# Rethinking Transnational Places as Migratory Ecotones

Thomas Lacroix, Judith Misrahi-Barak

► To cite this version:

Thomas Lacroix, Judith Misrahi-Barak. Rethinking Transnational Places as Migratory Ecotones. Population, Space and Place, 2025, 31 (4), 10.1002/psp.70034. hal-05030588

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

# Rethinking Transnational Places as Migratory Ecotones

Thomas Lacroix<fnref n="1" /> ID | Judith Misrahi-Barak²

**Correspondence:** Thomas Lacroix (Thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr)

**Received:** 11 May 2023 | **Revised:** 14 March 2025 | **Accepted:** 28 March 2025

**Funding:** The study was funded by Le Grand Entrepot, ANR project ANR-21-CE26-0008.

**Keywords:** ecotone | migratory spaces | phase space | Shani Mootoo | the Calais Jungle | transnationalism

## ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the concept of ecotone to shed a different light on migratory spaces. The notion of ecotone was first applied for the study of the contact zones between ecological systems. Over the last two decades, it has been used by scholars of postcolonial literature for the analysis of spaces of cultural interactions. Bridging this strand of work with the debate on more-than-relational space, this paper outlines the concept of migratory ecotones understood as the outcome of the process of territorialization of intersecting transnational circulations. Migratory ecotones are ambivalent spaces underlain by contradictory forces: a principle of encounter and cultural interaction, but also a principle of power, conflict, distribution, and hierarchy. We argue that ecotones are more-than-relational spaces in three regards: current encounters are shaped by the material environment in which they are taking place, by the political forces constraining the capabilities of migrants, by past encounters and events weighing on present ones. The theoretical considerations developed in this paper will be supported by a literary analysis of a short story by Canadian writer and artist Shani Mootoo and by the political geography analysis of a border camp, the Jungle of Calais.

The fascination for instant communication technologies and cheap transportation means has led some to downplay the importance of geography (Graham 1998). In a world canvassed by all kinds of flows, place making was seen as an outcome intersecting connections, mere coordinates in a world in motion (Castells 2010). Space, in this regard, appears as an outcome of relations between interconnected people and places, but with little regard on how space may affect these relations. Migration geographers have, at times, given way to this temptation, with a propensity to see space and place as the product of human mobility and long-distance relations. The transnational scholarship focuses on translocal ties and what circulates between places of arrival and departure. When space is accounted for, it is often as an object of transformation (one may think of the migration and development literature investigating the transformative impacts of remittances in sending spaces), and less as a vector of change.

Calls to reassess the importance of the agency of space are nothing new (Mcewan et al. 2005; Amin 2007). Scholars have sought the thin line between space and place, between the need to approach social processes as locally situated without neglecting their embedding into wider dynamics (Agnew 2011). As discussed in the opening paper of this special issue (Axelsson and Hedberg 2025), proponents of the more-than-relational approach seek to disentangle the spatial intricacies of intersecting relations, understanding how encounters affect place making and conversely, how the spatial materiality and temporality of place shape interconnections in spatial assemblages (Allen 2012; Jones 2022). The special issue which this paper is part of contributes to rethinking theoretically the linkages between migration space and place. It explores the need for a more-than-relational approach to migration geography. While acknowledging the importance of connectivity, it strives to build a more integrated view of migration processes. Part of this

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© 2025 The Author(s). *Population, Space and Place* published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

<footnote n="1">¹Department of Political Science, Centre for International Research, Sciences Po, Paris, France | ²Department of English, EMMA, University of Montpellier
Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France</footnote>
effort, Lin Axelsson and Charlotta Hedberg reassess the importance of temporality in the production of migration places (Axelsson and Hedberg 2025). Drawing on Michael Jones' concept of “phase space” (Jones 2009), they argue that migration places are to be approached as timeplaces, i.e. as “the products of temporally entangled plastic connectivities, material objects and discursive practices” (Axelsson and Hedberg 2025, 1). A phase space shapes current social processes through the structuring power of past layers of relations and the way they interacted with the materiality and immateriality (e.g. meanings and values) of things. Former social, cultural and political configurations define the opportunity structures of current dynamics.

This paper adds to this debate by bringing to the fore two other factors: the importance of encounter (with things and people) and the agential power of the environmental and ecological materiality. It draws on an interdisciplinary conversation between migration researchers and postcolonial literary scholars around the concept of ecotone. Eleven international conferences formed part of the ‘Ecotones: Encounters, Crossings, and Communities’ Project whose aim was to address the variety of dynamics at play in migration and diaspora texts and contexts¹. Building on Lefebvre’s critique of a compartmentalized approach to space (Lefebvre 1996, 196), we understand the notion of ecotone as an “emergent” concept, as a multilayered notion whose meaning derives from the confrontation and dialog between different disciplinary perspectives.

An ecotone is a term borrowed from environmental sciences. It designates an ecological transition zone. Its etymological root is composed of *oikos* (household, home) and *tonos* (tension). It is a contact zone between two ecosystems—sea and land, plain and mountain, forest and savannah... (Hufkens et al. 2009). It is a space of interpenetration, reciprocal adaptation, exchange, production of hybrid species, competition, disruption and regulation. Taking up this idea of interface, migration and literary scholars understand ecotones as places of encounters and frictions produced by transnational flows. The above-mentioned conference cycle contributed to introducing the term in migration studies and the humanities. Scholars of migration and literature have used it to address various processes in cities, camps, routes, crossings of the Mediterranean, in the confines of homes, workplaces and public spaces in various parts of the world (Duboin et al. 2020). In many regards, the concept of ecotone has followed a similar trajectory as the proximate notion of “contact zones”, initially forged in postcolonial literary critique (Pratt 1991) and later spread to social sciences. The scholarship on contact zones has mostly focused on cities. By contrast, the ecotone does not designate a specific type of migration place. The aim of this paper is to firm up the conceptualization of ecotones and engage with the debate on more-than-relational geography. We argue that it could be considered as a perspective, a heuristic toolbox to investigate places affected by migration.

