data. Through empirical data analysis, the study aims to highlight the complexity of in-between places as fields of resistance and resilience. The thesis concludes that official refugee management policies fail to incorporate the lived experience and organic needs of migrants. Instead, informal practices and the in-between places created by communities themselves emerge as critical mechanisms of social and spatial resilience. Finally, it proposes a shift from technocratic population management toward inclusive planning that recognizes Τhe Right to the City and the organic survival strategies of mobile populations.

An abandoned school in Praggi, at the northern Evros border, situated directly within the Militarized Zone (ΖΑΠ), becomes a liminal space where refugee and ethnic bodies, objects, and discourses intersect at different times and leave traces. In this location -a transient passage for refugees and part of the militarized border complex of Evros, the Borderland of Europe and topograpgy of fear for the unrecognizable populations- we examine the traces and mobility of the fearscape. We study the embodied presence of people on the move within the school and the ways in which the school-border is produced - discursively and spatially – as a contested site for the culturally intelligible (or unintelligible) subject. We also examine the discursive presence of locals through racist and antifascist inscriptions on the surfaces of the school, as a struggle over sovereignty (and the hospitable or inhospitable nation) enacted in the school space and articulated through the masculinities that (are called upon to) represent it. We ask how newly arrived subjects find refuge in the school, despite technologies of prohibition and death, and how they embody and carry with them the border atmosphere on their way to the city. In this site, the two researchers meet, examining and reconstructing traces and the affective atmosphere -the remnants of ritual practices through which subjectivities are produced and identities performed. We combine fieldwork findings (photographic archives, narratives, diaries) and analyze the iconography to foreground the lived atmosphere of the border fearscape. Drawing on feminist decolonial border theory and the archive, as well as post-structuralist discourse analysis, we examine the presence of migrants and residents alike: objects, slogans, wall inscriptions, the sticky affect, excretions of the ethnic body, and the exergue of ramparts upon the open archive/body of Evros -unfolding enclosures and resistances within the urban landscape.

Labor migration is constitutively bound to social reproduction, and the living environments of migrant workers are often conceived merely as sites where labor power is restored: spaces to recover and return to work. As a result, the spatial intelligence through which migrant communities organize collective life within and beyond these constraints remains largely illegible within the planning categories inherited by architecture and urbanism. This contribution proposes domesticity, tacit spatial knowledge, and spatial attunement as reorienting frameworks for reading migrant emplacement through lived urban ambiances. Drawing on feminist theories of social reproduction and the notion of “life’s work” developed by Mitchell, Marston, and Katz, this contribution asks whether everyday domestic practices exceed capital’s attempts to discipline migrant life under conditions of precarity. It does so by bringing migration housing studies into dialogue with ambiance theory. Central to this argument is nostalgia, understood not as a fixed longing for a lost home, but as a generative spatial condition through which migrants negotiate belonging, continuity, and orientation within unfamiliar urban landscapes. This excess becomes visible through practices of spatial attunement: shared routines, sensory memories, affective gestures, and embodied forms of inhabitation that reconfigure hostile or temporary environments into spaces of care and collective presence. Mobilising Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, the contribution grounds its argument in the Rotterdam–Venlo logistics corridor (Sgolacchia, 2023), where workers housed in surveillance-governed flexwoningen reorganize domestic space through collective routines and nostalgic spatial practices that exceed the logistical infrastructures designed to contain them. Collectively maintained thresholds, improvised domestic rituals, and spaces charged with sensory memory transform institutionally imposed housing into affectively dense commonscapes. In doing so, migrant presence not only inhabits existing urban ambiances but actively reworks them, generating alternative forms of sociality and emergent claims to the city.

