Buildings of Refuge is a situated account of the so-called ‘European migration crisis’. It studies the tumultuous period that witnessed both the arrival in Europe of millions of what were categorized as first-time asylum seekers, and a proliferation of responses to this phenomenon by governmental authorities. Taking as its object of analysis and investigation 65 reception centres for asylum seekers in the small central Italian province of Macerata, this book records and interprets the reverberations, refractions and deflections engendered by these arrivals and responses.

As convincingly made clear by critical scholars, the ‘crisis’ witnessed in this period is not to be understood as one of migration, but rather one created by said proliferation of responses. Blocking legal routes of entry into Europe and thus irregularizing almost all forms of European Union (EU) bound migration; multiplying and diffusing points of violent border enforcement within and outside Europe; creating chokepoints at European internal borders and thus engendering informal settlements; introducing legal and administrative innovations that dilute the right to seek asylum; curtailing the entitlements associated with the latter; and other such transformations; are all implicated in fracturing and making more turbulent what otherwise could have been safer and more linear migration routes (see de Vries et al 2016; Ambrosini et al 2019). This is a border crisis, not a migration one (Kasparek 2016), and as such it will be considered throughout this book.