Talk at III Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress / Session 2: Housing architecture for colonial and migrant workers. Control, education and everyday organization
by Dhara Patel
This paper investigates the spatial politics of migrant housing in contemporary Frankfurt by focusing on the emergence of informal architectural geographies shaped by private landlords leasing disproportionately to Indian Highly Skilled Migrants (HSMs). Despite being one of the fastest-growing and most financially mobile migrant groups in Germany, Indian HSMs are routinely excluded from the mainstream housing market, resulting in their concentration into ageing, substandard housing stock. This phenomenon unfolds not through formal planning, but through racialized landlord strategies that effectively produce de facto segregation.
The significance of studying Indian HSMs lies in the analytical paradox they embody: although economically privileged, they are racialized as undesirable tenants, revealing the limits of class mobility in postcolonial Europe’s urban regimes. Their case challenges the conventional binary of ‘vulnerable’ versus ‘successful’ migrant and offers insight into how racial capitalism and neoliberal housing regimes intersect to reproduce spatial exclusion—even for the most skilled.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and urban mapping, the paper traces how these dynamics generate a shadow architecture of control, one that mirrors colonial logics of containment under the guise of market rationality. By positioning private landlords as key actors, the paper exposes how speculative and racialised housing practices contribute to the architectural production of migrant segregation. This emerging typology—spatially peripheral, degraded in condition, and racially targeted—offers a critical lens into how housing is weaponised as a tool of governance in the postcolonial city.
III Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress
11-13 February 2026
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon