Hotels, refuge, and the rise of carceral hospitality

Abstract Geographical work on hotels has foregrounded their role as spaces of commercial hospitality, leisure, and increasingly as sites of emergency accommodation for a range of displaced groups. Developing such work, this paper critically examines the central role of hotels in accommodating and containing asylum seekers and refugees. By considering the use of hotels in the UK and Australia, we argue that the hotel is a durable and vitally important site of bordering, one that manifests many of the tensions and contradictions of state responses to asylum seekers and refugees. Far from being a marginal or temporary space, we centre the hotel as a critical site for the reproduction and maintenance of contemporary bordering. In doing so, the paper advances understanding of the hotel as a specific type of social, political and cultural space, associated with three dynamics that we explore in turn: forms of flexibility and emergency response, patterns of hospitality, and the violent displacements of the hotel as a site detached from ‘everyday life’. In surveying these understandings of the hotel, we argue that the cultural and political significance of the hotel as a site for understanding contemporary bordering emerges from its unique position at the confluence of the carceral and the hospitable. The paper thus proposes a concept of carceral hospitality , to designate the fraught positioning of the hotel between carceral conditions of institutional detention and spectacle, and the hospitable expectations more readily associated with sites of leisure, escapism and relaxation. It is this positioning that has allowed hotels in the UK and Australia to act as lightning rods for critical discussion and public concern over state responsibilities, welfare entitlements, and the narrowing scope of refugee protection.