Drawing on field observations conducted across multiple urban contexts in Muscat and semi-structured interviews with blue-collar migrants, white-collar migrants, and a policy analyst, the research traces how informal social life is produced, constrained, and recalibrated within daily routines of work, mobility, and rest. The findings show that everyday public life is organised through proximate micro-settings embedded in routes between work and accommodation, including shopfront edges, tea stalls, thresholds, and semi-private building spaces. These settings function as informal social infrastructure not because of design quality, but because they align with compressed leisure time, limited mobility, and the need to manage visibility.
The analysis further demonstrates that public presence is shaped by time scarcity, household form, social coding of space, and perceived enforcement ambiguity. Formal public spaces remain underused not due to absence or distance, but because their social norms and visibility costs render them unevenly accessible. Where street-level gathering becomes demanding, public life is reconfigured inward through the appropriation of rooftops and stairwells, revealing withdrawal as a spatial practice rather than an absence of placemaking.
By foregrounding everyday practice rather than formal provision, the thesis reframes informal social spaces as negotiated and provisional responses to structurally constrained urban conditions. In doing so, it contributes a grounded account of migrant urban life in Muscat and offers analytical insights into how public life is sustained, limited, and withdrawn under conditions of extended temporariness.
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