The architecture of asylum infrastructure

Lead researcher

• Paolo Novak, Senior Lecturer, SOAS Department of Development Studies 

Funders

• Field Research for Buildings of Refuge (2017-2020) was funded by British Academy Small Grant SG162483, and the SOAS Development Studies department
• The Our Shared History impact project (2026) ESRC SOAS Impact Acceleration Fund

Duration

• 2016 - ongoing

This project studies buildings transformed into asylum seekers reception centres, to reveal conjunctural maps of our present. 

Analytically, it is grounded in Buildings of Refuge (Novak 2025), which casts asylum accommodation facilities as architectural objects that can be ethnographically read to expose both the dense condensation of social relations that sustain them and the open-ended practices, complicities, refusals, and deflections that continually unsettle them. Approached in this way, these buildings register the friction between world-making projects that script the intended functions and effects of asylum infrastructure and the place-making practices through which people inhabit, reinterpret, and transform them. 

Asylum infrastructure emerges thus as a dispersed social process that unevenly spreads across society, cutting across migrant–non-migrant distinctions, and offering a vantage point from which to read the our present conjuncture.

The project’s policy impact is advanced through the ESRC IAA initiative Our Shared History, which applies this framework in educational and community settings. Through collaborative, place-based activities, the project counters hostile narratives, fosters empathy and inclusion, and provides reusable resources for partners addressing marginalisation.

In its current phase, the project expands its analytical and geographical scope, investigating how migration infrastructures more broadly map, amplify, and refract the fractured geographies of contemporary cities.

Publications:

• Novak, Paolo (2026) Buildings communicate in Samaddar R., Mezzadra S. and Morlicchio E. (eds) The City as the Southern Question. Alternative Histories of Urbanisation After Gramsci. London: Routledge, Chapter 10.
• Novak, Paolo (2025) Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure. Bristol: Bristol University Press
• Novak, Paolo, 2025, Re-producing the Humanitarian Border, Geopolitics (30), 1, pp 46-67
• Novak, Paolo, 2021, Deservingness and uneven geographies of asylum accommodation, Social Policy and Society (20), 3, pp 452-463. Winner of Social Policy Association’s CUP Award for Excellence in Social Policy.
• Novak, Paolo, 2019, The neoliberal location of asylum, Political Geography (70), pp 1-13

Dissemination:

• Novak, P. (2025, August 28). Five lessons the UK can learn from Italy’s asylum accommodation crisis. SOAS Blog. https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/blogs/five-lessons-uk-can-learn-italys-asylum-accommodation-crisis
• Doná, G., Lindley, A., Novak, P., & Sanders, C. (2025, August 15). As protesters and politicians call for the closure of asylum hotels, what are the alternatives?. The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/AB.p73h4whmn
• Doná, G., Lindley, A., Novak, P., & Sanders, C. (2023, November 13). Shades of carcerality? Reflections on asylum accommodation in Italy, France and the UK. Border Criminologies Blog. https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2023/11/shades-carcerality-reflections-asylum-accommodation
• Novak, P. (2023, February 14). Riots in Knowsley: How the state perpetuates violence in asylum accommodation. SOAS Blog.  https://www.soas.ac.uk/study/blog/riots-knowsley-how-state-perpetuates-violence-asylum-accommodation
• Novak, P. (2022, October 3). The Humanitarian Border, in Place. Border Criminologies Blog (University of Oxford). https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2022/10/humanitarian-border-place
• Novak, P. (2021, December 15). The postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxbLD-OdRI
• Novak, P. (2018, February 7). The spectre of fascism haunts Italy after attempted massacre forces African migrants to stay indoors. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-spectre-of-fascism-haunts-italy-after-attempted-massacre-forces-african-migrants-to-stay-indoors-91293
• Novak, P. (2017, October 24). Enough pasta already: why asylum seekers in Italy are fed up with their food rations. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/enough-pasta-already-why-asylum-seekers-in-italy-are-fed-up-with-their-food-rations-84147