Geographies of Asylum in Europe and the Role of European Localities (original) (raw)
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This article examines refugee accommodation centers in Germany as constitutive elements of deterritorialized borders. It is argued that in the refugee experience, borders reveal themselves as ubiquitous rather than as mere separation lines between nation states. Before that backdrop, it is shown that the social production of refugee centers and camps rests on powerful processes of boundary drawings that replicate the b/ordering mechanisms of the nationalist order of our allegedly globalized world. Yet, this paper also employs a reversion of perspectives and exposes that manifold practices by refugees and their supporters challenge or (re-)negotiate these boundaries on various spatial levels. A special focus is put on the dimension of the everyday and everyday spatial practices. Rather than fixed once and for all, refugee centers, and boundaries more generally, are therefore understood as inherently unstable sites of struggles, as spaces of the articulation of the Political.
Whereas the recent Refugee Studies with geographical approach often focus on the state-refugees nexus and living conditions in refugee camps or accommodation centres, we propose an analysis of the refugees’ residential insecurity and institutional constraints, questioning how they generate and influence individual strategies of urban integration and resettlement. Hence, our approach is to compare the politically established, multi-scaled “spatial management” of refugees with the refugees’ individual actions and decisions within their spaces of arrival. For this, we compare Marseilles’ and Berlin’s accommodation systems and urban specificities that come within two different national and local settings in terms of politics and migration patterns. The core question we address is to understand if and how these two barely comparable political and administrative systems can still lead to similar refugee resettlement patterns within urban spaces. The studies are based on the authors’ intensive ethnographic fieldwork in both cities that helped carry out in-depth case studies on Syrian nationals. Keywords: Refugee Accommodation, Residential Trajectory, Ordinary Urban Experience, Urban Inscription Patterns, European Comparison.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF ASYLUM SEEKERS AND REFUGEES IN EUROPE
Recent waves of immigration flows and asylum seekers are posing serious social and political problems in European countries. Between 2009 and 2015, it has been estimated a total of 3-3.5 millions of asylum applications to national governments. This chapter discusses the geography of asylum seekers in the European Union and proposes some descriptive statistics concerning the behavioral reaction of residents. In particular, it is shown a strong correlation between the size of the population of asylum seekers and the fear of terrorism and crime, whereas no economic concern was found. This evidence is interpreted as need to provide also correct information to residents when implementing immigration policies.
The Local Production of Asylum
Current debates and conflicts surrounding the reception of asylum-seeking persons in Germany have reminded us once again of the central importance of the local setting. When investigating the conditions and ways of inclusion and exclusion of newcomers, the specificities of local contexts have long been neglected. While some scholars have called for a local turn in migration studies, we still face the difficult question of what to focus on when examining the local level. In this contribution, we argue that it does not suffice to focus on local policies and administrative practices. The challenge is to elaborate a research approach that does justice to the emergence and constant change of complex socio-political orders. Discussing how multiple actors and factors play into the negotiation of decent accommodation for asylum-seeking persons in the East German city of Leipzig, we propose a conceptual approach that ties in with constructivist spatial theory and seeks to contribute to debates on local migration regimes.
Confined to the threshold The experience of asylum seekers in Germany
2013
The session to which this abstract is summited is the number 24: Urban camps from a global perspective: resources, livelihoods and governance. The topic of this paper concerns the system of immigration control in Europe and the situation of asylum seekers in Germany as case-study. The theoretical context relates to the phenomena of immigration in relation to globalization, the first effect of which is the production and proliferation of new boundaries. The border itself has changed shape and nature with respect to its classical conception; its shift towards the interior has created border spaces within the national territories themselves. These new border-spaces have been the field of my research, i. e. the Wohnheim in the region of Brandenburg. And the protagonists of my research are the asylum seekers, a group historically joined to the structure of the camp (Arendt 1967, Agamben 1995). The management of asylum seekers in Germany is developed through a system of three types of cam...
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Erdkunde, 2019
The East-German city Leipzig and the West-German city Osnabrück, the main locations of our research, are among the pioneers of a nationwide movement for the decentralisation of refugee accommodation. At the beginning of the 2010s, local authorities in the two cities decided against housing refugees in mass accommodation centres, instead choosing to support them in leading self-determined lives by facilitating their access to private housing. However, the two cities then responded very differently to the increasing number of people coming to Germany for protection over the course of 2015. Based on empirical observations, this paper discusses an exemplary solution to a major research problem of how to compare the diverse and changing practices and discourses of refugee accommodation in local migration regimes. To find answers to this question, we develop a five-dimensional comparative model, combining the relational rescaling approach of Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çağlar with Henri Lefebvre's spatial constructivist considerations.