Working title: Beyond shelter: towards an atlas of architectures of holding.

My research aims to theorise and reframe new forms of subaltern urbanisations generated by human displacement across Europe, looking at those ecologies that sustain the power of marginalised autonomies, destructuring the monist dimensions that classify practices and spaces as (il)legal, (im)mobile or (un)inhabitable. How do makeshift camps, squats and other kinds of informal inhabitation reshape the contemporary urban patterns of capitalist European cities and internal borders? Can these resistance strategies help to decipher new practices of dwelling beyond the shelter? Drawing on abolitionist, and feminist scholarship, as well as critical urban studies, the thesis analyses the ambivalent relations between control and care, examining through the makeshift what I refer to as the architectural embodiment of some ‘space of holding’. I will look at the central Mediterranean route to the UK, focusing on so-called migrants’ corridors between Italy, France, and the UK. By providing a critical reading of institutional methods of refugees’ hospitality, I suggest looking at informal shelters as new non-dominant and non-singular support through a ‘humane urbanism’ of actions of solidarity. Aiming at holding space and sustaining the multiple, multifaceted, and singular identities that constitute the analysed ecologies, avoiding forms of extractivism and control, the research will be unfolded through participatory counter-mapping of memories and legacies of displacement, through ethnographic analysis and participant observation.