Our intent is to re-embed the social and cultural dynamics of human interactions into the materiality of space (including environment) and the path dependency of past relations. It is concerned by the normative order of power dynamics. It brings to the fore the structuring force of social interactions and long-

distance diaspora connections. Materiality, temporality and power, it is argued, are the key features shaping encounters in ecotones.

The concept of ecotone adds to our understanding of migratory place making in three ways. First, by regarding encounters (with non-migrants, other migrants, objects of authoritative power, etc.) as the matrix of territorialization of migration flows, it bridges local processes with global dynamics. Second, the dual genealogy of the term, inherited from environmental and postcolonial studies, draws analytical attention to both material (environmental) and immaterial (cultural) features. Thirdly, the notion of ecotone encapsulates the temporal thickness of migration place-making.

The paper starts with a conceptualization of the notion of ecotone. It connects the concept with proximate notions that have framed our understanding of migratory geographies so far: migrant space and migration place, migratory fields, ethnic enclaves, transnational and diaspora spaces, frontiers and contact zones. The second part of the paper substantiates the argument by providing two illustrations. Following Lefebvre’s call for a multidisciplinary approach to space production, the argument is substantiated by two studies written by a researcher in postcolonial studies and by a social scientist. The intent is not to merely showcase the variety of possible perspectives on ecotones but enrich the concept by connecting its multifaceted meanings. These two cases have been chosen to give flesh to the main aspects of the concept of ecotone. The first illustration draws on the analysis of a short story, “Out on Main Street”, by Canadian writer and artist Shani Mootoo (Out on Main Street, 1993). It focuses the dynamic of social encounter and its identity underpinnings. The second illustration revisits research on the city of Calais and its so-called Jungle. This section brings a complementary light on the role of “more-than-relational factors” in structuring the interactions in this contact zone, namely time, connectivity, power and the physical environment.

# 1 | Contact Zones In Transnational Spaces

The notion of ecotone casts a bridge between migratory places and migratory spaces. Although seemingly straightforward, the notions of and relationships between space and place have been the focus of a long-standing debate among migration geographers. As shown by Linn Axelsson and Charlotta Hedberg in this special issue, the debate emphasized the local dimension of migratory dynamics rather than Nation-States (Axelsson and Hedberg 2025, 3). In the migration scholarship, migration space is mainly understood as the emergent outcome of interconnected places, linked by multifarious flows of people, money, ideas, goods, etc. The main input of geographers has been, in this regard, to “ensemble” migration dynamics and their cultural, economic, or social outcomes, against the temptation elicited by mobility studies to consider immigrant transnationalism as free-floating, deterritorialised process (King 2012).

John Agnew distinguishes three ways in which place can be addressed (Agnew 2011). First, it is the *locale* of everyday activities, it is a portion of space marked by a specific process.
Secondly, it can be construed as a *location* where an activity or
process takes place in relation with similar events taking place
in other, distant sites. Places are thereby coordinates of a wider
spatial ensemble. Thirdly, from a phenomenological perspec-
tive, places can be understood through the *sense of place* they
elicit, such as a sense of belonging or the meanings and values
associated with it This latest approach is close to the one
articulated by such a scholar as Yi-Fu Tuan, whose work in
geography was influential among postcolonial scholars, espe-
cially when he defines place as the way space is organized by
human subjectivity, modified by experiences, memories, etc.: "Place is then composed of both culturally created and natural
elements, intertwined and inseparable for human identity:
[Place] is made up of experiences, mostly fleeting and
undramatic, repeated day after day and over the span of years"
(Tuan 1977, 183).

Drawing on this triple perspective, migration places can be
alternatively addressed as locales where migration processes
take place, such as settlement and integration or departure and
its determinants; as locations connected through transnational
relations and circulations (such as the multiple settlement areas
of diasporas); or through the imprint they leave on migrants'
subjectivities such as the experience of constraints at the border,
or a sense of belonging to settlement areas. The following sec-
tion examines the ways in which migration geographers have
combined these different analytical angles in their approaches.

1.1 | Translocations: Migration Places in Cross-Border Social Fields

Migration spaces delineated by cross-border flows and translo-
cal connections are a not so recent object of research in
migration geography. In their pioneering works on the Swedes
in the US and the Tunisians in France, respectively, the geog-
raphers Torsten Hägerstrand and Gildas Simon used the term
migratory fields to designate the space of intertwined migratory
networks linking places of departure and settlement
(Hagerstrand et al. 1957; Simon 1979). Two decades later, this
approach was revived by American sociologists and anthro-
pologists. Early works focused on cross-border socialities (Basch
et al. 1994). Since then, transnational studies have become a
dominant approach to migratory phenomena (see Axelsson and
Hedberg 2025). The research has shown that most transnational
connections elicited by migration are translocal connections.
With the migration routes leading migrants from rural towns of
the Global South to Western gateway cities, with the sending
of remittances to family members, or the development projects
of hometown organizations for the benefit of the village of
origin, most transnational activities link specific locations in
sending and receiving countries. An example of this is given by
the work of Rim Affaya on transnational Moroccan traders.
Map 1, titled the transnational circuit of Moroccan transport
companies, shows the trade routes borrowed by a wealth of
small vans carrying goods to cities where brokers and trans-
portation agencies dispatch them to be sold in local shops
(Affaya 2024). This approach is characteristic of trajectoryl
spaces, "that are constituted from the movement of goods and
living beings that are synthesized to create them"
(Weidenhaus 2024, 101). It is worth noting that the flows

interconnecting these locations are multifarious. Migration
induces the back-and-forth mobility of people but also of
money, goods, ideas, symbols, values, etc. Migration thereby
affects place-making both at the material and immaterial levels.

This body of work has addressed places as coordinates in
relations with each other within wider spatial ensembles.
Local to local connections foster translocal migration spaces
woven into a canvas of interlaced corridors. Through their
activities and connections, migrants transform the places
they settle in in many different ways, transforming their
material landscape and adding layers of meaning. Migrants
transform the city neighborhoods they traverse by their ways
of living, the shops they open, the associations they set up...
They transform cities to facilitate their movements. In doing
so they also facilitate the incoming of future migrations.
Locations made by migration are the crucible of a collective
memory which is passed on from one generation to the next.
Some argue that the heightened capacities for mobility and
connectivity have exacerbated the different dimensions of
place-making. Steven Vertovec has coined the term super-
diversity to refer to the co-presence of populations with
highly diverse backgrounds (Vertovec 2007). The geographer
Michel Lussault talks about ‘hyper-places’, i.e., places char-
acterized by a high degree of social interactions embedded in
the various spatial and temporal scales (Lussault 2017).
Globalization, they suggest, has amplified place making in all
its dimensions.

