Migration, Settlement, and the Concepts of House and Home

Iris Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138547117
• eBook ISBN: 9781317961796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

How do migrants feel "at home" in their houses? Literature on the migrant house and its role in the migrant experience of home-building is inadequate. This book offers a theoretical framework based on the notion of home-building and the concepts of home and house embedded within it. It presents innovative research on four groups of migrants who have settled in two metropolitan cities in two periods: migrants from Italy (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from mainland China (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Melbourne, Australia, and migrants from Morocco (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from the former Soviet Union (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The analysis draws on qualitative data gathered from forty-six in depth interviews with migrants in their home-environments, including extensive visual data. Levin argues that the physical form of the house is meaningful in a range of diverse ways during the process of home-building, and that each migrant group constructs a distinct form of home-building in their homes/houses, according to their specific circumstances of migration, namely the origin country, country of destination and period of migration, as well as the historical, economic and social contexts around migration.

1 The Migrant House in the Globalised City

Iris Levin

DOI: 10.4324/9781315866802-1

Walking in the streets of Fawkner, a northern Melbourne suburb, it is hard to feel this suburb is part of a city which is predominated by Victorian terrace houses, Federation and Californian bungalows, 1950s DIY brick homes, and more contemporary forms of suburban living. In Fawkner, as in some other suburbs around the city, a strange hybrid building style prevails, combining an Anglo-Australian dominant culture of detached houses, blended with a Mediterranean influence of arches, dark brown bricks, white concrete balustrades, terrazzo tiles, and other ornamental features around the house. Consider Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 ‘Italian' houses in Fawkner, Melbourne, 2006.

Fawkner is one of the most ‘Italian’ suburbs of Melbourne. At the time of the 2006 census, around 30 per cent of people who lived there have been born in Italy (ABS 2008). With this in mind, these kinds of houses, which appear to be quite distinctive to some areas of the city and can be easily identified, evoke some fascinating questions: To what extent does the physical shape of the house help immigrants in the building of their homes in the city? Does the house have an important role in this process? Does it only ease this process or also hinder and delay it? What, really, does the house mean?

In this book, I wish to closely explore the questions. Societies of the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly diverse, as waves of migration flow around the world more easily than ever before. Migrations have been part of human history since the earliest times, yet international migration has grown in volume and significance since 1945 and most particularly since the mid-1980s (Castles and Miller 2003, 4). During this period, known as the post-industrial period, migration has become a global phenomenon and has affected almost every corner of the globe. There is hardly any society that has not gone through a change in the past twenty years, either because it has been a destination for, or a source of, massive migration (and sometimes both). People movements have always emerged from significant social, economic, or political changes, such as revolutions, wars, colonial and imperial expansion and nation-building but also conflict, persecution, and dispossession (Koser 2007, 4). The distinct features of this era of migration, argue Castles and Miller (2003, 2–3), are its global scope, its centrality to domestic and international politics, and its economic and social consequences. Because mobility has become much easier as a result of political and cultural changes, as well as the development of new transport and communication technologies, international migration has become a global phenomenon.

Migration as a global phenomenon, or transnationalism as it has been understood recently, has been at the centre of debate in the past two decades among scholars from a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology, sociology, and human behaviour to geography, planning, and urban studies. Earlier theorists of transnationalism have suggested that we are now moving into a ‘postnational’ phase of the global culture economy with an intense movement and mobility producing detachment from local places (e.g. Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996). Others have argued that ‘despite migrants’ transnational loyalties, there is also a heightened sense of commitment within their immediate local contexts’ (Hall and Datta 2010, 70) and that the nation-state is very much alive as a political project (Ong 1999; Papastergiadis 2000; Smith 2001, 19).

As a geographical phenomenon, one of the most discussed topics is the influence of migration on the social and physical appearance of the urban environment (Ley 2007; Hugo 2004). Within critical scholarship on the immigrants’ presence in the city, scholars have looked at how the built environment changes and reacts to the presence of newcomers, and how immigrants cope and manage their home-building processes within the urban environment. This has been done through examining urban and national policies, ethnic public buildings, such as mosques and places of worship or public spaces, or housing in specific neighbourhoods. Only a few studies have looked at how immigrants utilise their domestic environments and the built form of housing to help them feel at home in the city. It seems to me that the notion of the migrant home, which focuses mostly on emotions and feelings around the construction of home, has been studied extensively. The notion of the migrant house, its physicality and tangible aspects of the building itself, seen here separately to the migrant home, has not been adequately explored. This book, therefore, will focus on the house or, differently said, on the tangible aspects of the migrant home, addressing the need to further explore the migrant house and its role in migrants’ settlement process.

