The so-called European migration crisis has led to a proliferation of facilities aimed at addressing what is, from the perspective of governance, the 'problem' of migrant accommodation. An expanding asylum infrastructure—comprising barges and barracks, containers and tempohomes, newly built constructions, hotels, rural houses, and urban apartments—now sits at the heart of contemporary policy, political, and academic debates across Europe and beyond.
This talk investigates what these buildings communicate about crisis by reading asylum infrastructure through architecture. It traces the institutional mechanisms that have turned ordinary structures into spaces of accommodation, listens to the stories of those who live within them, and unearths the histories of the communities that surround them. By examining how these layers come together in everyday life, the analysis shows how migration infrastructure operates across scales and through temporal discontinuities, historical entanglements, and daily improvisations. Rather than treating asylum facilities as static containers or merely technical solutions, the talk approaches them as communicative sites through which broader social, political, and economic forces become visible—sometimes coherently, sometimes ambiguously, and often in tension.
Paolo Novak is a senior lecturer in development studies and co-director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (SOAS, University of London). His research explores the relationship between borders, migration, and development, with a focus on how global structures are reproduced and contested in place-specific ways. He is the author of Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure (Bristol University Press, 2025). At the IWM, he is developing a research project on architectures of containment and the built environments of control.
Ayşe Çağlar, IWM Permanent Fellow, will moderate the discussion.
