Migrant Housing in the City and the Village: from Melbourne to Zavoj

Abstract

This paper will discuss the kinds of communities that evolve through historical practices of migration. The migrant house is associated with a new architecture that had appeared in the cities of immigration of the new worlds (Melbourne, Toronto, Chicago). It is perceived as a stereotypical symbolisation of immigrants from Southern European origins that had arrived in the decades following the Second World War. The appearance of houses built by returning migrants in sites of origin suggests other trajectories, other modes of travel, and other forms of community. Central to the thesis of this paper is the testimony of two types of migrant houses. The study draws on theories of migration that address the site of departure, the site of arrival, and the question and conflict of return which is at the centre of the migrant's imaginary. This study will examine the migrant houses in the village of emigration (Zavoj in Macedonia), migrant houses built by returning emigrants. A study of the two houses of migration implicates a set of networks, forces, relations, circumscribing a large global geopolitical and cultural field that questions our understandings of diaspora, the binary structure of dwelling/travelling, and the fabric and fabrication of community. In addition, the paper will explore the notion of house as an imaginary landscape, a psychic geography narrated through migratory travels.

Citation

Lozanovska, M. (2009), "Migrant Housing in the City and the Village: from Melbourne to Zavoj", Open House International, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 39-48. https://doi.org/10.1108/OHI-03-2009-B0005