The Migrant House in the City

The migrant experiences in the city that are focused on their home-environment have generated a scattered body of literature that covers a range of issues. One issue is the relationship between past homes and current houses in a new land. Jacobs (2004, 265), for example, investigates the boundaries between the two, exploring how architecture is implicated in the processes of feeling at home in a mobile world, as they occur in relation to the Chan family who belong to the Chinese diaspora, shown in the Australian film Floating Life. Jacobs analyses a number of houses in different places and countries, as well as different times and cultures, as presented in the film. She contrasts the ancestral homes with the modern Australian house and searches for the way ‘migrant senses of “homeliness” are made and remade’ (2004, 181). Thomas (1997, 1999), focusing on homes of Vietnamese migrants in Australia, examines the home in the homeland against the available houses in Australia and points out differences between the two and the difficulties that arise because of these differences. Similarly, Dearborn (2008, 37) explores the ways that Hmong refugees in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, build their homes and ‘reterritorialise their culture and traditions’. In the early 1990s, Hmong leaders took advantage of the decaying environment Milwaukee’s inner city offered, purchased houses in a small geographical area, and constructed an immigrant enclave. Dearborn argues that this has allowed them to create a supportive environment to ease the effects of rapid cultural change.

Another theme is focused on migrant houses built in the homeland with resources earned in the host land. Fletcher (1999) investigates a transnational community in the suburbs of Los Angeles, which comes originally from a rural village in central Mexico, to build their casa de sueňos (house of dreams), back in their home village. She explores the influence of transnational migration on the imagined homes and already built houses in the village. Transnational migrants from that village try to reassert themselves in place, even from a distance, by building houses in the village. Building these houses became an important activity of transnational immigrants, even if the houses are never to be inhabited by their owners. Through the construction process, they create tangible linkages between their present location and their desired past ‘home’. Due to the transnational nature of contemporary migration, other scholars have looked at similar cases. Among them Klaufus (2006), exploring transnational migrants who migrated to the USA, building their houses back in Cuenca, Ecuador, Dalakoglou (2009) examining a ‘Greek house’ built in Albania by a person who migrated and settled in Greece, and van der Horst (2010), studying houses built in Turkey by Turkish migrants who live in the Netherlands. These studies stress the importance of the act of building a house in the homeland, even if there is no intention to actually return to the homeland and live there.

A different focus by scholars has been the backyard of suburban Australia as a place where migrant home-building practices can be studied. Armstrong (1999), for example, examines different types of gardens created by different migrant groups in Australia (migrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asian countries), and argues that creating a garden in the host country is an early stage of accepting the new country. Not only does it make the unfamiliar feel familiar, but it also helps heal the experience of war and repression, especially for refugee migrants. Likewise, Head, Muir, and Hampel (2004) examine the suburban Australia backyard gardens of three contemporary migrant groups (Macedonians, Vietnamese, and British-born) and a group of first-generation Australians with both parents born overseas. Head, Muir, and Hampel’s work highlights the differences between the three immigrant groups’ backyards, seeking to explain them with reference to the rural background of some of the groups. Graham and Connell (2006, 375) found that the gardens ‘helped to emphasise and maintain cultural relationship, provide a space of nostalgia, and give a sense of ownership and control’. Morgan, Rocha, and Poynting (2005) explore migration stories and examine the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of western Sydney. The gardens were selected from a list, compiled by the local museum, of backyards that displayed interesting transplanting and hybridisation of homeland and other Sydney suburban culture. Morgan et al. (2005, 93) argue that many migrant gardens are places in which creative labour is expended to symbolise connections not only to homeland but also to Australia and other cultures. Against the official display of carnival and festive occasions of immigrants in Australia, which only depicts one side of the migration story, they show a diverse everyday lively practice that is evident in garden and backyard creativity. This suburban creativity produces at the same time symbols of homeland blended with symbols of Australia and other cultures.

