‘The Glucksman is like home': young asylum-seekers, belonging and the right to the city

Young people growing up in the asylum system do so against a background of institutionalisation, precarity and socio-spatial exclusion. This paper explores how, in this context, asylum-seeker youth assert their place in the city and their right to belong, through everyday practices of inhabitation, including visibility and audibility. It draws on a small-scale ethnographic research project conducted with young asylum-seekers, exploring their identities and belongings through the lens of their music consumption practices. The research was conducted in the context of the young people’s participation in an arts-based youth project in an art museum in Cork city, Ireland, involving participant observation and interviews with young participants and adult facilitators. During the research, one young participant described the art museum as ‘home’–an unusual term to describe a beautiful but imposing building. We reflect on why this space might have felt like home. Drawing on concepts of home-in-migration, right to the city and thirdspace, we consider how the young participants inhabited the museum space and the wider city through the project, and in so doing, co-created a place of belonging and claimed their right to actively inhabit spaces that are at the centre of social and urban life.