Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure

Paolo Novak is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS University of London.

• Introduction1. Buildings as Protagonists2. The Place of Asylum Infrastructure3. Provincializing Logistics4. Destabilizing Coloniality5. Placing Autonomy6. The Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure

“Buildings of Refuge is a beautiful and thoughtfully constructed homage to how place is made through the dialectical interaction of individual stories with wider social forces. Novak artfully renders a multi-layered chronicling of a diverse array of buildings used to house asylum seekers in the Macerata province of Italy as places at the height of what is often, wrongly, as Novak too insists, seen as Europe’s migration crisis of the mid to late 2010s. The book’s concluding discussion is highly timely in its call to use a capacious and open conceptualisation of place as a resource in the fight against the nationalist right. The road to this conceptualisation is tightly argued in respectful and sometimes divergent conversation with Marxist geographers Gillian Hart, Doreen Massey and Milton Santos and a broad array of other scholarship. Novak holds together complexity, insisting as much on proper regard for history and more broadly for time, in the analysis of contemporary places, as on an engagement with how the buildings at the heart of the book are produced by and productive of, local social relations, just as they are shot through with the stories of the people whose refuge they became in the first part of the twenty-first century. A sophisticated, scholarly, grounded and humane contribution and one that is well worth making time to read.” Ben Rogaly, University of Sussex