In two minds: The high-rise housing ambivalence of transnational migrants

Arriving migrants of middle-class backgrounds increasingly establish themselves in high-rise apartments of densifying cities of the Global North through the private rental market or first homeownership. From their transient and elevated homes, transnational migrants find themselves vacillating between a desire to perform the archetype of the successful migrant livelihood and the realities of metropolitan vertical living. Memories and narratives of life ‘back home’ shape practices and relationships that enable them to put down roots. Yet high-rise housing, with its socio-material implications, mediates migrants’ everyday experiences in unique ways. This article investigates transnational migrants’ ambivalent feelings of ‘home’ in two verticalising cities, London and Melbourne. Drawing on affect- and practice-theoretical approaches to emotions and on the geographies of home, I argue that ambivalence enables migrants to habituate to the transience of their high-rise housing situation. Through interviews with 42 transnational migrants of diverse nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds, I analyse two registers of ambivalence as they unfolded in migrants’ narratives of high-rise housing. In the apartment, migrants’ ambivalent sensations revealed the embodied transience of transnational homemaking. In the vertical development, migrant’s ambivalent attachments unveiled their negotiated and intermittent feelings of belonging. Given these differential registers of ambivalence, I demonstrate that migrants are unevenly positioned to adjust to their vertical homes. I conclude by suggesting that ambivalence helps in further conceptualising the lived experience of high-rise housing, and that a more nuanced understanding of emotions is needed to envisage prospects for migrants’ livelihoods in apartments in the contemporary city.