15 Silos in Trieste, Italy: A Historical Shelter for Displaced People

Abstract

When you arrive by train in Trieste, a city in the northeast of Italy on the border with Slovenia, a huge historic building welcomes you just a few metres from the station: the so-called Silos. The word 'Silos' literally means a container. It was built as a granary in the commercial hub under the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the mid 1800s, during a period of rapid economic growth. The enormous warehouse covers a vast area of 45,000 sq.m, and for a long time was a tangible symbol of Trieste's wealth, which originated in its strategic position as a place for maritime transit between the Balkans and Central Europe. Silos was built as a huge three-storey warehouse, with a central body at the front behind that lies a long, open air space for railway tracks and freight trains. It was built using the then recently discovered technique of concrete construction and still today its location in the heart of the city is a prominent example of industrial architecture dominating the urban panorama of Trieste. It was originally constructed for purely practical purposes, as a port facility for storing grain at the edge of the quay by the sea. The trains that entered it 'loaded or unloaded goods directly from two long sheds' (Semerari and Tamaro 1998: 162).Today, this enormous structure is private property, mostly abandoned after a fire. The one exception is a small area, occupied by a pay car park and a coach station, which is the last stop in Italian territory. After the original edifice burned down in 1994, only the facades remained, which stood

Makeshift camp geographies and informal migration corridors

“…Cities and towns can be attractive to migrants along corridors for a host of reasons – as places through which to access important resources, as transportation options for onward journeys, information, work, links to home countries through money transfer shops and Internet, as well as the possibility to temporarily escape ‘the stigma of refugeeness’ (Sanyal, 2014: 560) that comes with smaller, more remote locations. Urban squats have emerged across European capitals (Dadusc et al, 2019) such as Paris (Boyer, 2021; Carretero, 2022; Katz et al, 2018; MT/AFP, 2019; Pascual, 2020; Terraz, 2021), Rome (ANSA, 2017, 2021; Bertelli, 2020; Bock, 2018; Busby and Dotto, 2018; Scherer, 2016); Brussels (Rönsberg, 2015; Schreuer, 2018), Budapest (BBC, 2015; Hartocollis, 2015; Kallius et al, 2016), Belgrade (Obradovic-Wochnik, 2018; Rapisardi, 2015; Specia, 2017), Athens (Hilton, 2016; Kantor, 2016; King and Manoussaki-Adamopoulou, 2019; Mavrommatis, 2018; Squire, 2018) and in port cities and border towns where blocked refugees make repeated attempts at border crossing, such as Calais and Dunkirk in northwest France (Agier et al, 2018; BBC, 2021, RFI, 2019, Katz, 2016, 2017b), Patras in Greece (Arkouli, 2013; Tagaris, 2018) and Trieste in Italy (Altin, 2020), but also in cities in northern Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Augustová, 2020; Hromadzic, 2019; Jordan and Moser, 2020; Minca et al, 2018; Minca and Umek, 2020).…”

Micro‐Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid, Serbia

“…Scholarship on makeshift camps has grown over the last years, focusing primarily on the Calais “Jungle(s)” (Agier et al. 2019; Davies and Isakjee 2015; Hagan 2022; Ibrahim and Howarth 2018; Mould 2017, 2018; Queirolo Palmas 2021; Van Isacker 2019), although scholars have also explored sites in other European cities (Altin 2020; Bock 2018; Squire 2018) as well as along the Balkan Route (Davies et al. 2019; Jordan and Minca 2022; Minca and Umek 2020; Obradovic‐Wochnik 2018).…”