P(R)OP2 unites migration historians and social geographers to study the role of housing in the integration and segregation of migrants. It offers the first detailed investigation of the relation between population movements and property relations at the level of a city over a period of more than a century. Whereas migration historians have investigated mobility and integration, and urban historians have analysed housing development, historiographical research on their interrelation is hard to find. Social scientists, on the other hand, have mostly studied current housing affordability issues without including the legacy of historical property ownership structures as a possible determining factor. Going beyond an analysis of migrant access to housing, we interrogate how local owners of land and housing responded and respond to migrant housing demand. The central idea of the project is that housing first needs to be made available to migrants before this housing can be accessed. We thus investigate how property relations – that is, who owns property and how they make it available – have limited or favoured the integration of certain migrants similarly or differently over time, hereby conditioning the distribution of people across urban space throughout generations.
Our work centres on the case of Dudelange, Luxembourg’s fourth biggest city, between 1910 and 2024. A rural municipality until 1882, the city then became one of Europe’s preeminent steel production sites. This economic transformation caused a rapid increase in its inhabitants until the early 20th century. The city’s population later stagnated until the early 1990s, when Dudelange started to accommodate those priced out of the capital city and financial centre. Thanks to the past work by project members, a collection of datasets linking owners and occupiers of place is available that
has few parallels in Europe: land registry records, census tables, migrant arrival forms and genealogical records. We crosslink data using a dual approach: a stock perspective, comparing population and ownership data at the beginning and end of the study period, and a flow perspective, capturing population movements and property transactions in the intervening period. In this way, we capture what allows migrants to gain a foothold in a new place (rental housing infrastructure availability, homeownership opportunities) and what renders their stay more precarious (gentrification, outmigration due to housing prices).
P(R)OP2 mobilises source criticism to understand what information the datasets offer through a reconstruction and interpretation of the administrative procedures, understandings and practices that have created them. It also complements the quantitative analyses with expert and intergenerational interviews to unravel the lived housing experiences of migrants.
Interdisciplinary in form and content, P(R)OP2 significantly scales up ongoing research practices within single academic disciplines. It is co-led by a historian (Machteld Venken, C2DH, UL) and a social geographer (Antoine Paccoud, LISER), who each work with a postdoctoral researcher. The eight research questions broached in the project concern long run developments related to source criticism, integration and segregation through housing, and the lived housing experiences of migrants. Interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to answer these. Each research question yields an article in an international peer-reviewed journal following a presentation at an international conference. The results also feed a special issue, a digital exhibition displaying interview fragments about housing experiences, and roundtable discussions with housing policy makers and archivists. P(R)OP2 promotes a renewal of historical research by including housing as a key factor for integration into migration history, while also training social scientists to broaden the time frame of their studies and to adequately contextualise their data.
Pilot Study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2022.931758/full