1.2 | Locales of Migration Processes

Migration places can be construed as sites shaping and shaped
by the events they contain. A large array of research on housing
dynamics driving segregation or gentrification processes, on job
market incorporation and many other facets of migration set-
tlements processes have shed light on the different aspects of
the formation of immigrant neighborhoods. They document the
way they are transformed by the presence of immigrants and,
conversely, how this presence in the city in constrained by
domestic, social, economic or political forces leading to differ-
entiated outcomes in different settings. For instance, the inertia
of socioeconomic-based disparities in German cities explains
why there has been limited racial segregation despite recent
massive inflows of immigrants (Marcińczak and Bernt 2021).
Conversely, in US cities, race-based segregation persists 50 years
after the legal ban of racial discrimination in lending and
housing and despite growing social mobility among Black and
Latino populations. Unequal distribution of power and resources,
on the one hand, and the role of private brokers in sorting access
to the housing market on the other explain this persistence
(Hwang and McDaniel 2022).

Students of ethnic business shed a complementary light on the
factors shaping processes in immigrant neighborhoods (Portes
and Rumbaut 2006; Terzano 2014). They analyse the impact of
the presence of immigrant businesses on urban public spaces.
But they also highlight the influence of long-distance trade
relations on local activities (Portes et al. 2002; Fleury
et al. 2020). For instance, research shows how businesses in the
Chinatowns in Western cities have evolved with the opening of
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**MAP 1** | The transnational circuit of Moroccan transporters.</figcaption></figure>

China since the early nineties. This opening enabled the formation of trade routes between production sites in mainland China while Chinese enclaves in Western countries became places of storage and distribution (Li 2021). This body of works shows that localized events in migration places are undergird not only by domestic factors, but also by processes happening at distance. The structuring role of connectivity is observed in all aspects of migrants' lives. Focusing on the everyday transnationalism of families and associations (Smith 2006; Boccagni 2011), research shows how any decisions, from lifetime decisions such as marriage, to the most casual daily practices can be made in relation with long-distance bounds and engagements.

**1.3 | The Sense of Migration Place: Contact Zones Between Locals and Diasporans**

Taking a different stance, another body of works examines how people experience their multi-scalar embedding, how they adjust to local interactions and long-distance connections in their daily life. This study has largely studied the phenomenological and identity dimensions of migration places. The seminal work of Arjun Appadurai or Doreen Massey initiated a large body of works on how globalization fashioned new ethnoscapes, reshaped the daily interactions and perceptions (Appadurai 1995; Massey 1991). Authors have put the emphasis on the emergence of creolized cultures whose grammar borrows
from multiple repertoires (Cohen and Sheringham 2017). Identity making in migration places feeds into both diaspora connections and local, mixed-race vernacular (Back 2017). The city is a setting saturated with signs whose reading and interpretation must be decoded by those settling in. The multiple layers of traces left by successive generations of migrants endow the immigrants' neighborhoods with their temporal thickness (Berthomière 2012).

More recent works have questioned the promise of a new social equilibrium buttressed on hybridization dynamics. Not only hybrid cultural forms but also ambivalent hospitality, mutual ignorance, competition and segregation emerge from daily coping strategies. A body of works investigates the daily interactions of populations with and without immigration background in the so-called “contact zones” (Pratt 1991; Allport et al. 1954). They look into interpersonal relations to see whether regular interactions between individuals would ultimately lead to mutual understanding rather than to conflict, and under what conditions. This study produced mixed evidence in a variety of settings such as the street, workplaces, school gates, sports clubs, communal gardens, art galleries, shops and malls, etc. It shows that certain types (e.g. sustained encounters, rather than fleeting ones) of contacts in specific contexts may lead to meaningful interactions (Matejskova and Leitner 2011; Askins and Pain 2011; Lehmkuhl et al. 2015).

Research on contact zones sheds light on the daily workings of hybrid encounters. But the latter do not necessarily lead to a stronger sense of group belonging. Encounters may also lead to differentiation and segregation. Hostile interactions in public spaces, sometimes reinforced by police interventions, are conducive to the production of “boundaries of civility” regulating coexistence between distinct social groups (Ye 2019). It produces and is produced by a topography of power determining who is entitled to be where and at what time (Ye 2019). The contact zone scholarship shows that daily power relations are not only conditioned by a top-down state territoriality, but also by the shock of social interactions (Amin 2002).

Focusing on the here and now of the encounter, works on Global North contact zones tend to obscure the long-distance connections in which individuals are embedded. Revisiting the concept of frontiers as contact areas between societies where boundaries are contested, African anthropologists re-inscribed local interactions into broader translocal contexts. Frontiers are places “in constant flux and change as new influences and social practices intrude and are transformed and domesticated” (Bank 2015, 1069; see also Jensen and Zenker 2015). The study of Leslie Bank on the connection between South African urban migrants and their homeland shows that not only do they transform rural Transkei through their housing investment, but also do they import new frames of belonging and citizenship against the grain of traditional norms. In a different manner, such work points to the politics of contact zones. They appear as relational places marked by specific and selective modes of incorporation (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2008). They are traversed by internal lines of fractures erected by micropolitics of daily interactions, the mesopolitics of urban planning and the macropolitics of migratory regimes.

## 1.4 | Towards a More-Than-Relational Concept of Migration Place

Migration research addresses the relation between migration space and place in different ways. This brief overview shows that the relational, processual, and phenomenological understandings of places outlined by John Agnew are present in the scholarship. Transnational scholars and students of contact zones have approached the relation between migratory places and spaces from opposite vantage points. While the former regarded migration places as nodes where transnational flows converge, the latter have first addressed daily interactions within localities before incorporating them into a wider web of connections. For the sake of space, the overview outlined above only accounts for the studies that focused on cities. But the same could be said of research addressing other types of spaces such as borders. The latter have been investigated as a canvas of interlocked places, as specific areas where control policies and avoidance strategies are taking place or as sites where legal categorization is experienced.

