Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities at increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logics of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, of movement and settlement, of centre and periphery, of time and space.

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This article questions the meaning and scope of “settling” in the context of racial capitalism and its structural displacements, from a perspective situated in the mobile and transborder geographies of labor and inhabitation that are proliferating at the crossroads of old and new Southern questions, between Southern Europe and Northern Africa. With an epistemic focus on what scholars have started to address as the “Black Mediterranean” and an empirical focus on Italy’s agro-industrial encampments, the article explores the emergence of a geography of unsettlement at the core of Europe. This condition, it argues, renders migrant spaces largely uninhabitable and highlights how borders impact not only labor regimes but also the politics of dwelling. At the same time, the article employs the notion of “unsettling” to inquire into the possibility for alternative notions of place that can overcome the necropolitics of the hold. While drawing new connections among cutting-edge debates that are reassessing Europeanness, trans-Mediterranean movement, and the labor-migration nexus, the article ultimately suggests that un/-settlement is a spatial poiesis of social life in the Mediterranean that is absorbed by and yet also manages to contravene the dualities of temporariness/ permanence, formality/informality, mobile/anchored, and settled/unsettled at the heart of the modern idea of Europe.

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