Remembering and anticipating precarity: a temporal perspective on housing experiences of labour migrants in the Netherlands

This article contributes to geographical scholarship on home as a place of ontological security by considering the multitemporal, long-term lived effects of housing precarity among labour migrants. Within migration and housing debates, housing precarity is often viewed as a material and temporary condition that labour migrants accept to achieve better living conditions in the future. 

In this paper, we argue that this misrepresents the experience of housing precarity. We draw upon the housing biographies of Polish labour migrants in the Netherlands and identify four distinct temporal logics of housing precarity showing how past, present and future intertwine in different ways. First of all, extreme precarity in early years can become a reference frame, leading people to accept marginally improved precarious conditions in subsequent housing. Second, memories of past precarity permeate into the present and future shaping how migrants navigate housing. Thirdly, expectations and aspirations for the future feed back into the present shaping the experience of living arrangements as precarious. Finally, the demands of the precarious present can be so consuming that past and future times are pushed away. Our findings show that we should rethink how housing precarity manifests itself, not only as a material and temporary housing condition but also as an ontological experience with long-lasting effects.