E-resources
Peer reviewed
Open access
-
Dorignon, Louise
Geoforum, November 2023, 2023-11-00, Volume: 146Journal Article
Arriving migrants of middle-class backgrounds increasingly establish themselves in high-rise apartments of densifying cities of the Global North through the private rental market or first homeownership. From their transient and elevated homes, transnational migrants find themselves vacillating between a desire to perform the archetype of the successful migrant livelihood and the realities of metropolitan vertical living. Memories and narratives of life ‘back home’ shape practices and relationships that enable them to put down roots. Yet high-rise housing, with its socio-material implications, mediates migrants’ everyday experiences in unique ways. This article investigates transnational migrants’ ambivalent feelings of ‘home’ in two verticalising cities, London and Melbourne. Drawing on affect- and practice-theoretical approaches to emotions and on the geographies of home, I argue that ambivalence enables migrants to habituate to the transience of their high-rise housing situation. Through interviews with 42 transnational migrants of diverse nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds, I analyse two registers of ambivalence as they unfolded in migrants’ narratives of high-rise housing. In the apartment, migrants’ ambivalent sensations revealed the embodied transience of transnational homemaking. In the vertical development, migrant’s ambivalent attachments unveiled their negotiated and intermittent feelings of belonging. Given these differential registers of ambivalence, I demonstrate that migrants are unevenly positioned to adjust to their vertical homes. I conclude by suggesting that ambivalence helps in further conceptualising the lived experience of high-rise housing, and that a more nuanced understanding of emotions is needed to envisage prospects for migrants’ livelihoods in apartments in the contemporary city.
Author
![loading ... loading ...](themes/default/img/ajax-loading.gif)
Shelf entry
Permalink
- URL:
Impact factor
Access to the JCR database is permitted only to users from Slovenia. Your current IP address is not on the list of IP addresses with access permission, and authentication with the relevant AAI accout is required.
Year | Impact factor | Edition | Category | Classification | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
JCR | SNIP | JCR | SNIP | JCR | SNIP | JCR | SNIP |
Select the library membership card:
If the library membership card is not in the list,
add a new one.
DRS, in which the journal is indexed
Database name | Field | Year |
---|
Links to authors' personal bibliographies | Links to information on researchers in the SICRIS system |
---|
Source: Personal bibliographies
and: SICRIS
The material is available in full text. If you wish to order the material anyway, click the Continue button.