In this article, we argue that modes of labour and value extraction have been under-researched and under-theorised in critical geographical research on migration, asylum and refugee humanitarianism. We examine data production, voluntary work programmes and financialised asylum housing as key sites through which value is extracted from asylum-seekers’ unpaid and reproductive activities.

In Homestead, Indigenous Maya migrants displaced during and after scorched earth counterinsurgency work in ornamental plant and palm nurseries, filling U.S. subdivisions and yards with verdant plant life. These flourishing plants produce and stabilize suburban property regimes across the country.

This article considers how urban peripheries are made and unmade by forms of “shifting”. We examine these shifts from the perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which both offer makeshift working and living arrangements to rural–urban migrants.

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of ‘urban informality’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century.

This article discusses the concept of porosity and what it might offer critical urbanism. It engages recent scholarly and practical writing on the “porous city,” outlining three sets of contributions that porosity offers in analyzing contemporary urbanization patterns and in orienting planning, policymaking, and knowledge production.

Through a contemporary history of social conflicts surrounding the Corredor, I demonstrate how corporate and State actors work together to make corporations appear as if they were independent from the social contexts in which they operate and therefore free from responsibility for the harms they cause. Following Timothy Mitchell, I call this the “corporate effect.”

This article explores the tiny house movement as a contemporary example of alternative housing practices. Within the stories women tell about their tiny house journeys, we uncover diverse prefigurative practices and politics, which in turn invoke an expanded sense of fairness and agency in and through housing.

This article invites critical geographers to reconsider the conceptual offerings of Austrian-British object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), whose metapsychology has had a significant but largely unacknowledged contemporary influence on the field via theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant.