From hospitality to dwelling: a lens for migrant homesharing in Italy

Abstract

This article examines migrant homesharing programs in Italy through a dwelling lens, which seeks to understand how homesharing transcends the home and provides new opportunities for migrants to build a life as more than temporary guests. Homesharing is a growing reception practice across the Global North, and it sees residents house migrants in their own homes. We start from a critique of hospitality as the primary organizing framework through which homesharing is designed and implemented. We then put forth dwelling, as an alternative lens to hospitality, which imagines a wider array of relationships to and across space. We draw from ethnographic research in Turin, Bologna, and Florence, Italy, to showcase how migrants, residents, and practitioners engaged in homesharing are already thinking beyond guest–host dichotomies, and prioritizing ways of doing cohabitation that go beyond hospitality. If hospitality indicates the conditionality of being hosted, maintaining the power relations between the host and the guest, dwelling concerns the process by which the conditionality and impermanence of hospitality are eroded, asserting the right of migrants to be more than guests.