This project examines how migration is governed and contested across the island’s urban spaces. It traces the asylum process as written in law alongside lived experiences, exposing gaps between formal procedures and everyday realities. The study maps the infrastructures of the reception system—camp spaces, bureaucratic pathways, policing and surveillance, and NGO support—together with the counter-spaces and practices of resistance that emerge. Methods combine ethnography, participatory action research, policy review, and spatial observation with collaboration among migrants, NGOs, first-line practitioners, academics, and host-society groups. Analytically, it mobilizes border epistemologies, assemblage thinking, urban morphology, and spatial justice to examine how agency is territorialized and deterritorialized through everyday urban practices.

Responsible Researcher: Ana Maria Ricchiardi Hernandez