I have been reading these two following articles: Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left With ‘Nobody to Talk To’ (Patricia Leigh Brown for the New York Times, August 30, 2009) and Les murs de la précarité (Pascale Dietrich-Ragon for La vie des idées, August 31, 2009) and couldn’t help weave them together. The first one speaks about how difficult it is to old immigrants to inhabit spaces/places in a foreign land. The second is a review of the book Les mondes des squats by Florence Bouillon, book that talks about squatting buildings, a practice that “allows the temporary appropriation of micro-territories” (my translation). To me, space making is about recovering oneself.

Why blogging this? My neo-nomad research offered a framework to look at  and design space with the three mobilities in mind, physical, mental and digital. I have tried to understand mobilities in relation to one another. This diagram shows the misalignment/ identity imbalance due to various displacements:

This diagram helps you visualize/classify types of nomads, and possibly topics of inquiries (since interest arises from the tension between mobilities). For example, refugees are forced to leave their home — travel physically — while mentally longing for the place left behind. Some use tools and technologies (photographs, video tapes, emails, social networking…) to connect to their homeland, transfer information from/to and about the two spaces connected digitally. Technology helps in regaining a sense of territory, hence a sense of self (and the other way around) (Remember the story of Kabibi). The temporary appropriation of spaces is another aspect of neo-nomadism.