Unlearning as Research: Lessons from Migrant Women in Liverpool
This is an installment in our series on migration. Click here to read the introduction to the series.
Cities and buildings are seldom designed to satisfy the needs of migrants—people who come from elsewhere and due to their appearance, beliefs, or simply their very existence disturb dominant perceptions of social belonging. Many of us, researchers in the spatial fields, study links between migration and architecture as we wish to support marginalized people in transforming the physical environments in which they feel alienated. Such a commitment feels especially urgent at a time when racist policies, deportations, and detainment camps have become normalized tools of governance across the globe. As we put forward a justice-centered agenda, however, we must remain vigilant of not letting our research cause harm to those we aim to benefit.
There is a robust body of scholarship that teaches us to always question our positionality, address power asymmetries at stake as we carry out research, and avoid “pain narratives” of overstudied “vulnerable” people. I would suggest that leaving widely accepted disciplinary assumptions unquestioned is another important, if perhaps overlooked way through which we could inadvertently inflict harm. That is, it’s not just by questioning our privileges and the uses we make of them as we engage with underserved communities, but it is also by interrogating assumptions that we may have normalized within our disciplines that we can make sure to actually center the perspectives of the marginalized.
A recent ethnographic project opened my eyes to these biases, changing my perspective on immigrant marginalization. I engaged with immigrant older women living in Toxteth, Liverpool, also called Liverpool 8 (L8), a long-marginalized neighborhood in the UK. Originally built in the nineteenth century, when Liverpool thrived on economies of slavery and empire, L8 transformed in the post WWII period from a wealthy suburb for merchants into the only place where non-white, poor people could find accommodation. Urban renewal and manufactured decay reshaped the neighborhood from the 1960s to the mid-2000s (Figure 1). Entire street grids of terraced houses were replaced by poor-quality semidetached houses placed on curved cul-de-sacs. Most residents were moved to newly built, peripheral districts. The people who managed to stay struggle today to recognize their neighborhood where most services and public facilities have either been demolished or left to decay.
Figure 1. Map of the Toxteth neighbourhood in Liverpool, U.K., known locally as Liverpool 8 or L8. Source: Hana Koubková, Francesca Piazzoni.
The history of erasure that transformed L8 prompted me to choose the neighborhood as a case study for exploring gender, age, and race as intersecting agents of spatial discrimination. A white European educated in the US who had only recently moved to the UK, I initially encountered Liverpool 8 by living at its more privileged edges. I observed the remnants of demolitions that had reshaped the community before my eyes and believed that those conditions would facilitate discussions about spatial inequities. In other words, following planning and architectural scholarship that often views clearances as unequivocally bad, I assumed that L8’s demolitions would be negatively perceived by its residents, easing my investigation on the material consequences of dispossession.
To my surprise, however, not everyone in Liverpool 8 reported associating resentment or sadness with the destruction. Several migrant women identified the demolitions as processes that allowed them to make L8 home for themselves and their loved ones. Diana, a member of the Al-Rahma Mosque who arrived from Albania in 1978, worked for the city to speed up the clearances. She was hired by the municipal office, carrying out surveys on the physical conditions of houses. When she met resistance from some long-time residents, who resented a newcomer working to move people away from the neighborhood, she created an association of Muslim women and organized public activities to enable community members to meet one another. To this day, as she lives in one of the new houses built on the street where the mosque is located, and regularly attends the venue, Diana believes that the demolitions freed space, allowing her community to build a spiritual hub and confront Islamophobia in the neighborhood.
Selah, a 64-year-old woman who migrated from Nigeria in 1985, saw the clearances as a gift from God. She and her husband had tried to find permanent housing for years. Although her husband worked for the city and had relatively easy access to information on housing, the couple were not assigned a house until the street where they now live was cleared and rebuilt. The demolitions, Selah believes today, shuffled original residents around, letting “people like us” (immigrants) buy a house on a street that would have been otherwise out of their reach.