This overview brings into light the diversity of conceptual and disciplinary perspectives on migration places, from the most generic (place of immigration, area of settlement) to the most specific (enclave, frontier, hyper place, contact zones), the literature is fraught with terms and concepts designating migration places. Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, urbanists, or postcolonial scholars have developed their specific analytical lenses to understand the bearing of migration flows on the spatial texture of social phenomena. Henri Lefebvre had already denounced the danger of fragmentation (Lefebvre 1996) and called for a genuine interdisciplinary dialog on the production of space.

Despite this fragmentation, extant approaches remain embedded in a relational understanding of space. What this relation consists of may vary. For transnational scholars, migration space is made of distance places connected by multifarious flows. For students of contact zones, it is the outcome of daily interpersonal relations. But this relational approach tends to leave aside the agential power of space. Paraphrasing Bartmanski and Füller, we argue that in contemporary theories of migration spatiality, “space still tends to appear as a taken-for-granted and passive background rather than a composite and consequential condition of life” (Bartmanski and Füller 2023).

It is our contention that both loopholes are linked and should be addressed together. Acknowledging the emergent nature of socio-spatial configurations requires an epistemology of emergence, that is to say a common conceptual platform making a cross-fertilizing dialog between disciplines possible, rather than a mere juxtaposition of complementary standpoints premised on distinct frameworks. Such a dialog draws on the postulate that no disciplinary perspective can exhaust the meaning of space.

Expanding on this, we seek to capture what drives the relation between all kinds of migration places and migratory spaces. What are the dynamics taking place while human, material, monetary, and ideational cross-border flows territorialize? This
brief review of extant research shows that this “agential power”
of space keeps on popping out under three guises. The first one
is materiality: not only man-made (buildings, migrant houses,
warehouses, shops, travel agencies, places of worship, traces left
on walls), but also natural environment (soil, temperature, cli-
mate, geology, etc.)... they all form a spatial canvas that con-
ditions the materialization of flows.

The second one is power. Political authorities use space to ex-
ercise power. The implementation of police stations, CCTV
cameras, fences, but also of schools, fire stations, and other
public services are different ways for states to territorialize the
rule of law. Places also affect behaviors through the moral
representations they are imbued with. In a previous work, we
have shown how migration places are embedded in a moral
geography of transnational networks (Lacroix 2020). Likewise,
cities of arrival are marked by a moral universe in which mi-
grants need to learn to navigate and adjust their behaviors
accordingly (Cattan 2014; Ye 2019).

The third one is time. Previous migration and the multifarious
dynamics induced by their insertion have left lagging traces that
condition the reception of current ones. The building and
reproduction of collective memories in immigrant neighbor-
hoods underpin the acceptance of newcomers (Hickman 2012).
Likewise, the lingering presence of arrival infrastructures, set
up to support (such as reception centers, civil society organi-
zations, etc.) or constrain (police and other power arrange-
ments) past inflows, marks the arrival of new ones.

Materiality, time, and power shape encounters and the territo-
rialization of transnational circulations. This is what the con-
cept of ecotone strives to encapsulate, thus enhancing the
meaning of migration place.

2 | Defining Migratory Ecotones

We propose to revisit the concept of ecotone and use it as an
analytical lens for the study of migratory places. Migratory
ecotones can be defined as places produced by the cultural,
social, and material territorialization of transnational migratory
flows and their evolution over time. They are areas of contact
between populations with different migratory background,
shaping and shaped by the competition, conflict, innovation,
and hybridization dynamics elicited by their interactions. The
concept of ecotones encapsulates the three complementary
dimensions of migration place: it is a locale where migrants
make contact with things and people; a location where suc-
cessive waves of transnational flows converge; a sense of place
elicited by the intercultural and power dynamics of migration
settlements. This section examines the different aspects of this
definition.

2.1 | Ecotones as Locales of Material and Cultural Encounters

Ecotones can first be considered as settings where migration-
related processes such as settlement, integration, segregation, or
development take place. Because of its peculiar trajectory, the

notion brings into light the dual, i.e., material and cultural,
levels of these processes. As explained earlier, the term initially
comes from environmental studies. Three decades ago, it was
imported into the field of postcolonial studies by Florence Krall
who coined the notion of cultural ecotones:

Cultural ecotones are the pluralistic contexts out of which conflict and change emerge; they are places where society smooths the wrinkles in her skirt. (...) The ecotone, which, in the natural world provides a dynamic interchange, becomes exceedingly complex as a cultural metaphor and may represent a barrier that blocks some people from their rightful place in the scheme of things. (Krall 1994, 4-5)

It brings to the fore the “encounter” as the core of social and
spatial processes: encounters between cultures, between I and
the Other, between agents and power structures, between
beings and their physical environment. It is underpinned by a
processual understanding of place making: the encounter is the
process through which social interactions are shaped by and
reshape spatial formations. Encounters are molded in extant
spatial-temporal configurations of actors, symbols, and objects
but they also renew them and condition future ones. Because of
its etymology, the notion of ecotone is an invitation to consider
in a same gesture nature and culture, and space and time. This
dual meaning underpins the duality of the dynamic of the en-
counter characterizing ecotones: encounters with other people
on the one hand, and with the materiality of the environment
on the other.

The ecotone approach was first applied in the study of insular
spaces and literatures. It was used to encapsulate their unique
ecosystems, between land and sea, between the intimacy of
isolated confines and maritime connections with far-flung
harbors. They foster archipelagic connections and creole
hybridities. These first explorations of insular ecotones cast
obvious bridges with migratory dynamics: “To focus on cultural
ecotones thus implies looking into the process of transcultura-
tion related to migration, the processes of diasporisation and
creolization” (Duboin et al. 2020). They are places of en-
counters, or contact zones, between people with distinct cul-
tural backgrounds, brought together by their respective lives
and migration trajectories.

