Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure challenges the narrative of ‘migration crisis’ in Europe, offering instead an analysis of how European Union (EU) enforcement policies have created a ‘border crisis’ that manifests in the everyday life of local spaces. Situated in the Macerata province in Italy, Paolo Novak’s deeply situated ethnography of 65 Centri d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers, or CAS) examines the situated manifestations of the EU border interactive machine. Through detailed observations of buildings – ‘the protagonists of the book’ – the encounters within them (including owners of the buildings, employees of organizations running the reception centres for asylum seekers, and people living in these spaces), and the history of these spaces, Novak makes an original and necessary contribution to understanding the infrastructures of bordering through a situated account of local places. This does not just mean turning from the global to the local, as Novak argues, ‘placing the study of borders, migration and their infrastructure does not (simply) mean shifting the analytical focus from global, regional or national scales to local ones’. Rather, the detailed descriptions of these spaces and the various layers of interactions between them and the people that live there seek to situate the fluid geographies engendered by the EU border machine, ‘recognising that each place is the product of diverse trajectories and relations, each uniquely and unevenly expressing the immense movement of the world’.