The Other('s) city: living in Berlin as a post-migrant city (original) (raw)
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Narratives of flight often depict cities and cities are often considered central to the imaginary of refugees. How is the city "felt" in these narratives and how do they portray the ways in which subjectivities are shaped in urban space? What is the role of public spaces and performances in staging narratives of colonial violence and displacement? How do the haunting returns of the traumatic past reverberate in these spaces? Exploring these questions in the context of Western colonialism and the Arab Spring, this special issue offers four studies that discuss the impact of colonialism and displacement on the formation of subjectivities in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, among other factors. The aim of the issue is twofold: apart from focusing on the role cities play in staging sometimes multiple layers of contested traumatic memories, articles also investigate the significance of affect in intersubjective encounters set in urban locations. Literary works, theatrical performances, installations, and protest marches are analysed in an interdisciplinary framework, which foregrounds the diverse yet overlapping emotions that haunt urban narratives of colonial trauma and migration. Following in the wake of Lisa Blackman, John Cromby, Derek Hook, Dimitris Papadopoulos, and Valerie Walkerdine, we define subjectivity as "the experience of the lived multiplicity of positionings" (Blackman et al. 2008, p. 6). The articles in the issue explore how subject positions are affected by the experience of colonialism and dislocatedness. Contributions focus on historical and social issues such as Paris and the massacre of Algerian protesters on October 17, 1961 (Christine Quinan); New York and the unseen experiences of illegal migrants (Aparajita Nanda); Malmö and its Community Theatre used for performing migrant narratives (Tegiye Birey); Leipzig and protest actions staged at its Main Station (Elisabeth Kirndörfer). The concept of the postcolonial city (McLeod 2004; Varma 2012), haunted by the colonial past and memories of violence, is central to Quinan's argument, while Nanda reads New York as a neocolonial metropolis where a new form of slavery prevails. Birey and Kirndörfer, on the other hand, explore how immigrants and refugees
Call for papers Espaces & Sociétés - Migrants and access to city
Migrants and access to the city Recent events related to the arrival of refugees or asylum seekers and the reappearance of forms of precarious habitat that seemed to have disappeared in Europe call into question the issue of migrants11 access to the city. If these questions are not new and have already been widely debated in the social sciences, we argue for a revisiting of this problem by focusing on the local effects of migrants' appearance in the city, both in countries in the Global North as well as in the Global South; whether migration is from a distance or from more proximate origins. We thus invite authors to question the concept of access – which refers as much etymologically to the approach of urban space as it does the manner in which it " agrees " to welcome migrants – across the sites that materialize this access. Generally the concept of access is understood in terms of mobility and transport in relation to the 'city'; or in terms of resources, difficulties and inequality (see current issue E&S) as when it deals with the subject of 'housing'. As for work on migration, academic works tends to oscillate between two interpretations of migrants, dividing emigration from immigration. This issue of Espaces et Sociétés intends to theorize the problem differently by considering access to the city as both an intermediate step in the flow of migration, and dependent on the type of entry (one time, temporary or permanent) of a person in specific urban spaces. To characterize migrant access to the city, we offer three types of questions: The categorization of access to the city in its relation to the formal and normative city The reality of migration generated public debate using new expressions that come to question the scientific categorization of migrants: The designation of people (migrants, immigrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, inhabitants of the camps, urban refugees); migration management systems (detention center consolidation, camp center, encampment, village insertion, transit center, cited transit), and finally the institutionalization of legitimate standards including sanitary control, insalubrity, adaptation criteria, the 'integration project', etc. The difficulty of stabilizing the terminology invites us to analyze the categorization processes at work, particularly in relation to what would become normalized in an urban context. The authors are invited to examine the forms of habitat resulting from migration in terms of their relationship to the city, which can highlight:-Interstices of the legalized city proper (squatting in slums)-Institutional forms and measures (camp, camping, 'bridging housing', shelters, mobile villages, 'insertion villages', cities of transit). Access to the city: insertion and / or integration We propose to seize access to the city through insertion and integration. These two concepts, strongly used in France, are often mobilized for housing issues (called insertion through housing); or individuals (integration into society). They are sometimes understood as chronological when they describe an individual's course of action (integration would succeed insertion), however we propose to take them as two modes of migrant reception by differentiating them according to their etymological meaning – inserire, meaning " put in the 11 The categories of designation of populations as places were produced by administrations or organizations responsible for these populations, we italicize these terminologies as a methodological caution (the categories are built for convenience and not knowledge).
Sustainability
Places affected by urban shrinkage are widely depicted as left behind places characterized by decline and decay. Refugees are generally constructed as victims or ‘dangerous other’. Hence, place-making and negotiations of belonging in shrinking cities are accompanied by multiple layers of stigmatization. Despite this contextual factor and even though many questions related to inter-group relations in shrinking cities are still unanswered, refugee-centered revitalization of shrinking cities is being discussed among city officials, planners and in the scientific community. This paper investigates local discourses on urban shrinkage and refugee arrival as contextual factors for negotiations of place and belonging, and connects to previous studies on the stigmatization of declining cities and the othering of refugees. It uses Nayak’s (2019) concept of re-scripting narratives to analyze whether acts of re-writing apply not only to stigmatizations of place, but marginalized groups as well....