Finally, Georgiana, who arrived from Moldova in 2010, informally occupied a vacant house on a street that was designated for demolition. Taking advantage of bureaucratic loopholes and conflicting interests among developers, which left the street untouched for a long time, Georgiana lived in the occupied house for seven years before it was demolished. The money she and her husband saved during that period served as a deposit for a new home, and the friendships she made with other occupiers of vacant homes endure to this day.
None of these women chose to have their neighborhood demolished. The most evident sentiment shared by all my interviewees—those who were born in L8 as well as those who migrated there—was anger at how city authorities created and sustained deprivation in the neighborhood. Demolitions were seen at best as unavoidable due to the extremely poor conditions the neighborhood. Yet, migrant women who did not always feel welcomed by old-timers, do not believe that destruction and physical dilapidation aggravated their circumstances. On the contrary, the women emphasized that those material conditions opened opportunities for them to survive, and at times thrive in an otherwise hostile environment.
That several migrant women viewed demolitions as their allies, challenges prevailing narratives in urban studies that portray clearances as unambiguous marks of domination. Building on familiar stories of contested postwar renewals (often seen through examples such as the work of Robert Moses or the ethnic enclave discussed by Jane Jacobs), important scholarship has demonstrated both how demolitions work as dispositives of oppression, and how residents often oppose erasure through more or less formal acts of resistance. Even cases where oppressed people collaborate with their oppressors are often explained with their passive internalization of inequality at the intersection of force and consent following the logics of Gramscian hegemony.
The experiences of the women I met tell a somewhat different story, one in which migrant people supported the clearances or, in any case, saw them as beneficial (Figure 2). The characteristics that each woman embodies—as a migrant, an aging female, and possibly a non-white person—shape responses to what many scholars identify as damaging erasures. While migration is widely acknowledged as a challenging process, several interviewees suggested that their past experiences had equipped them with a greater capacity to identify opportunities at the institutional and street level—by making them more used to navigating institutional loopholes for their benefit or better prepared to respond to hostility from old-timers. Some women also perceived their seniority as an asset that granted them a degree of respect from members of their community, allowing them to better control change in the neighborhood compared to younger women. And race, though widely recognized by most respondents as a significant factor in discrimination, was also seen by some non-white women as an advantage in Liverpool 8. Given the racialized history of the neighborhood, they felt that being non-white helped them integrate more quickly, foster friendships and build connections within the community.
“That several migrant women viewed demolitions as their allies, challenges prevailing narratives in urban studies that portray clearances as unambiguous tools of domination.”
Figure 2. Landmarks of Liverpool 8, from left to right: the Igbo Community Center (previously the Deaf and dumb Benevolent Society Building, built in 1864, currently abandoned); the Kuumba Imani Millennium Center (built in 2004 on a site demolished in the mid-1990s); Edge Hill Library (built in the 1880s, closed to the public in the 1990s, currently abandoned); terraced houses on Ducie Street (built in the 1880s, demolished in the 1990s);Tiber Street School (built in 1904, demolished in 1994). More information on the buildings and the women who cherish them at L8 HERstory: An Architectural Guide from Older Women. Source: Luke Fawcett.
These circumstances bring attention to erasure and destruction as processes that might, somehow paradoxically, prompt self-empowerment for some people, particularly for those who migrate into a new environment and seek to make it home. The ways by which the women collaborated with demolition to make L8 a better place for their communities teach us that liberation can emerge from seemingly destructive processes.
But there is another, broader lesson that the stories of Diana, Selah, and Georgiana point us toward. They warn us to always interrogate disciplinary assumptions that we may have come to take for granted, particularly when researching material histories of migration. As scholars, historians, and perhaps activists, we must remain open to unlearning what we assume to be common truths. This will help us rethink how we expect certain urban processes to affect the lives of different communities, questioning how we understand vulnerabilities to intervene in the spatial fabric of everyday life. As we seek to center the agencies and aspirations of migrant people, we need to ensure that our efforts are guided by the voices of those directly affected by urban change.
Citation
Francesca Piazzoni, “Unlearning as Research: Lessons from Migrant Women in Liverpool,” PLATFORM June 16, 2025.
