Multiple geographies of precarity: Accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens,Greece

Introduction

During the last decades, Greece has been a major destination and transit country for migrants and refugees ¹ fleeing war and poverty. More recently, and especially since 2015, significant numbers of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries arrived in Greece, in a movement widely portrayed as a ‘refugee crisis’ (Afouxenidis et al., 2017; Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins, 2016 among others). Since 2016, following the gradual closure of Balkan borders, the implementation of the EU ‘Hotspot Approach’ ² (Tazzioli and Garelli, 2020), and the EU-Turkey Common Statement, a significant number of asylum seekers have been forced to stay in the country. Greece gradually adopted a series of accommodation policies implemented through European and national bodies and characterised by a sense of ‘emergency’ and temporariness. Apart from the entrapment of asylum seekers in the ‘Hotspots’ of five Aegean islands, accommodation is provided in massive camps and camp-like facilities created in mainland Greece and in apartments or other buildings rented for this purpose under the EU-funded ESTIA programme. Until December 2020, a total of 30,520 places were created in 32 camps in various regions of the country, five of which in metropolitan Athens (IOM, 2020). Another 28,726 accommodation places were provided in 4,576 apartments that were rented in various urban areas, 56 percent of them located in Athens (UNHCR, 2020). Compared to the self-settlement of migrants in the Greek cities during the previous decades in the context of rudimentary housing policies, these developments outline a new landscape of accommodation.

Refugee accommodation policies have been significantly reshaped in a series of European countries since 2015, leading to renewed academic interest in the field (Darling, 2017, 2020; El Moussawi and Schuermans, 2021; Kreichauf, 2018; Novak, 2021; Semprebon, 2021; Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020). This article, which is part of the Special Issue ‘Urban Europe, Precarious Futures?’, brings to the forefront the case of Greece as not only one of the main entry countries but also as an important part of the wider European reception system. It attempts to shed light on the uneven geographies of accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens. In doing so, it investigates the (re)production of multiple geographies of precarity emerging from the accommodation system through the lens of ‘precarity of place’. We argue that accommodation policies create precarity through three interrelated sets of mechanisms: (a) filtering mechanisms based mainly on vulnerability categorisations, (b) socio-spatial isolation and segregation, and (c) the no-choice basis on which accommodation is provided and the extensive control of everyday habitation. By tracing this complex grid of policies and rules, the article attempts to explore their ambiguous impact on socio-spatial identities, relationships, and processes of belonging in the city, as well as the precarious conditions they create and how they hinder the long-term settlement of asylum seekers in space and in society. The analysis highlights the different ways in which asylum seekers experience, and sometimes contest, precarity by investigating in a complementary way the distinct – yet intertwined – types of accommodation, namely the camps and accommodation in urban space. Thus, it goes beyond most relevant contributions in the field, which investigate such accommodation policies, types, and spaces separately, without looking into social and spatial interrelations.

In this article, the multiple geographies of precarity for asylum seekers are explored through a mixed-methods research approach. Α critical policy analysis was conducted from 2019 until mid-2021, including the systematic and critical review of the amendments of the national legal framework and European legislation; the interventions and documentation of International Organisations, NGOs, and the local authorities. In parallel, field research was conducted in metropolitan Athens from June 2020 to January 2021, consisting of twenty-three (23) semi-structured and in-depth interviews. These include thirteen (13) interviews with asylum seekers and refugees accommodated in apartments in various neighbourhoods of Athens and in three different camps of the metropolitan area. As regards the country of origin, six (6) of them are from Syria, five (5) from Afghanistan, and two (2) from Iran; in terms of gender, four (4) of them are women. Most of them are living with families and four (4) are single men. At the time of the interview, the majority were asylum applicants, while one (1) was a beneficiary of international protection and another (1) applicant was awaiting family reunification. Furthermore, ten (10) ³ interviews were conducted with representatives and employees of institutional actors, namely International Organisations, local and international NGOs, and local authorities involved in the accommodation sector.

