Transnational spaces of exclusion in Glasgow: multi-story, photography and spatial practices

Abstract

In 2000, the city of Glasgow signed a contract with the British government to house up to 2000 asylum seekers a year in what were considered some of the most notorious council estates across the city. These estates have some of the highest levels of deprivation in the United Kingdom and have been abandoned as zones of violence, antisocial behaviour and crime and are viewed by many policymakers as beyond rehabilitation. This is where thousands of women, men and children from conflict zones across the world have been assigned accommodations while their refugee claims are assessed. This article examines Multi-Story, Street Level Photoworks’ online archive of art projects made by asylum seekers in Red Road housing estate in Glasgow. Following de Certeau, the article examines these projects as ‘tactics’, spatial practices that produce temporary spaces of dwelling in what the article argues are layered extraterritorial transnational spaces of exclusion that include both generations of unemployed Scottish residents and asylum seekers belonging to global networks of displacement. The article draws on Lefebvre’s ideas about ‘representational space’ to examine how the asylum seekers’ photographs and videos create possibilities to ‘think differently’ about what have been abandoned as ‘degenerate’ spaces of exclusion. As the article argues, the temporal dimension of multi-story as an online archive is significant, pointing out how it operates as a graveyard and as a memorial that works as a place-making practice long after many of the asylum seekers have been deported or left the building, incorporating their presence in the social and emotional landscape of the city against the discourses and legal mechanisms that exclude them.