The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure

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The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure

Astolfo, Giovanna; Allsopp, Harriet; (2024) The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure. Housing Studies 10.1080/02673037.2024.2373992. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

The incredible mobilisation to welcome Ukrainian refugees following the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 demonstrated how housing is an affective sociomaterial infrastructure. In cruel contrast, such mobilisation also exposed the inherently racist and colonial face of accommodating refugees and migrants, and the structural inequalities that racial capitalism continues to reproduce. Drawing reflections across several geographies and temporalities through illustrative vignettes, this paper begs the questions under what conditions do we accept that some people are housed, others not? What kind of power structures allow certain bodies to be welcomed? This paper borrows from postcolonial, black and critical theory to examine refugee housing through the lens of necropolitical infrastructure. It connects Mbembe’s notion of necropower with Power and Mee’s notion of housing as infrastructure of care, and filters this through reflections across Calais, Brescia and Athens, to illustrate the bio- and necropolitical side of the refugee housing infrastructure in Europe. The paper ultimately argues that refugee housing, because it is an infrastructure and because it is part of the broader extractive and exploitative system of (humanitarian) care, is deeply imbricated in the production of racialised subjects. Specifically, it is complicit with the extraction, (re)incorporation, abandonment and slow death of Black and Brown refugee lives.

Type:	Article
Title:	The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1080/02673037.2024.2373992
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2024.2373992
Language:	English
Additional information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
Keywords:	Housing, refugees, unhoming, displacement, necropolitics, care
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Development Planning Unit
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194065