VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

This paper investigates how nostalgia is inscribed, performed, and expressed through everyday home-making practices in the refugee settlement of Strovolos II. Recent scholarship has examined how displaced populations reproduce and reinterpret the notion of ‘home’ in new environments, revealing a complex and often ambivalent relationship between nostalgia and processes of home-making in the wake of forced displacement. Rather than understanding nostalgia as a passive emotional state associated solely with mourning or sentimental attachment to the past, several studies conceptualize it as a dynamic spatial practice that evokes the lost homeland through diverse representations, reconstructions, and material or symbolic gestures enacted within unfamiliar spatial settings. Strovolos II is one of the first refugee settlements in Nicosia, Cyprus, constructed after the 1974 Turkish invasion to provide temporary shelter for internally displaced Greek Cypriots. Today, fifty years later, the settlement has undergone radical transformation and is inhabited by first-, second-, and third-generation refugees, as well as migrant workers, each holding distinct constructions of the past and divergent aspirations for the future. Consequently, Strovolos II is examined as a site where multiple embodiments of nostalgia foster creativity, improvisation, resistance, reconciliation, and transformation in everyday life. The paper draws on qualitative methods, including site observations, semi-structured interviews, and photographic documentation. The empirical material was collected with a particular focus on how nostalgia interacts with home-making practices through residents’ daily experiences. The overall goal of this paper is illuminate the ambivalent relationship between nostalgia and home-making and to demonstrate the multifaceted role this sentiment plays in shaping a vibrant and continually evolving built environment.