Abstract

AbstractThe MERGING project addresses refugees’ reception and housing systems made available in several European countries by adopting a cross -national and comparative perspective. Access to adequate and affordable housing is regarded as one of the main actions t o integrate and include asylum seekers and refugees in Europe. However, to date the research and practice of models for integration tend to view housing as a complementary or secondary aspect with respect to other inclusion pillars such as language, work, or healthcare. The MERGING project, acknowledging the importance of housing for the inclusion and integration of refugees, has collected evidence about the institutional contexts of reference and five specific cases of housing in France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. The project perspective may be described as constructivist: migrant inclusion through housing into our societies is seen as constructed by interactions between individual, collective and institutional actors situated and reproduced by discursive practices and embedded in discursive orders. An exploratory approach is required, in which several heuristic perspectives are applied and combined. In particular, each European partner collected: • Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (third sector NGOs, internationalorganizations, immigrants’ associations; public administration - governing bodies;public administration - service providers) to reconstruct the political and operationalcontext in which the project is located. • Semi-structured interviews with members of the community (neighborhood, church,newsagent, individual citizen, pharmacist, commercial activities) to reconstruct theextent to which the social context enhances/obstructs the project. • Biographical interviews with migrants (present on the territory for at least one year)to reconstruct the subjective meaning they attribute to housing as a starting pointfor integration. In this data set are collected five codebooks collecting the number of the Interviews conducted by each partner. Only aggregated data are included and not the interview transcripts. Each codebook included the following items: Code, Data Type, Partner involved, Interviewer(s), Interviewee, Date, Place, Length, and Materials used (Audio files, Transcripts, Pictures, Notes, Others).