Placemaking under circumstances of forced displacement: The case of a community centre in the Syrian neighbourhood in Tarsus

This article examines refugee placemaking as a relational and politically embedded process through an ethnographic study of a community centre established in a Syrian tented neighbourhood in Tarsus, Turkey. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Syrian refugees, local residents, and public actors, the paper analyses how placemaking emerges through everyday practices, religious brokerage, and negotiations with local authorities under conditions of legal precarity and spatial informality. Rather than approaching placemaking solely as a phenomenological experience, the article conceptualises it as a power-laden and uneven process through which refugees establish contingent claims to presence while forming attachments and social relations over time. The findings show that placemaking can be politically enabling without being politically transformative: it facilitates social relations and forms of attachment while simultaneously reproducing gendered exclusions, moral hierarchies, and delegated modes of refugee governance. This article demonstrates how placemaking is organised in a semi-permanent tent settlement that develops outside of formal camp management, shaped by informal land use, agricultural labour relations, local mediation, and delegation of authority. It contributes to human-geographical debates by showing how place is made in an informal tented settlement—through religious brokerage and delegated governance rather than humanitarian design—moving beyond the conventional camp–city binary.