## 2.2 | Migratory Ecotones as Transnational Locations

Ecotones are locations traversed by what the Barbadian poet
Kamau Brathwaite calls *tidalectics*, i.e., the ebbs and flows of
people, goods, money, ideas, memories coming from afar
(Reckin 2003; Hessler 2018) to rest in the present. The concept
that invokes “the continual movement and rhythm of the
ocean”² emerged from the image of an old woman sweeping
sand in her yard, repeatedly, every morning. While locally
embedded, people retain connections with and legacies from
distant horizons. Their presence connects ecotones with dia-
sporic universes spanning times and borders. Ecotones are
connected with distant places, but also with themselves in
distant times. They are saturated with memory: the contemporary detention camps of migrants in Lesbos, Nauru or Guantanamo resonate as contemporary echoes of sugar plantations and their slave economy. In this regard, they can be considered as a form of phase spaces (Jones 2009), i.e. places where current processes are informed by past circumstances. In other words, the ways transnational flows “encounter” and territorialize into local material and immaterial configurations hinge on the memories of past ecotonal interactions.

## 2.3 | Ecotones as Experiential Sites of Cultural Elaboration and Power Exercise

Ecotones are ambivalent sites of solidarity and creativity, but also of conflict and coercion. People's subjectivity is shaped by the encounters with others who live a multiscalar life, sharing their time between street-level daily interactions and their connection within distant social spaces, people who may be fierce working-class activists locally, but may be part of a local elite family in their hometown. Ecotones are places where hybrid cultural repertoires and a plural humanity build up. Bernard Lahire defines as “plural humans” people who have socialized in distinct social spheres, be they local, or diasporic, professional, gendered, sexual, or political (Lahire 2011). The plural human is made of this aggregation of roles acquired along their life trajectories, when they grow up, get married, have a new job, adhere to a new cause. They are made of the multiple proximate and distant social spheres within which they are embedded.

However, the formation of ecotonal spaces is also driven by the existence of coercive powers. The colonial hierarchy of the plantation has given way in contemporary migratory ecotones to the administrative power of immigration authorities on the one hand, to capitalist forces on the other. Whether embodied by the physical materiality of police presence or imposed by the diffuse (but no less violent) constraints of market relations, these powers contribute to hierarchizing migrants along class, gender, racial, national, or religious lines, which, in turn, shape subaltern subjectivities. Understanding the role of power in migratory ecotones is also understanding the role of space in conveying the exercise of power. It is the case when authorities “weaponise” the materiality of space to constrain the movements of people, or when the place is associated with moral representations that affect the presence of who is entitled and who is not, and their behaviors. Yet ecotones are also platforms of political and cultural resistance, places where communities of suffering take shape by transcending communal belongings. In this regard, they are the crucibles for the formation of heterotopia (Foucault 2004). Ecotones are both within and outside the societies they are embedded in, as sites of assignation and rebellion (Lacroix and Misrahi-Barak 2021).

Ecotones can therefore be understood as locales of migration processes, as locations within broader migration spaces, a site of migratory experiences of cultural elaboration and coercion. The concept thereby provides an analytical lens to study all forms of places affecting and affected by migration: gateway cities, of course, but also borders, camps on far-flung islands, maritime and desert spaces, but also villages receiving asylum seekers,

etc. This analytical perspective can be applied to the analysis of entire cities or regions as well as micro-level locales of interactions. It invites researchers to investigate how places are shaped by the material and immaterial flows elicited by migration, while they interlock with the cultural, material, power and temporal configuration of the place. However, the concept of ecotone does not provide a unified methodology to address the dynamics at play. It provides a common ground for an interdisciplinary dialog on the complexities of migration dynamics.

We will now use this framework to examine two types of ecotones from closer up: the city and its interstices, namely *the marketspace*; an ecotonal non-place, *the camp*. These two studies have been chosen to illustrate the interdisciplinary dialog fostered by this approach, but also two of its central tenets. The literary analysis of the short story ‘Out on Main Street’ sheds light on the dynamic of the social encounter and its identity underpinnings. The geographic analysis of the Jungle will unveil the step-by-step evolution of a phase space and the role of power and (weaponised) environment affecting the presence of migrants in the area.

## 3 | The Immigrant Shop as Ecotone

In line with the interdisciplinary spirit in which the concept of ecotone has been forged, the first example draws on a literary text. ‘Out on Main Street’ is part of the eponymous collection of short stories by Shani Mootoo which belongs to the corpus studied by one of the authors of this paper (Misrahi-Barak 2021). Mootoo was born in Dublin but grew up in Trinidad in a family with distant connections to the 19th century indentured laborers who had migrated from India to the Caribbean between 1834 and 1917. She established herself in Canada in the 1980s. Published in 1993, the story is written in a creolized English that translates the ecotonal culture of the setting. The unnamed female narrator and her girlfriend Janet are ‘out on Main Street’ Toronto, in a *meethai* (sweets) shop, far from Trinidad and even further away from their ancestors who had left India as indentured laborers between the 1830s and the 1920s to work on colonial sugar plantations in the 19th century. Through the angle of fiction and the use of comedy, the short story sheds a different light on urban ecotones as they are formed through migration flows that converge and diverge, creating compact layers of time and memory that contribute to assemble the present (see the ‘thickness of time’ above). The short story does not step into the realm of undocumented migrants and highlights the cultural dynamics taking place in diverse ethnoscapes. Cities are places of intercultural abundance and commercial dynamism. They are paradoxical places of both reproduction and reconfiguration of migrant cultures and identity. One thinks of the enclaves of American metropolises, of London's cultural mosaic, of the ‘Asian’, ‘Turkish’ or ‘African’ districts of Paris, Amsterdam, or Berlin. And this is not unique to the cities of the North. Kolkata lives on its ‘para’ neighborhoods, where people from the same rural areas, castes or professions gather, sometimes along several centuries (Hillion 2020).

The short story was chosen for this article because it is highly representative of the way a fictional text can be a concentration
of the global and local stakes when tensions, frictions, and in-
teractions are constantly changing on the interpersonal, social,
and political stage of urban dynamics. Far from only operating
on the level of representation, it also shows how a fictional text
can perform and problematize such dynamics.

