Conclusion: The Impossible Task

Displacement occupies a central position within the policy and planning agendas of nation-states, academic institutions, and international organisations alike.The term is employed to articulate the consequences of crises and their spatial dimensions, large-scale movements of people, and the persistent challenge of meeting the fundamental needs of millions who are compelled daily to escape violence, disaster, and environmental degradation.It is frequently juxtaposed with initiatives aimed at developing long-term responses, regulating mobility, and managing the arrival of displaced populations.Within these debates -spanning concerns of security, governance, and control, alongside the principles of freedom of movement, inclusion, and participation -the intertwined notions of refuge, shelter, and inhabitation remain of paramount importance.This book seeks to conceptualise displacement not as a particular absence, location, or category within migration studies, but rather as a generative process of territorial production -an urbanism in its own right -despite its conventional association with forms of life existing out of place.It wishes to contribute to other debates that have recently discussed displacement as urbanism directly (Huq and Miraftab, 2020;Soedberg, 2021;Lichtman and Traganu, 2024;Watt and Morris, 2024), while reframing displacement as urbanism, questioning its productive tensions with forms of exhaustion, extinction, extraction, and expulsion.Displacement produces territories, landscapes, and regions not as the sole outcome of territorial operation, biopolitical or capitalist, extractive or violent, securitarian or humanitarian, but as form of resistance, acceptance, and inevitable agency -fragile and precarious at most.However, such production -being an urbanism -is not a sole question of spatial practices.Rather, due to its planetary scale, it becomes a more ontological one: a way of being, a world-making issue generated by the complex and interrelated