Chapter Becomings: Placemaking in the Inbetweenness, is the penultimate Chapter of the manuscript. It deals with the analysis from the perspective of the inhabitants of The Dzjangal, Tiburtina and Los Arenales exploring, through their state of inbetweenness, the process of creating social places within the urban dynamics. The first section of this Chapter examines how these places embody a temporality and spatiality that diverges from the norms of Western cities. Here, I contemplate the possibility of looking at them as "Elsewhere" through a post-colonial lens, bringing to light intertwined colonial traces within the narratives of the people in these places. I reflect on the complex relationship between migration and racism as manifestations of colonial legacies, contextualizing the colonial layers embodied by people-in-transit within the violent interaction with the surveillance technologies of the border regime and the racialized nature of labeling people-in-transit as "migrants" in a South American context.
In the subsequent section, I delve deeper into how these settlements are transforming ‘empty spaces’ into social places. Through their state of migratory inbetweenness, they imbue meaning into their surroundings, echoing the conceptualization of the critical geographer Doreen Massey ‘sense of place’ (1991). Here, I revisit again the concept of Liminality, critiquing it from a spatial and temporal standpoint. This analysis allows for a deeper exploration of the state of inbetweenness, portraying it not as a confined spatial setting but as an open space of conviviality and ongoing practice of becoming. These migratory processes serve as local responses to global phenomena, such as the crisis of border regime. This Chapter serves as the basis for my final reflections, in the Epilogue, on how these communities are reshaping urban spaces through alternative placemaking, ultimately leading to a much-needed redefinition of Western cities in a present postcolonial and postmigrant society.