'Out on Main Street' takes us to a *meethai* shop, i.e., an Indo-Caribbean-Canadian variation of the shop around the corner, in one of the diasporic Indo-Caribbean neighborhoods of Toronto:

Janet and me? We does go Main Street to see pretty pretty
sari and bangle, and to eat we belly full a burfi and gulub
jamoon, but we doh go too often because, yuh see, is dem
sweets self what does give people like we a presupposition
for untameable hip and thigh.

Another reason we shy to frequent dere is dat we is
watered-down Indians – we ain’t good grade A Indians.
We skin brown, is true, but we doh think ‘bout India
unless something happen over dere and it come on de
news. Mih family remain Hindu ever since mih ancestors
leave India behind, but nowadays dey doh believe in
praying unless things real bad...³

To foreground the multistranded historical and social relations
that immigrants and their descendants are involved in, Mootoo
zooms in on the microcosmic space of the shop. The author
brings to life these ‘plural humans’ (see above) populating
urban ecotones. The general impression is that one never quite
fits in — too Indian or not Indian enough, too Caribbean or not
Caribbean enough, too black, too white, or too brown. They
always already exceed what they should be. Like Abdelmalek
Sayad (1999), Mootoo asks the question of dis-placement
(displaced, migrants never feel totally entitled to be where
they are), of diaspora and of the continuation, or reproduction,
or questioning of *community*.

I used to think I was a Hindu par excellence until I come
up here and see real flesh and blood Indian from India.
Up here, I learning 'bout all kind a custom and food and
music and clothes dat we ever see or hear 'bout in good
ole Trinidad. Is de next best thing to going to India, in
truth, oui! But Indian store clerk on Main Street doh have
patience with us, especially when we talking English to
dem. Yuh ask dem a question in English and dey insist
on giving de answer in Hindi or Punjabi or Urdu or
Gujarati. How I suppose to know de difference even! And
den dey look at yuh disdainful disdainful – like yuh
disloyal, like yuh is a traitor. (Mootoo 1993, 47-48)

The story unfurls a series of encounters and incidents in the
*meethai* shop, that push to the surface the question of who gets
to decide who is what, and who gets the right to be where. Here,
status assignation does not come from an external authority but
is nested within interpersonal encounters. Caribbean, Indian,
Indo-Caribbean, Canadian, Indo-Caribbean-Canadian, Fijian,
Sikh, Hindu, Moslem, etc., and of course man, woman, or
queer. On top of questions related to citizenship, religion, and

gender, it is also the question of the *space* that is granted to
second- or third-generation immigrants that is raised, as well as
that of the *place* they make for themselves. Through the concept
of the ecotone, we can understand how the 'plural humanity',
the *humanness* of the individual and of the group is recognized
and *re-instated* symbolically. Systemic racism and daily en-
counters introduce seemingly irreconcilable fault lines between
the different spheres of people's being. They are disciplinary
tools to keep people at their place within a social and spatial
hierarchy.

And yet, in between these cracks, coping strategies and daily
interactions fashion a plural humanity. 'Out on Main Street'
also enables the reshaping of a space that is enclosed yet porous
to the outer world and to individual and collective history.
Other short stories in the collection, such as "Nocturnals" or
"Sushila's Bhakti" address related questions of belonging and
the creation of new identities. But in the one that has been
analysed above, the *meethai* shop is the perfect example of a
self-contained locus of social interactions *and* of a crossroads
where transborder flows and linkages converge. The short story
shows how new alliances are drawn up and boundaries shift.
Janet and her friend receive scorn for not being "grade A
Indians" and not knowing their *meethai*. But when ignorant
racists enter the shop, the customers' loyalties shift to support
the humiliated shop owners. In turn, when the shop owners
show a sexist attitude towards the female customers, they lose
the support they have just earned. And when the lesbian couple
of Janet and her narrator friend "blow their cover", the same
heterosexual women who supported them against the white or
brown racist or sexist men, turn against them. Conflict makes
for strange bedfellows, as new solidarities and allegiances are
constantly formed in the ecotone. In the story, the alternative
space takes shape through language, a "nation language" to
borrow Kamau Brathwaite's phrase, powerful enough to upset
the normative discourse of race, religion, class, and gender, and
it far exceeds the separate elements that compose it (Indian
Ocean history, Toronto, India, the Caribbean, indentured labor,
post-indentureship remigration, etc.). The *meethai* shop illus-
trates the complex, ever-shifting ways the local interacts with
the global, and the present with the past. It becomes a space
that is at once circumscribed and open, but more importantly,
that is prone to the creation of new identities, traversed by the
flows that constitute them.

4 | The Jungle of Calais: The Camp as Ecotone

The first vignette analysed above was situated at the heart of a
Canadian metropolis whose social fabric has been woven by
multiple layers of immigration waves. The second illustration
now brings us to the outskirts of a small city, not because the
immigrants have chosen to go there, but because of its geo-
graphic location on the way towards the United Kingdom: the
camp known as the Jungle of Calais. This section draws the
analysis of secondary academic (literature review) and non-
academic material (newspaper articles, online testimonies) as
well as on two field visits in Calais undertaken with Marie
Godin (University of Leicester) and Delphine Mercier (Maison
Française d'Oxford) in March and April 2024. Interviews and
commented visits of the different informal dwellings were
undertaken with representatives of local associations: Utopia 56, Human Right Observer, and l'Auberge des Migrants.

Camps can be seen as a specific form of ecotone. They are
places of passage that one could describe as non-places
(Augé 1992), places where migrants stay at times transiently,
at times durably, yet always temporarily. One may argue that
non-places and ecotones are two antinomic terms. Yet a closer
analysis reveals how important these interstices along the
migration journeys are in shaping dynamics that leave enduring
marks on individuals and their trajectory, and on the other
individuals they encounter. Calais and its Jungle provide an
emblematic example of what these informal camps are
(Agier 2018). Construed as a phase space, we analyse below the
evolution of this setting in three steps, each one preparing the
stage for the following one.