A different issue is the impact of the migrant house on the neighbourhood in which it is located and its relationship with the surrounding environment. A number of studies have shown how established neighbourhoods became arenas of conflict as newcomers purchased residential dwellings and altered the visual look of the existing housing stock. Lozanovska (1997, 108) investigates the role that migrant houses, as spatial zones, play in deconstructing the hegemonic culture in Australia and constructing the identity of the migrants. The South and East European migrant’s house’s decorations of eagles and lions are mythical and masculine symbols of war and defence, and its architecture is dubbed by Lozanovska as a ‘wall of war’. Sometimes it is the issue of the old character of the housing stock that is at stake (Allon, 2002, 101). In the case of Earlwood, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, residents have opposed the physical changes that have taken place there, after the experience of post-war immigration has resulted in the rise of hybrid styles, and a style in particular which has been named ‘Mediterraneanisation’. Local residents have considered transformations of these houses as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unsympathetic’, and have formed a historical society to maintain ‘heritage’ and cultural uniqueness and authenticity in their neighbourhood. As Allon argues (2002, 108), it is through the ‘Mediterraneanised’ houses that the migrant ‘residents evoke their translated identities and multiple belongings’ and thus it is an essential part of their settlement process. A similar case of Shaughnessy Heights, a wealthy suburb of Vancouver, Canada, demonstrates the same concern (Ley 1995; Mitchell 2004; Qadeer 1997). The architecture of this suburban landscape has generated a public debate after many of the dwellings were purchased by a wealthy group of migrants from Hong Kong, who entered Vancouver as business migrants with capital which they have invested in housing and commercial buildings in the city. The extra-large houses they have built, termed ‘monster-houses’ by the local residents, offered a noticeable demonstration of the economic and cultural changes then under way in Vancouver, most of them associated with transnational flows of capital, culture, and people from Asia (Mitchell 2004, 145).

Be it ‘monster-houses’ or ‘Mediterraneanised-houses’, both terms construct a negative depiction of the immigrants’ presence in the city, portraying them as abnormal and illegitimate. Mitchell suggests that transnational flows of capital and culture characteristics of global restructuring have opened new spaces of negotiation around the shaping of the suburban landscape. These struggles are ‘not merely over particular landscape and spaces, but over the ideology of the “public sphere” itself’ (2004, 157). Is it always the case, as in the studies described earlier, that the migrants’ ethnic origin is visible through their housing? Or perhaps these cases are exceptional and do not represent the majority of migrants’ housing? These questions need further investigation.

My aim in this book, then, is to come to a better understanding of the role of the built form of housing in immigrants’ home-building in urban environments. I wish to achieve this by exploring how the built form is utilised to support immigrants’ home-building in urban environments and, specifically, the way domestic environments have been transformed and altered by the presence of immigrants in the city. In this book, I investigate different forms of housing, both in the homeland and the host land, and track connections between these forms of housing that might influence the process of homebuilding in a new country.

I have chosen to look at immigrants from four countries who live in two metropolitan cities in two very different countries in which I have spent some years of my life. The first two immigrant groups are migrants from Italy who migrated in the 1950s and 1960s and migrants from mainland China who migrated in the 1990s and 2000s to metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. The second two immigrant groups are migrants from Morocco who migrated in the 1950s and 1960s and migrants from the former Soviet Union who migrated in the 1990s and 2000s to metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israel. The reason for choosing such a diverse mix of migrants who came from four different countries of origin, settled in two different countries of destination, and over two different periods of time is that I wanted to explore diverse migration and settlement experiences in order to understand the meaning of the house in different circumstances and situations. I intentionally did not want to study migrants from one origin country, as is mostly the case in numerous anthropological studies. I wanted to expand the breadth of the study through the exploration of four migrant groups who were also significant in the countries to which they migrated. The immigration nature of the countries and the urban characters of the cities are described in the following section, and this is followed by a discussion of some important methodological and ethical questions.

Australia and Israel as Immigration Societies

Australia and Israel are countries in which immigrants comprise a significant portion of the total population. They both have consciously engineered their societies according to their desires by using immigration as a tool (Jupp 2002, 18). Currently, there is a crucial difference between them regarding their immigration policies. In the past, migration policies in Australia have banned certain groups from entering the coun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Migrant House in the Globalised City
• 2 Settlement, Belonging, and the Migrant Home/House
• 3 "We Just Put It All Together" Houses of Migrants from Italy in Metropolitan Melbourne
• 4 "Home Is Where the Heart Is" Houses of Migrants from China in Metropolitan Melbourne
• 5 "I Record the Whole Story" Houses of Migrants from Morocco in Metropolitan Tel Aviv
• 6 "A House Like This Can Be Everywhere" Houses of Migrants from the Former Soviet Union in Metropolitan Tel Aviv
• 7 Migrant Experiences around the House/Home
• 8 Migrant Settlement and Home-Building in the Home/House
• Appendix A Migrants from Italy Who Participated in This Research
• Appendix B Migrants from China Who Participated in This Research
• Appendix C Migrants from Morocco Who Participated in This Research
• Appendix D Migrants from the Former Soviet Union Who Participated in This Research
• Bibliography
• Index