“Smells Like Bureaucracy”: Material Overhang, Affective Atmosphere, and the Obstruction of Place-Making

This paper takes an interest in how buildings can obstruct place-making efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research of a refugee emergency shelter in Germany, we explore how volunteers and refugees seek to turn a previous administrative office complex into a home and a communal place. However, the building's materiality evoked affective atmospheres, involving prison-like and bureaucratic affects, obstructing these place-making attempts. We conceptualize the material obstruction of the building to place-making efforts as material overhang, drawing attention to the limits of the productiveness of space as well as the agency of materiality.