Most interviewees were approached through the snowball method, utilising extensive networks that the authors have developed during the last years, ⁴ while a number of gatekeepers (especially employees in the accommodation sector) contributed in a crucial way in approaching a number of asylum seekers staying mainly in ESTIA apartments. Interviews lasted from one to two hours and took place in various places of Athens, such as public spaces and cafes, in ESTIA apartments where interviewees resided, and also online with both camp residents and most institutional actors’ representatives, due to the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The fact that the fieldwork was conducted during the pandemic posed specific challenges, mostly related to mobility and restrictions in the encounters. These challenges were added to the preexisting unwillingness and distrust of certain actors involved in accommodation management, as well as the time-consuming bureaucratic procedures required to officially grant permission and access to researchers in regulated accommodation in Greece.

The article proceeds with three sections. The second section provides theoretical considerations on precarity and, particularly, ‘precarity of place’, and views refugee accommodation through the lens of these theoretical considerations. The third section contextualises accommodation policies in Greece and metropolitan Athens by presenting their current form and by highlighting preexisting conditions of precarity in the absence of accommodation policies before 2015. The fourth section traces the multiple aspects of precarity of place for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens as they emerge from the uneven geographies of asylum accommodation in Greece.

Situating migrant precarity: theoretical insight

Precarity is a term that has been extensively used by social scientists during the last decades to label conditions of uncertainty, instability, lack of security, fragility, and risk in contemporary societies (Baban et al., 2017; Banki, 2013; Brown, 2015; Lancione, 2019; Waite, 2009). Waite (2009) notes the distinction between an approach that views precarity as a condition experienced by particular groups due to their position in the neoliberalised labour markets, and a more generic one, which perceives precarity as a generalised social malaise of late capitalism experienced in multiple social fields. For example, Trimikliniotis et al. (2016) extend the lived experiences of precarity to areas that intersect with precarious employment, namely housing, women’s rights, education, health, social rights, culture, mobility, and migration, while Baban et al. (2017) also highlight citizenship and social protection. Papadopoulos et al. (2018) identify various types of migrant precarity apart from precarious employment, including precarious legal status, precarity at the workplace, and life precarity in the sense of access to basic amenities.

Migrants have been a key concern in studies on precarity as, for them, ‘the precarization of work develops in tandem with a precarization of citizenship’ (Schierup and Jørgensen, 2016). This means that, apart from their often precarious working conditions, the life worlds and life prospects of migrants are critically influenced by their variable (non-)access to social rights according to their subsumption under multiple shifting categories, such as irregular immigrant, temporary worker, beneficiary of international protection, asylum seeker, unaccompanied minor, member of a separated family, and so on. Immigration controls by the state are of key importance in producing precarity in that they filter, sort, and institutionalise uncertainty (Anderson, 2010). Precarity is a concept which evokes the fact that the experiences of migrants are not only shaped by such classifications and the limitations that are intrinsic to them, but also by the very fact that their subsumption under various categories is usually ambiguous and enmeshes them in long and strenuous processes of filtering and selection. By definition, precarity is not a fixed status but rather a tightrope-like condition (Baban et al., 2017; Banki, 2013; Chacko and Price, 2020). It places people in a ‘confusing array of gradations of uncertain migration status’ produced by ‘policies designed to control immigration and curb the overall number of permanent immigrants’ (Goldring et al., 2009).

Studying what is particular to migrant precarity, Banki (2013) coined the term ‘precarity of place’, which she defines as ‘vulnerability to removal or deportation from one’s physical location’ (p. 453). Physical location matters, because it is through the physical presence of residents in a place that social services and infrastructures are used, social networks are built, a variety of social interactions and acts of citizenship (Isin, 2008) are performed, and social rights are claimed. If, according to Lancione (2019), precarity is experienced as a series of absences such as of medical assistance, warmth, a roof and, most importantly, of alternatives, then Banki (2013) detects the essence of migrant precarity in the absence of a permission to remain in a place, which we might reformulate as the absence of the right to remain. And, while her focus is on the national space, she claims her definition might also apply to other spatial scales.

