Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemHome, Hospitality and Confinement: The Villawood Migrant Hostel( 2022-10)The Villawood Migrant Hostel, open from 1949 to the 1980s, was one of the Commonwealth of Australia’s longest-running migrant hostels, providing temporary housing for migrants and refugees arriving under various assisted passage schemes. During the 1960s, selected hostels, including Villawood, underwent significant alterations, moving from portable structures inherited from the military to purpose-designed hostels. In 1976, on the same site but separate from the hostel, the federal government constructed detention facilities for deportation. When the migrant hostel ceased operation, some of its buildings were adapted for use in the expanding Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, which held refugees and asylum seekers subject to detention and, subsequently, mandatory detention. Central to the thesis are the spatial and architectural changes on the Villawood site relating to on-arrival accommodation and detention. The thesis asks whether the built forms demonstrate an association between the Commonwealth’s resettlement of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and the framing of national identities in connection to ideals of house and home. Varying degrees of nation-state hospitality underscore this association. Commonwealth on-arrival accommodation is considered as an entry point into Australian citizenship and examined in connection to physical constructions of idealised ‘homes’ in Australia. Pivoting on this single case study, the site of the Villawood Migrant Hostel, the thesis investigates the built facilities in relation to the trajectory of immigration policies as they shifted: from official strategies to increase and organise the nation’s population after the Second World War, to the introduction of mandatory detention for refugees and asylum seekers the federal government classified as ‘unauthorised’ from 1992. The thesis’s site exploration ends in 1992, as the introduction of mandatory detention significantly shifted the landscape of immigration detention facilities emerging under the Commonwealth’s administration. In considering the parallel development of detention on site, the focus of the thesis is on the architecture of the new migrant hostel apartments constructed during the 1960s, which are examined as a platform to explore dwelling types used for temporary tenures. The buildings’ physical, spatial and material fabric are introduced alongside the racialised narratives circling migrant and refugee resettlement. These historical transformations on site reveal the complexities of nation-state hospitality to displaced people and assumptions about house and home as fixed phenomena in a settler-colonial context. Through the lens of architecture, this thesis approaches the history of nation-building in connection to migration and examines how national identities were influenced by and changed due to migrant and refugee arrivals during the period of study. The thesis’s underlying argument is that ideological and physical conceptions of home influence the political and public narratives surrounding historical migrant and refugee arrival and temporary housing options. The notion of home, as a form that is visualised and spatialised as an Australian ideal, has frequently been transitory and discursively marked by cultures of both hospitality and spatial violence. In making this link, the thesis offers a reading of housing as connected to the nation-state to investigate the configuration and influence of housing ideals.