Everyday Geographies and Secretly Public Spaces in Asylum Bristol

The chapter explores how the music group constituted a “secretly public” space of sociality and expression that highlighted the overlap, rather than opposition, of notions of public and private spaces and realms of action. By engaging with the “secret publicness” of the music space, the chapter underlines the tensions within established (psycho-social) reading of music and leisure as a “private” space of individualised healing and/or well-being, and as “public” opportunities to showcase refugees’ efforts to integrate or tools of political action. Building on these points, the chapter discusses how the notion of secretly public spaces can contribute to debates on the urban politics of asylum by complicating established assumptions around the public/private divide within urban struggles for the right to refuge (and to the city).