Social Construction of the “Good Refugee” and the Resistances of Asylum Seekers in Italy between Marginalization and Autonomous Crossing of Urban Spaces

Abstract

Recent research and studies have undermined the idea that borders are not only a demarcation between an inside and an outside, but a performative space around which unexpected interactions, power relations, economic value, conflicts and new spatialities are produced. Inside and around the structures organized for the reception of asylum seekers, we are witnessing a constantly evolving process of production of new social relations and new micro-spatialities that tend to progressively change the territorial features. This paper, based on observations and materials collected during a long ethnographic study carried out between Padua and Venice, investigates the controversial relations between asylum seekers and such urban spaces and suburbs, with attention given to migrants who relate to the territory just as a point of transit. We analyze the widespread phenomena of segregation these individuals, who have often left the reception system, are subjected to in their daily routine of using public space in certain urban areas. Moreover, through a perspective and a positioning that allowed us to live some protests and phenomena of resistance “from within”, we focus on the ways in which the streets and the squares of the provincial towns and urban centers have presented themselves as “borderscapes”.