The denial of the right to remain can be seen as an instance of the wider phenomenon of displacement. Indeed, apart from cross-border and internal forced mobility, refugees and migrants’ displacement may also be experienced under circumstances of protection and accommodation. Refugee camps in the global South, variably described in the vast relevant literature as spaces of exception, security, disciplining, segregation, and exclusion, give the most prominent example of such a theorisation of accommodation as displacement (Agier, 2011; Feldman, 2015; Hyndman, 2000; Malkki, 2002). However, the proliferation of camps and camp-like facilities in the ‘global North’ and in areas that sit uncomfortably in either the ‘North’ or the ‘South’ has further dispersed the reality and problematics of displacement around the world (Kandylis, 2019; Kreichauf, 2018; Şenses, 2016). Moreover, additional cycles of displacement can shape reality even outside camps, in conditions of urban accommodation, as migrants and refugees may be displaced from one form of shelter to another, from one neighbourhood to another, from accommodation to homelessness, and so on (Bhagat, 2019). In this sense, we suggest an extension to Banki’s definition of precarity of place to include not only the absence of the right to remain, but the absence of the right to decide on one’s own habitation and mobility.

Our strategy in this paper is to examine the accommodation of asylum seekers in Athens through the lens of precarity of place. From a strictly administrative point of view, accommodation is about providing the basic material conditions for sustaining the life of a population, necessarily including some form of shelter or housing. EU Directive 2013/33 on the ‘Standards for the reception of applicants for international protection’ stipulates that housing may be provided in (a) premises in border areas, (b) accommodation centres, defined as ‘any place used for the collective housing of applicants’, or (c) private houses, flats, or hotels. Humanitarian policy texts go a long way towards connecting accommodation with decent housing, including issues beyond basic material conditions, such as the security of tenure (Sphere Association, 2018). However, such regulatory texts rarely question the various processes of categorisation of the people concerned or problematise the implications that accommodation systems have on precarious lives.

Camps and camp-like facilities make up an important part of the accommodation systems in Europe, to such an extent that Kreichauf (2018) proposed the term ‘campisation’ to indicate an overall tendency towards the spatialised control, isolation, and stigmatisation of those accommodated. Camps constitute the ‘physical space of administrative and political acts of power’ that aims at separating those inside from those outside, ‘citizens and non-citizens’’ (Kreichauf, 2018: 14). Nevertheless, ‘campisation’ is only one aspect of the accommodation of asylum seekers. The variety of existing accommodation types, locations, actors involved, and variations in ‘degrees of open- and closedness’ in spatial, material, and institutional terms may be more adequately described as ‘uneven geographies’ of asylum accommodation (Novak, 2021; Zill et al., 2020). According to Darling (2011), we may see the regulation of asylum accommodation as a means to control circulation and discipline asylum seekers through the production of spaces of filtering. The key function of these spaces of filtering is to separate those ‘deserving’ from those ‘undeserving’ and to mediate their access to various forms of accommodation (Novak, 2021; Sales, 2002).

In this perspective, extensive criticism has emerged on the tactics of dispersal as a means to manage marginality and ‘spread the burden’ of the accommodation of asylum seekers across regions and cities (Darling, 2011, 2017; Netto, 2011; Novak, 2021; Phillips, 2006). Such dispersal policies are implemented in several (mainly North-) European countries and cities that provide accommodation on a ‘no-choice basis’, meaning that those accommodated have no opportunity to choose the place of their accommodation (Darling, 2017; El Moussawi and Schuermans, 2021; Netto, 2011; Phillips, 2006), leading to the ‘reterritorialisation of asylum flows into particular, known, and controllable, spaces’ (Darling, 2011: 267).

These policies of asylum accommodation represent a perception of the city as a mere container of accommodation and fail to recognise the complex socio-spatial relationships that accommodation brings about and the contribution of asylum seekers in shaping urban space (Darling, 2017), especially through ‘migrant urbanisms’ as social and political practices resulting from movement, mixing, and exchange (Hall, 2015). On the contrary, in the words of Phillips (2006: 551), these policies ‘send[s] out a message of deterrence and control which is not conducive to engendering a sense of belonging’. Asylum accommodation thus produces a politics of discomfort (Darling, 2011) that is especially reflected in practical issues like the temporariness of accommodation, the danger of being evicted on short notice, and the right of the authorities to inspection and forced relocation, which disrupts existing social networks in local communities. In so doing, asylum accommodation leads to the production of ‘spaces in which feelings of belonging are to be undermined, negated or challenged’ (Darling, 2011: 269), as occurs with the potential socio-spatial relationships between asylum seekers and local residents. We suggest that this ‘discomfort’ could be seen as another expression of precarity of place.

