Looking for Homes in Migrants’ Informal Settlements: A Case Study from Italy

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of migrants’ home experience in informal settlements. Focusing on the case of an agro-industrial district in Southern Italy, and based on my ethnographic fieldwork, I first discuss the relevance of labour exploitation in shaping the emergence, localization and spreading of informal settlements in the Italian ruralscape, including the associated housing and homemaking practices. I then show how migrants’ home in informal settlements spreads out of the perimeter of dwelling and is deeply shaped by their broader social and relational experience. The chapter eventually stresses the importance of research on migrant homemaking practices in informal settlements. This points to the significance of aspects such as the blurring and entanglement of boundaries between public and private spheres; the deep influence of interpersonal relationships in shaping one’s domestic space; the social construction of housing and homemaking as the result of migrants’ autonomy combined with the social constraints and the forms of exploitation they are embedded in.