Place attachment under duress-Chronic illness, statelessness, poverty and spatial entrapment among migrants in rough neighbourhoods

In Lydiate, a rough peri-urban enclave populated by Malawian descendants, the idea of ‘home’ for some, departs sharply from popular imaginaries of sanctuary, belonging, or aspirational return. This paper investigates how the infirm, ageing, and chronically poor residents of Lydiate conceptualize and experience home under conditions of legal exclusion, intergenerational poverty, and spatial immobility. Grounded in Place Attachment and Displacement Theories, the study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews with Malawian-descended migrants. While much of migration and diaspora literature accentuate movement, identity fluidity, and transnational ties, this research centers the ‘ sedentarized poor’ - those trapped in place by structural abandonment, health decline, and statelessness. Findings reveal dynamics of ‘resigned emplacement’ and ‘involuntary home’ , where place attachment is not born of rootedness but of survival necessity. Participants articulate their lives through idioms of stuckness, fragility, and constrained belonging. Concepts like coerced habitation, habitual entrapment, and bureaucratic exile are used to describe the emotional, legal, and spatial politics of being forced to dwell in undesired places. Yet even in this context of dispossession, residents forge paradoxical attachments through informal care networks, spiritual rituals (e.g., the Nyau cult), and collective endurance. The paper contributes a grounded, bottom-up theorization of ‘place-making under duress , ’ urging a redefinition of home beyond normative ideals. It challenges mobility-centric paradigms in migration and urban studies, and speaks to the urgent need for inclusive planning, health equity, and citizenship reform in long-settled informal communities. As cities across the Global South expand under the weight of inequality and abandonment, the conditions in Lydiate are neither exceptional nor isolated. Entire communities are growing old, growing ill, and growing invisible in places that were never meant to be permanent – rough neighborhoods. The paper makes an urgent call: to rethink what ‘home’ means in the age of forced immobility - and to center the lives of those who, despite being left behind, continue to endure, inhabit, and name the margins as their own.