Between ‘laissez-faire’ settlement and regulated asylum accommodation

The interplay of multiple factors that have traditionally characterised urban development processes in southern European cities has determined immigrant housing and settlement trajectories in Athens from the 1990s until the mid-2010s. Scholarship on the development of southern European cities has already unveiled the rudimentary character – if not absence – of housing policies; the partial replacement of weak welfare states by strong family networks that strive to provide access to jobs and housing opportunities; widespread informality in diverse aspects of everyday life, including an informal economy; precarity, fragmentation, and flexibility without security in the labour market; and a mixed urban environment and low levels of social segregation in cities (Allen et al., 2004; Arapoglou, 2012; Gialis and Leontidou, 2016; Leontidou, 1990; Mingione, 1995). All the above are considered as factors that differentiate the production of space in southern European urban environments from that in the rest of Europe.

Greece has been a destination and transit country for migrants from Eastern European and Balkan countries since the 1990s, and from Middle Eastern, Asian, and African countries especially since the mid-2000s. Most newcomers settled in the large Greek cities in the context of a market-led laissez-faire approach regarding housing (Kandylis and Maloutas, 2018) and an absence of specific integration policies. A rudimentary system of accommodation that had been developed covered only the housing needs of some of the most ‘vulnerable’ (Georgiadou and Kandylis, 2017), leaving the rest to find precarious housing solutions on their own. Particularly in Athens, migrants settled by their own means mainly in the low-quality and affordable residential stock of central neighbourhoods, following the gradual relocation of part of the local population to the suburbs since the 1970s (Arapoglou et al., 2009). Their self-settlement produced a geography of socio-spatial mixing and ethnic diversity, reducing horizontal social segregation (Arapoglou et al., 2009); at the same time, in the residential block-of-flats newcomers inhabited mainly the lower floors and the basement, resulting in ‘vertical differentiation’ (Maloutas and Karadimitriou, 2001). Spatial proximity and interethnic contact in Athens have led to the establishment of networks and relationships that allowed for informal processes of socio-spatial settling and integration and fostered practices of belonging and neighbouring (Vaiou and Stratigaki, 2008).

Despite these positive aspects of the unregulated settlement trajectories, migrant settlement has been characterised by unequal housing conditions, housing insecurity and deprivation, and socio-economic inequalities (Arapoglou et al., 2009; Kandylis et al., 2012). Combined with the strict legal framework for migration and citizenship in place since the 1990s, inequalities resulted in conditions of multiple precarity that have determined the everyday lives and pathways of migrants. The rising unemployment, shrinking incomes, and deep impoverishment that followed the economic recession of the 2010s have been unevenly distributed among the population – mainly along the line of preexisting inequalities based on ethnic, racial, gendered, and legal status divisions – and have affected everyday life, socio-spatial relationships, and survival practices at the micro-scale (Vaiou, 2016). Furthermore, institutional and non-institutional racist discourses and practices against the ‘Others’ increased. A politics of fear prevailed, constantly representing ‘Otherness’ as an overwhelming threat to be excluded and segregated (Micha and Koutrolikou, 2019). Everyday racism and violent racist practices against the ‘Others’, as well as the fear thereof, affected the spatial practices and habitation of migrants in the city (Papatzani, 2021), multiplying aspects of precarity in their everyday lives in Athens.

In summer 2015, the massive arrivals in the Aegean islands and a makeshift camp of Afghani refugees in a public park in downtown Athens found their way to media representations and political debates, in which they were framed as a condition of ‘emergency’ calling for urgent responses. A new camp was soon inaugurated in an inner-city district, and various public facilities (sport centres, the old airport, etc.) were used as camp-like temporary shelters. In early 2016, with the gradual sealing of the Balkan corridor and the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement, the short-lived route to Europe was interrupted, and Greece effectively turned again into an obligatory country of destination for thousands of asylum seekers. The issue of accommodation for newcomers was now raised in terms of a prolonged ‘emergency’ and called for more interventions, at a time when a variety of non-state actors such as civil society organisations, local or international humanitarian NGOs, and international organisations entered the scene. A new law on reception in 2016 established specific accommodation policies in Greece, roughly creating three different types of institutional accommodation for asylum seekers.

The first type concerns the Reception and Identification Centres (RICs), whose operation was based on the European ‘Hotspot approach’. Newcomers fall under the so-called ‘geographical restriction’ of their freedom of movement to the specific islands where they are accommodated while their asylum claim is examined. RICs are located on five eastern border islands (Lesvos, Samos, Chios, Kos, Leros) and at the eastern land border of Evros. Although a detailed description of the operation of Hotspots exceeds the scope of this article, their role in filtering population and shaping the institutional accommodation types in the mainland is particularly important. The second type concerns the ‘open’ Temporary Reception Facilities in mainland Greece, widely referred to as ‘camps’. Even though the first camps were established in 2015 as informal and temporary forms of ‘hospitality’, after the closure of the Balkan corridor they multiplied rapidly, blurring the boundaries between emergency and long-term planning. The third type concerns urban accommodation in apartments, hotels, and other buildings in various cities of Greece through the ESTIA programme. The programme was initially launched in November 2015 as a UNHCR accommodation scheme primarily aimed at asylum seekers eligible for relocation. However, since 2016 it has been operating under the management of UNHCR as the ‘Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation’ (ESTIA) programme, aimed at vulnerable cases of asylum seekers and applicants for family reunification; it was initially funded by the European Union Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) and, since 2019, it is co-funded by the Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund of the European Union (AMIF). Both camps and ESTIA apartments were gradually transformed into permanent types of institutional accommodation and the responsibility for their management was transferred to the Greek state authorities.

Accommodation policies in the mainland (camps and ESTIA programme) were characterised from the beginning by short-term planning and temporariness. Regarding ESTIA, the lack of planning, combined with the lack of spatial or geographic criteria in the selection of the apartment locations, led to relatively higher concentrations of ESTIA apartments in specific neighbourhoods of Athens (Papatzani, 2020); a subsequent attempt of dispersal was launched along the line of similar policy tendencies in other European cities. Moreover, even though specific supplementary services and activities are provided in both types of accommodation, none of them offers systematic integration possibilities or pathways. The ‘protracted emergency’ that characterises the accommodation system leads to conditions of welfare dependency (Kourachanis, 2018) and reproduces a permanent state of insecurity and precarity for asylum seekers. Arguably, precarity has been intensified by the cessation of accommodation for those recognised as beneficiaries of international protection one month after the final decision on their application is reached. The measure of cessation has been systematically applied since March 2019, while there has been very limited development of adequate long-term housing and integration policies for recognised refugees.

Material and spatial differences in the accommodation system create a multiplicity of precarity experiences between camps and ESTIA, but also among camps and among different apartments. Camps consist of tents or containers and they are usually located in industrial districts of Athens or in distant peripheral areas with insufficient public transportation networks. They are also characterised by inadequate sanitation facilities, poor hygiene conditions, and overcrowding. On the contrary, ESTIA programme is implemented in the socially and ethnically mixed residential neighbourhoods of Athens. Located in the dense urban fabric and providing habitation in blocks of flats, ESTIA apartments are in sharp contradiction to the isolated camps. Whether in camps or in apartments, some characteristics such as proximity to the city centre, adequacy of facilities, access to services, and living conditions create a hierarchy of accommodation places. For example, the camp of Elaionas, located in the municipality of Athens, is generally considered more privileged compared to the remote camps in Malakasa or Elefsina. Thus, a grid of multiple and uneven geographies is translated into a hierarchy of precarity in asylum accommodation, on which we focus in the next section.

Tracing the multiple aspects of precarity of place for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens

The uneven geographies of accommodation described above severely constrain the right of asylum seekers to remain and to decide on their own habitation and mobility. In line with Banki (2013), we consider that these restrictions are essential to the definition of precarity of place. In metropolitan Athens, the precarity of place is produced through three interconnected sets of mechanisms that consist of categorising and filtering asylum seekers, isolating and segregating them through a differential ‘placement’ in accommodation types and places, and controlling everyday habitation.

Conclusion

Until 2015–2016, the settlement of migrants and refugees in Athens took place in scarcely regulated conditions. The ‘refugee crisis’ of those years was used as an opportunity to set up, for the first time, a regulated system of accommodation consisting of two pillars: massive accommodation in camps and urban accommodation in rented apartments of the ESTIA programme. Our analysis shows that precarity persists, not any more as the product of a ‘laissez-faire’ approach but as the outcome of the uneven geographies of regulated accommodation.

