ABSTRACT
Emigration set the village on a path towards disappearance, but do the growing numbers of new migrant houses in the village constitute renewal? A photograph of a vernacular dwelling juxtaposed against a new migrant house that appears to be a ‘twin house’, provokes questions of their visual distinction and similarity. Migrants invest in new constructions in their homeland villages. This interest parallels the deterioration and ruin of traditional housing and the ancestral home in the village. The image makes visible the difference in materials and construction technology but not the difference in use, programme and inhabitation. This duality of migrant and vernacular housing in the village is reflected in the duality of the migrant house and the conventional mainstream house in immigrant cities. The migrant house in the immigrant city extracts a space for existential territoriality, while the migrant house in the village converts the space of the ancestral home into minimal private housing, reversing its role. In that process, it displaces dwelling from the construct of housing. This chapter will examine the twinness of housing after migration as a conceptualisation of the complex tension between dwelling habitus and housing.
