Structured Transience: Migrant Self-Governance and the Production of Urban Order

Structured Transience examines life that is officially temporary but practically enduring. It looks at how migrant communities living under conditions of uncertainty in Paris build their own arrangements for order — deciding how space is shared, how disputes are settled, how newcomers are received and how care is distributed.

Rather than reading these arrangements as improvisation or disorder, the chapter treats them as governance: patterned, negotiated and consequential for the wider urban environment they sit within.