In this paper, we examined the accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens through the theoretical lens of precarity of place (Banki, 2013), which we reformulated as the absence of the right to remain and of the right to decide on one’s own mobility and habitation. Our analysis suggests that uneven geographies of accommodation are translated into a hierarchy of precarity, given that asylum seekers are affected by these geographies in unequal ways. It also suggests that precarity of place is prolonged well beyond the conditions of ‘emergency’, through three sets of interrelated mechanisms that operate together and have the common effect of extending the precarisation of the residence of asylum seekers.

The first of these mechanisms consists of processes of filtering which distinguish asylum seekers along various categories of deservingness/undeservingness, according to vague criteria of ‘vulnerability’. One’s subsumption under this or that category entails one’s differential access to rights and benefits. Asylum seekers are forced to comply with the applied criteria and ‘perform’ their vulnerability. The second mechanism consists of regulations and processes that impose spatial isolation and segregation through the distribution of the already filtered categories in different types (camps and apartments) and places (residential areas of the city, industrial urban districts, and distant peripheral locations) of accommodation. The differences between camps and urban accommodation (but also among camps) are marked by inequalities regarding mobility, material conditions, access to services, and opportunities to build and maintain socio-spatial relationships and networks, both within and across ethnic groups. The third mechanism concerns the extensive control over everyday habitation exerted by those in charge of the accommodation system. Asylum seekers are generally expected to accept what is offered to them on a no-choice basis. While in accommodation, they are expected to follow formal and informal rules that strengthen feelings of discomfort and disrupt the development of their social networks.

As these lines are written, evictions from the accommodation system are taking place, reinforcing existing exclusions and divisions. Being expelled from accommodation is a liminal moment of precarisation, not only because it amounts to a serious risk of material deprivation, but also because it reveals the homeless body of the refugee as the ultimate precarious field of accommodation. The same body which is considered deserving and protected while in regulated and controlled accommodation risks being perceived as an unregulated and uncontrolled threat once forced out. To evict is to annihilate the right to remain in the most decisive way, and evictions actually bear a new category of ‘Otherness’ in the city. It is the category of those who were once included in the ranks of the ‘deserving’ and were later transferred to the ‘less deserving’, long before they were ready to cope with their housing needs on their own.

Undoubtedly, among the variety of categories, types, places, and rules that determine asylum accommodation in Greece and Athens, there remains room for informal practices of habitation to emerge and for networks of mutual aid and solidarity to thrive. The southern European model of informal urban development, with its prevalence of social mixing, may contribute to that. In such a context, the everyday practices of asylum seekers may transcend and contest the precarity of place, control of habitation, and politics of discomfort through their embedding in informal networks reproduced in the city, informal labour relationships, or urban encounters between asylum seekers, refugees, and locals. Through such practices of everyday resistance that shape processes of social and political reconfigurations (Hall, 2015), asylum seekers may claim, implicitly or explicitly, the right to remain and the right to decide on their own future pathways. As Lancione (2019) remarks in a different context, the stake of such practices and of the social relations that they generate is no less than ‘an alternative understanding of the urban political’.

The practices and claims of asylum seekers can be further considered from the viewpoint of the conceptual ‘tension’ between precarity and the related concept of vulnerability. We saw that the latter is a key term in the humanitarian jargon of the Greek accommodation system, one constantly deployed to distinguish and regulate asylum seekers. The conceptualisation of vulnerability as the condition of someone who is ‘not proof against wounds’ (Philo, 2005 cited in Waite, 2009) or as the liability or susceptibility to harm (Turner, 2019) imposes a humanitarian typology of powerlessness, suitable to legitimise (more) humanitarian interventions and force asylum seekers to act as powerless victims. On the contrary, the genealogy of precarity links this concept to the political potential of mobilisation by social justice movements and may reveal ‘the political and institutional context in which the production of precarity occurs rather than focusing solely on individualised experiences’ (Waite, 2009: 421). In our view, precarity of place is to be understood as a condition of prolonged uncertainty and instability created by accommodation systems in their threefold effort to filter-segregate-control migratory mobility. As such, precarity can be resisted through migrant agency, while vulnerability is meant, at best, to be acknowledged and cured at the individual level, by systems of governance.