Beyond shelter: towards an atlas of architectures of holding in northern France

The prospective research project will examine the current stage of settlement and composition of
makeshift camps in northern France, highlighting their progressive state of temporariness, dispersion,
and precariousness. By investigating the evolution of the archipelago of makeshift spaces of
inhabitation and shelters from 2015, the aim is to make visible this subaltern urbanization (Roy, 2011)
from the perspective of inhabitants and their network of support.
The investigation will continue research commenced through an MSc Dissertation in Architecture and
Urban planning at the Polytechnic University of Turin, where I demonstrated the strong spatial
correlation between practices of hostility and support to refugees and people on the move, which I
named "spaces of holding". The purpose of this project is to theorise a series of margins that sustain
the power of marginalised autonomies and reframe new urban and rural assets, destructuring the monist
dimension of (il)legality or (im)mobility. What is left today of these practices of holding? How do
makeshift camps, squats and any other form of informal habitat reshape the contemporary urban
patterns of European cities and internal borders? Can these strategies of resistance help to decipher
new emergency practices of dwelling beyond the shelter? Drawing on these inquiries, the research
aims at recounting patterns of urban space production, neglected by the contemporary neoliberal and
securitized city, and use them as a reference to promote unfinished interventions of non-dominant,
non-singular and decolonial shelters for refugees, people seeking asylum and people on the move.