Bare Shelter: Hostile Architecture of Migrant Accommodation within and Outside the City

The Bibby Stockholm migrant barge accommodating asylum seekers in Portland Port since August 2023, marked a new low in the UK’s hostile immigration environment. The vessel, re-designed to accommodate over 500 people – double the number it was originally designed for – was immediately rejected by the local population and council, condemned as an affront to human dignity by several charities and church groups, and deemed unsafe by firefighters. The barge was immediately closed due to a legionella bacteria found in the water system, and after it was reopened an Albanian asylum seeker was found dead on board after taking his own life. Hostile spaces make part of migrant accommodation within and outside cities in the UK and beyond. Across the globe, migrants are pushed to inhabit both makeshift and institutional forms of inadequate accommodation, such as urban industrial spaces and abandoned sites, which are also targeted by the violent in/actions of the authorities.

This paper invokes the concept of ‘bare shelter’ as the uninhabitable and hostile spaces produced for migrant accommodation within and outside the city. While the notion of ‘shelter’ is related to spaces of minimal protection, ‘bare shelter’ is exposed to enhanced degrees of violence and precariousness. The amplification of bare shelter in cities worldwide illuminates the intensification of urban colonial relations, particularly along the colonial-based borderlines of the global apartheid and its borderzone departure cities and points of arrival. The process is illustrated by highlighting three key dimensions of spatial articulation: inadequate living conditions; excluded locations within and outside the city; and violence of containment and evictions. These dynamics underscore the need for a revised definition of shelter that furthers the scope of spatial–social critique and refers to uninhabitable urban realities, for a better understanding of the relations between migrant accommodation, hostility, and oppression.