Chapter 6: Material Culture, Infrastructures and the Built Environment

Interviews with:

Daniel Miller, Irene Cieraad, Hilde Heynen, Tom Scott-Smith, Anne Sigfrid Grønseth.

There is a materiality, a locality, even a physicality to the experience of home or to the search for it, on the move and from the margins. It may be that migrants make themselves at home more online than offline, as Miller (this volume) insightfully remarks. Yet, it remains hard to disconnect what home means to them – if only by default – from their interactions within their everyday living spaces. While everybody would agree that home is more (or other) than a house, there is hardly a way to conceive, let alone experience it without some tangible infrastructural support. Whether this is a shelter, a house or even only a portion of place, and whether it “suffices” or not, the support is more than a background to the things that happen there. Rather, it contributes to make them happen. This also holds for home-related views, emotions and practices. Even for migrant and displaced people it is important to see not only which material infrastructures are accessible, but also what they do – how they shape, in terms of affordances and constraints, their chances to negotiate some security, familiarity and control there. To be sure, this has to do with the very existence of an infrastructure and with its basic quality but also with the ways in which it is managed, maintained, made more or less accessible, inclusive and protective.