4.1 | Phase One: The Pre-History of the Jungle

The presence of undocumented migrants waiting to cross the Channel has been confirmed since 1986. Situated 50 km from Dover, Calais is the closest continental point from the British Isles. It hosts a ferry terminal and the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Because of these facilities, Calais is a place where migrants have converged since the 1980s. In other words, Calais became a migratory ecotone not because of its intrinsic (economic) attractiveness, but because of its location on political (border) and physical (coastal) discontinuity. Migrants were attempting to cross the Channel by climbing illegally on the trucks boarding the ferries and the train (Shuttle).

Their number and origin have evolved over time. Kosovars in
the early 1990s have been replaced by Somalis, Afghans,
Sudanese, Iranians, Iraki, Eritreans and, more recently, Alba-
nians. The city of Calais was an important stopover within a
complex and evolving migration space. Migrants were dwelling
in informal camps in the parks and wastelands scattered in the
city. With the settlement of immigrants, the city became a
contact zone where very diverse populations mixed and min-
gled, and where spontaneous solidarity would spark, whether it
be Calaisians offering accommodation to homeless migrants,
local support organizations such as L'Auberge des migrants
(The Migrants' Hostel), or NGOs (Médecins du Monde, Méde-
cins sans Frontières).

After a decade of laissez-faire, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then Home Secretary to Lionel Jospin's government, forced the migrants out of the city and into the reception centre of Sangatte in 1999 (Centre d'hébergement et d'accueil d'urgence humanitaire, CHAUH). Located 9 km away from Calais, it was set up in a former depot used when the Channel Tunnel was being dug (see map 2, the Jungle: an ecotone between land and sea). The number of persons hosted in the centre varied between 800 and 1400. When Sangatte was closed in 2002 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Home Secretary, migrants were dispersed throughout the region. Informal camps mushroomed along the roads leading to Calais's harbor and to Cherbourg, Grande-Synthes, Norrent-Fontes, Angres, and Steenvoorde as well as in Calais itself, behind the factory of the chemical company Tixoide.

4.2 | Phase 2: The Jungle: A Cultural Contact Zone on an Ecological Ecotone

These groupings were again evacuated in April 2015 and then
moved to the “New Jungle”. At that time, what was to become
the Jungle was a site located 7 km away from the city centre in
the vicinity of two chemical plants storing toxic materials. The
Northern side of the camp is bordered by the sea. It expands
southward on a natural reserve classified “ZNIEFF” (Zone
d’Intérêt écologique, faunistique et floristique). This dune land of
low grass hosts in its midst a small 300-meter-long lake bor-
dered by woods which is a nesting area for sea larks and other
local birds. It is protected from the maritime winds sand dunes,
and by the motorway embankment. Located between land and
sea, this area is an ecotone in the environmental sense of the
term, a protected humid zone. Its ecological features and the
proximity of chemical industries preserved the area from any
urban infringement (see Map 2).

Remoteness and access easily controllable by police forces ex-
plain why the municipality chose this place to relocate immi-
grants. Designed originally for 1500 people, it accommodated
up to 10,000 people on a 30-ha piece of land in 2016, just before
it was dismantled. Migrants had initially no access to water or
electricity nor to any other facility. But the soil made of sand is
dense enough to support light habitations while absorbing most
of the water in excess. The proximity of the motorway N216 that
leads to the Ferry terminal makes it one of the stopovers on the
way to the United Kingdom. Migrants would leave the camp at
dusk, reach via the motorway one of the petrol stations where
they would try and sneak onto a truck during night-time. Its
location makes it both a place of local isolation and of cross-
border connection.

Migrants made the most of the small available space to produce
a makeshift form of urbanity. The Southern part, with its open
space covered with grass, is the most populated. Entering the
area via the rue de la Garenne, the visitor is immediately struck
by the restlessness of the place. The muddy populated street
gathers restaurants, hotels and shops, most of them run by
Afghans. Further away stands the Coptic church surrounded by
the Erythrean neighborhood. From there, several lanes lead
towards the different groups of informal habitation areas of the
camp (Sudanese, Afghans, and Pakistanis, etc.). The “Chemin
de la Garenne” itself carries on and crosses the land until the
Southern entry of the site and the camp secular school. The
Northern part of the Jungle was less populated until the
Southern part was dismantled in March 2016. Its wooden part
and thick bushes leave less space for habitations to build up.
After the bulldozing of the Southern part, around 8000 people
squeezed into a 10-ha area. This density of population forbade
any form of group-based structuration and tensions were much
more frequent.

The Calais camps attracted a large number of volunteers,
militants (such as the No Border movement), and artists
(including Banksy). An artist collective named Art in the Jungle
organized public exhibitions in December 2015. This varied
population rubbed shoulders in the Jungle's social spaces: its
accommodations, its restaurants, theaters, libraries, and cafes
were all spaces that generated what Patrick Chamoiseau has
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**MAP 2** | The Jungle: an ecotone between land and sea. Author: Thomas Lacroix, 2024.</figcaption></figure>

termed ‘the other fraternity’ in his novel *Frères Migrants* (Migrant Brothers) but that, at times, could also generate violent conflicts.

By contradistinction, the two sections of the camp maintained by public authorities in the Northern zone present a totally different atmosphere. At the Northern end of the Jungle stood the “Jules Ferry” day centre. Built within a former municipal leisure centre, it hosts a canteen, a health centre, showers, and rooms for women and minors. In October 2015 a second reception centre named “Centre d’Accueil Provisoire” (CAP) was opened. Surrounded by a fence, it consisted of a series of 125 white containers lined up on a bed of gravel. It offered bunk beds to minors but any form of personal appropriation of the

space was forbidden. The contrast was blatant between the fraternity seen in the Jungle, which could often be brotherly, even if at times conflictual, and the cold anonymity of the CAP. In the ecotone of the Calais Jungle two co-existing architectures and two modes of living generated the grassroots socialities of refugees, on the one hand, the panoptic organization maintained by public authorities on the other.

