Refugees, expellees and immigrants: comparing migrant reception policies and practices in post-war Bristol, Dortmund and Malmö (2022) (original) (raw)
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Urban History
The vital role that cities play in the governance of migration is increasingly recognized, yet migration scholars still perceive this ‘local turn’ as a recent phenomenon. This article presents a cross-country and cross-city comparative analysis of three mid-size European cities during the post-war period: Bristol, Dortmund and Malmö. It analyses administrative cultures and local policy arenas, exposing the complexity of local migration policy-making and the crucial importance of historical perspectives. It reveals the inherent local variation in policies and practices, and argues that traditional national-level studies do not fully capture how urban actors responded to migration.
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The role of municipalities in migrant integration in postwar European history has largely slipped below the radar in previous migration research. Our special issue presents case studies on how Bristol, Dortmund, Malmö, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Utrecht managed migrant influxes from the mid-1940s to 1960s. Following interdisciplinary advances in local migration studies, our urban histories take a diversity of approaches, present diverse temporalities, and uncover municipal responses that range from generosity to indifference and to outright hostility. In all six cities, despite such diversity in local attitudes and municipal policies, municipal authorities had significant impacts on migrants' lives. The introductory article explores how our urban perspectives contribute to scholarship on reconstruction and the postwar boom; welfare; democracy and citizenship; and European integration. Using local migration as a lens into postwar European history, we argue, provides important new insights for the historiography of postwar Europe.
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