Urban solidarities around migration are not only produced through moments of public mobilization. They are sustained, more quietly, through everyday spatial practices that hold collective life together at the margins of institutional reach. In Cyprus, a small-state context shaped by unresolved territorial division and deep migrant precarity, grassroots solidarity operates under particular pressure. Networks are informal, alliances unstable, and support for migrants is often politicized. Within this terrain, certain spaces have emerged where migrants and locals produce shared life outside institutional channels. This paper calls these commonscapes. The work draws on ethnographic and spatial research in Nicosia to examine how commonscapes are produced through grassroots and migrant-led practices. It asks what kinds of spaces and relational arrangements sustain solidarity, and how these remake urban space through inhabitation. Two sites anchor the analysis: assembly and event spaces at Social Space Kaymakkin and Yalla Collective Space, where trust, shared political meaning, and coordination accumulate through recurring encounter; and a sewing project run from a refugee woman's workshop in the city center, where a private business space becomes a site of skills-sharing, care, and community for survivors of violence and displacement. Across these sites, solidarity operates less as event than as infrastructure, built through introductions, repeated presence, and practical collaboration. These are not spectacular politics. Yet this paper argues they constitute a politics of presence in their own right: one that remakes urban space from within, asserts migrants' right to the city through inhabitation, and binds solidarity to the slower rhythms of urban life that event-centered accounts tend to miss. Commonscapes, in this sense, are not just sites of refuge but spatial arguments about who the city is for.

The discussion on camps typically prioritizes the structural, managerial and logistical dimensions. Academic inquiry frequently centers on the macro-politics of containment, the spatialities of exclusion, and the economies of deterrence that define camps as spaces of exception. While an emerging body of scholarship highlight the agency of residents in contesting camp regimes, the specific role of ambiance remains critically under-examined. This paper seeks to address this gap by exploring the camp not merely as a physical site, but as a complex affective landscape shaped by intersecting emotions, senses, and intensities. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research conducted within various camps in Greece over the past decade, this paper explores how ambiances are deliberately weaponized as tools of governance. I argue that the atmospheric production of the camp often seeks to instill a sensorial racism, emotional despair and corporeal obedience. By modulating fear, anxiety, and sensory deprivation, these environments aim to induce the dehumanization of their inhabitants, rendering them powerless passive subjects of a biopolitical order. However, atmospheres are inherently unstable and cannot be fully enclosed. This paper demonstrates that the camp’s ambiance is not an absolute, biopolitically sealed space. Instead, it is a site of constant atmospheric struggle. I explore how residents navigate and disrupt the oppressive climates to invent and produce minor everyday atmospheres of solidarity. Through practices of camouflage, sabotage, and commoning, camp residents enact a radical form of care and contestation. These affective maneuvers represent the production of new socialities of solidarity that challenge the dehumanizing intent of the camp. Ultimately, this paper argues that focusing on ambiance reveals the subtle, sensory, and deeply human ways in which the camp is both felt and resisted, offering a more nuanced understanding of the embodied and lived experience of camp residents.

This paper focuses on the interconnections between contemporary human geography and ambiance theory in the everydayness of migrant emplacement in the city of Thessaloniki. Beginning with the theoretical framework of the right to the city and urban commons, which enhance our understanding of contested urban neighborhoods[PH1.1], we see migrant inhabitance through the analytical lens of threshold spaces and non-representational geographies. Bridging the gap between materialist and phenomenological approaches, ambiance theory enables us to explore and analyse aspects of urban dwelling beyond theoretical dichotomies, giving also space for the exploration of the sensory perceptions and interpretations of place. How do specific neighborhoods of the city affect and are affected by migrant communities? How is urban space felt and appropriated? How do atmospheres-ambiences and urban rhythms unfold in the constant rapidly transforming neoliberal urban terrain? In total how do commoning practices challenge the logic of urban enclosures and gentrification? Does care and solidarity unfold both in the local and in the wider metropolitan field, highlighting the possibilities of another lived ambience in the public sphere of the city? Through our ongoing ethnographical research in three district neighborhoods of Thessaloniki, we propose the notion of commonscapes as a hybrid analytical tool which, through participatory transnational and transcultural practices of commoning, enables urban transformative potentialities. In the ever-changing current turbulent times of exclusion and marginalization of migrant communities, the emergence of multiple commonscapes in urban thresholds actively confronts the neoliberal and commodified logic of the city, proposing forms of collective inhabitance, solidarity and mutuality among the urban dwellers.