**4.3 | Phase 3: After the Jungle**

The Jungle was dismantled in 2016. This eviction combined with an enhanced effort by French and British authorities to fence off the access to the Tunnel, put an end to the Calais-Dover
route. Fences, CCTV, carbon dioxide sensors, thermic cameras, and dogs made it possible for police officers to detect migrants hidden inside trucks. But this did not put an end to Calais being a border ecotone, former settlements that existed prior the Jungle were filled with boulders to impede the return of migrants (see Figures 1 and 2: pictures of boulders in Calais). The setting of the Jungle has returned to its initial function of a natural reserve. Garbage was evacuated and 30 cm of soil has been scraped off to remove any trace of waste and chemicals dumped by nearby plants. Sea larks have come back for the pleasure of bird watchers. But woods have been cut down and the land has been buried to widen the flooded zones: the landscape has been modified to prevent any attempt of resettlement (Figure 3: the setting of the Jungle today). However informal camps re-formed, this time on the outskirt of the city. Calais became a transit area before small boats departed from the coastal area between Dunkerque and Abbeville. Another ecological feature has become a focus of attention: the height of waves. Below half a meter, the crossing becomes possible for small boats. Smugglers and activists, and probably the police itself, all use their mobile app “Windy” to monitor the state of the sea and the subsequent opening of a window of opportunity. Local civil society organizations had to adapt to the new situation. While they carry on taking care of transient migrants locally, they have also organized to assist those who depart from the coastal area by patrolling on the seashore and setting up a hotline for distress calls. Despite this support, the weaponisation of the environment by border authorities has reached a new level with the use of sea and the lethal threat it represents as a tool to deter crossings.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** | Boulders in Calais. Source: Marie Godin, 2025.</figcaption></figure>

This brief overview shows how and why an ecotonal place can evolve over time. It sheds light on the importance of the material environment and its growing weaponisation by police authorities. Calais became a border ecotone because of its physical location as the nearest continental point to the UK. The arrival of migrants from around the world embedded this migration place into a global canvas of global flows. But the enforcement of police measures radically transformed the territorialization of these flows. Security policies were conducive of the forced concentration of immigrant populations (first in

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 2** | Boulders in Calais. Source: Marie Godin, 2025.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 3** | The setting of the Jungle today. Source: Marie Godin, 2025.</figcaption></figure>
Sangatte, then in the Jungle) followed by dispersion locally (in informal camps on the outskirts of the city) and regionally, in the coastal area. They also transformed the city landscape with the building of fences along the roads to the port and of boulders in any potential settlement area. Each phase conditions the configuration of the following one, leading successive waves of migrants to adjust to the extant circumstances and fashioning solidarity encounters with local populations. Despite adverse circumstances, Calais has become a form of heterotopia, a crucible of cultural innovations and social movements, having been the stage of unaccountable art pieces and of the training of many generations of activists.

## 5 | Conclusion: Ecotones as More-Than-Relational Transnational Locations

This paper revisits the concept of ecotone to propose a more-than-relational approach to transnational locations. The concept adds to the notion of contact zone insofar it also takes into account the importance of long-distance socialities and flows. It adds to our understanding of migratory place-making by pointing out not only the temporal embedding of contemporary encounters but also the agential power of the material and ecological environment. The two examples in this paper investigate the dynamics at play in these ecotones at different scales. The first one takes place in the premises of a small shop at the heart of an immigrant neighborhood in Toronto. In this short story, Shani Mootoo sketches daily interactions between individuals with different backgrounds. Entirely written in creolized English, the short story in itself performs hybridized cultures characterizing the ecotones of large metropolises. The author sheds light on the complex interplay between individuals and their different layers of identity, but also the power relations that may imbue them. The short story shows how ecotones, these relational contact zones, set the stage for the formation of a plural humanity and hybridized culture. The second example enlarges the focus of analysis by examining how natural, temporal, and power dynamics shape and reshape the reception of migration flows in the Calaisian ecotone.

Ecotones are sites where states can exercise their authoritative power over transnational flows. It is true in Calais, the same is true for 'hot spots' that have been opened on the margins of Europe, in Sicily, and on Greek Islands. The architecture of these hot spots is entirely designed to sort migrants depending on their eligibility to apply for asylum. There is no space for a multicultural population to express its plural humanity—psychological trauma and suicides have been reported (van de Wiel et al. 2021). This attempt to rationalize the management of migration flows has turned into a containment policy locking up bodies and subjectivities.

The paper highlights a second aspect of these more-than-relational ecotones: their material and environmental features. In Calais, it explains why this particular piece of land located in the Eastern outskirts of the city, has been occupied by migrants. It also undergirds the spatial distribution of habitations and facilities. A camp, like any other human compound, is a living organism traversed by organic and nonorganic streams. Since the dismantling of the Jungle, the area has morphed back into a

natural reserve. There is, however, a third feature shaping interactions: time and its inertia. Both Shani Mootoo's short story and the Jungle of Calais represent contact zones informed by the succession of migration waves, the forced ones and the semi-forced ones, from slavery to indentureship to post-WWII reconstruction. One could argue that the temporal thickness of ecotones may have even deeper roots. This is the case of Calais, where Sangatte, the reception centre that welcomed immigrants between 1999 and 2002, was built upon the site of a concentration camp accommodating Jewish workers for the building of the Atlantic wall during the Second World War (Fassin 2011). Traces of indentureship and remigration can be read in the *meethai* shop in Toronto. Echoes of a more distant past preceding migratory encounters keep haunting the present.

The analytical lens of migration places offered by the concept of ecotone starts from the dynamics of encounter and explores its multiscalar, physical, political, cultural, and temporal dimensions. The quality of the notion lies in its peculiar etymology, which opens different doors towards environmental, cultural, and social studies. It invites the analyst to borrow one of these openings and consider its relations with others. This is what has been done in this paper through the juxtaposition and cross-feeding dialog between two analytical sensitivities, two gazes on migration places. The concept of ecotone represents an invitation to engage differently in the research process and partake in a transdisciplinary epistemology of emergence. It bears the promises of a dialog beyond the confines of proximate disciplines meant to engage with a world in radical social, political, and environmental transformation.

### Acknowledgements

The study was funded by Le Grand Entrepot, ANR project ANR-21-CE26-0008.

### Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

### Data Availability Statement

The authors have nothing to report.

### Endnotes

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