Tracing urban solidarity in the northern quarter: a cartography of mobilities and mobilizations (ARCH - Metrolab series, p. 51-53) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Karathanasis, P., and Kapsali, K. (2018). ‘Displacement and the creation of emplaced activism: Public interventions on the walls of a European border city’, entanglements, 1(2): 52-61., 2018
Displacement is a process that affects the places of departure as well as the places of arrival. One such place of arrival has been the island of Lesvos in the northeast Aegean Sea. Lesvos has been a place through which hundreds of thousands of displaced people passed, on their way to Europe, during the period of the "Refugee Crisis" (2015-2016). The urgency, however, of this massive influx, led to the arrival of several humanitarian actors, as well as activists, and volunteers, who played a vital role in the reception of the displaced, forming official and unofficial support networks. Today, despite the proclaimed ending of the ‘crisis’, more than 7.000 people still reside in camps and other facilities within and around the capital of Mytilene. The ‘hotspots’ policy of the European and Greek authorities, including the EU-Turkey statement and the ‘geographical restriction’ of the asylum seekers on the islands, keeps asylum seekers in a liminal and in-between position; in-between asylum and deportation or in-between the lives they left behind and those they can only imagine. In an attempt to approach the liminal condition in which the asylum seekers are being placed, our video-presentation focuses on the slogans and other public interventions on the walls of Mytilene, which are related to the self-organized refugee support networks. These interventions, created by local and international activists, as well as by people on the move, can be seen as the results of a renewed emplaced activism that reacts to the ‘hotspot’ technologies of humanitarian governance as well as to the deportation regime in place in Lesvos and the other Aegean islands. Keywords: Refugee Crisis, Lesvos, Displacement, Activism, Graffiti, Public Interventions, Liminality Video Link: https://youtu.be/DpO75yZXl9Y
What is Left of Migrants' Spaces
Pariss, 2020
This article deals with the political legacy of migrants' spaces across Europe that are the outcome of border enforcement policies but that are also shaped by migrants' struggles and movements. It interrogates what is left, after their vanishing forced eviction, at the level of spatial-political traces, as well as in the collective memory of the citizens of those places. The main argument of the piece is that in order to come to grips with these spaces beyond their ephemeral dimension, we need to consider the temporality of migrant struggles and of solidarity practices -between migrants and citizens. The article focuses, first, on the French-Italian Alpine border, and analyses how the sedimented memory of the struggles in that valley has been reactivated in the present to support the migrants in transit. Then, the article moves on by developing the notion of transversal alliances through an insight into the Gilets Noirs movement in France, a collective of undocumented migrants which mobilised towards getting to permit to stay and accommodation, while at the same time framing their struggle as a broader battle against precarity and exploitation. The piece concludes suggesting that by bringing in the genealogy of struggles and solidarity practices, migrants' spaces appear as part of a precarious mobile common in the making.
Cities as sites of refuge and resistance
European Urban and Regional Studies
The article identifies some of the patterns and dynamics that have emerged in the uneven landscape and shifting constellations of local immigration regimes in the wake of the 2015 ‘summer of welcome’. Using the German case, it explores key players and institutions within this urban policy arena, and how their collaborative/competitive interactions in addressing the challenges of (receiving) the many newcomers have been shaped by supra-local as well as contingent and political factors. Firstly, it looks at the role and relative autonomy that municipalities exert in designing (proactive) refugee and integration policies. Out of the broad spectrum of civil society organisations that engage in this field, the paper then focuses on the new civic engagement often referred to as volunteer welcome initiatives, and on another civil society actor less frequently discussed in this context: the protest movement organised by refugees themselves. The evolving practices of, and interrelations amon...
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).
The Other('s) city: living in Berlin as a post-migrant city
This research-oriented bilingual (English and Farsi) seminar aims to deal with the production and consumption of space by migrants and particularly by refugees in a city namely Berlin. Migration changes a city and its spatiotemporality. Acknowledging migration in a city and consider it as a city of migration, introduces political, cultural and spatial crises. Migration is no longer a deviation in the norm. Rather, migrants and particularly refugees are a more representative of the current society. They engage and contribute to the future of the city through their interactions and imaginaries. Thus, of particular interest in this course is heterotopias, i.e. the spaces of otherness in the city. These spaces are decisive elements that form spatial imaginaries and guide social actors (here refugees) in their everyday life. The course also addresses the temporal indications of living as “the other” (i.e. refugee) in a particular space and ways in which spatial experiences can sway temporal horizons of social actors. This invites consideration of the expectations of social actors and changes in them regarding their lived experiences. Students and refugees in this course will learn about city, urbanisation, space, migration and otherness in order to explore the urban spaces in Berlin. This seminar is in line with the previous seminar (Spaces of Migration) to produce spatial narratives of refugees in Berlin. It will benefit from the previous attendance with refugee background as the facilitator of research in the seminar. The spatial narratives of refugees will be presented on a specific website that is designed for the project. The seminar is organized by the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration research and funded by Kultur,- Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät as a part of Humboldt University’s initiative to opening the university for refugees. Keywords: Migration, Post-migrant society, Otherness, Heterotopia, Social spaces, Social imaginaries, Spatial memory
Contested Borderscapes. Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe.
Research Group: Invisible Cities, 2019
European member states are signatories to the Geneva Convention Related to the Status of Refugees. Human rights and dignity are respected in detention centres across Europe. An electrified fence was built to protect the nation-state from illegal intruders. Traffickers are responsible for deaths by drowning in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Deportations are voluntary returns. Turkey is a safe country. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. In 2016, Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” the word of the year. In this Orwellian moment, the movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants across the increasingly militarised borders of Europe have instigated a socio-spatial debate about the limits of human rights, national sovereignties, continental values, precipitating and contributing to the ongoing condition of European crises. Although in the era of globalisation borders constitute porous passages for capital and commodities, at the same time they have hardened and ossified as “new enclosures” seeking to immobilise migrant and refugee populations. Fortress Europe emerges as a complex of new state control mechanisms, freshly erected border fences, newly built detention centres and improvised refugee camps; together, these technologies of migration management aim at the criminalisation, classification, stigmatisation, and biopolitical control of moving populations, fomented by xenophobic politics, and managed by humanitarian subcontractors. In this hostile climate, people on the move contest European border regimes, peripheries, and cityscapes by claiming spatial justice and political visibility while creating a nexus of emerging common spaces. They are joined by activists defending their right to movement, who are engaged in efforts to “welcome refugees” into a shrinking and contested public sphere, into alternative and self-organised social spaces, responding to the humanitarian crises wrought by militarism, violence, and structural adjustment with solidarity, stemming from a larger vision of sharing in each other’s struggles for survival and social transformation. The collective volume is an outcome of the international conference ‘Contested Borderscapes. Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe’ that took place in Mytilene (Lesvos), September 28 – October 1, 2017.