Abstract
This chapter explores the growing prominence of urban contexts, urban authorities, and urban politics in shaping debates on asylum and refuge that have traditionally been orientated around the nation-state. Focusing on the case of Glasgow, a city at the heart of the UK’s response to refugee displacement, this chapter examines three trends in contemporary urban configurations of asylum. First, how asylum seekers and refugees have been positioned within urban economies of value extraction. Second, how cities have been sites of considerable experimentation over the containment of asylum seekers and refugees, with flexible infrastructures of accommodation being one key development. Third, the frictions of government and solidarity that urban asylum foregrounds. These are frictions between local and national governments, on the one hand, and between community initiatives to support refugees as neighbours and the patterns of bordering practiced by state and non-state actors, on the other. Taken together, I argue that these trends point to the growing influence of cities in shaping how we understand asylum and its political possibilities.
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1 Introduction
Recent years have seen a growing focus on the role of multiple urban actors in shaping policies and practices towards refugee reception and accommodation. Driven in part by attempts to account for the complexities of governance in contexts of displacement, this work has drawn attention to diverse relations between local governments, humanitarian organisations, private contractors, NGOs, and public and private service providers. At the heart of these discussions has been the city, as the practical and political realities of displacement and asylum have been brought to the fore in cities across Europe (Darling, 2017; Kreichauf & Mayer, 2021) and beyond (Carpi, 2020; Üstübici, 2022).
Debates on asylum and the city in Europe foreground two connected trends shaping how cities are positioned in relation to forced migration. On the one hand, discussions of asylum and refuge have been situated in relation to the city as a result of the growing presence of refugees and asylum seekers in urban environments, either through the agency and spontaneous arrival of such migrants (Van Meeus et al., 2019) or through the purposeful dispersal or resettlement of asylum seekers and refugees into cities (Robinson et al., 2003). In either case, across Europe debate has focused on how cities may engage with and support asylum seekers and refugees, whilst also exploring the ways in which migrants are reshaping cities through their agency and the appropriation of space (Çaglar & Glick Schiller, 2018). This first dynamic names a ‘politics of presence’ (Darling, 2017) through which cities become the focal point of contestations over rights, refuge, bordering, and control (Lebuhn, 2013). At the same time, European cities have begun to show significant degrees of autonomy and even activism in relation to asylum, such that refuge becomes an area of urban policy and a site of contestations between municipal and national authorities (Garcés-Mascareñas & Gebhardt, 2020; Miellet, 2022). The city has thus been argued to represent a ‘battleground’ for responses to displacement, as diverse actors and authorities assert different visions of how cities can and should respond to often restrictive national policies and assertive claims to urban rights (Ambrosini, 2021).
It is the confluence of these trends that I examine through this chapter, terming such developments the ‘urbanisation’ of asylum. This implies the growing prominence of urban contexts, but also urban authorities and politics, in shaping and influencing debates on asylum and refuge that have traditionally been orientated at the nation-state (Gill, 2010). Countering the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) of past work in Migration Studies, the last decade has seen the role of the city as a space of both refuge and regulation for forced migrants being critically explored. In this chapter, I focus on the case of Glasgow in Scotland. I focus on Glasgow not as a ‘border city’ in any standard reading of the term; whilst a port city, Glasgow is not situated on an international boundary and carries few of the migratory journeys associated with transit and border cities. This is not, however, to suggest that Glasgow does not exhibit any of the fraught tensions associated with migration. Rather, Glasgow has a history of negotiating these challenges, not least because since 2000 it has been the city at the forefront of the UK’s approach to accommodating asylum seekers through a system of dispersal. Thus, rather than representing a ‘border city’, Glasgow can be understood as a bordered city. In the context of UK government policy to create a ‘hostile environment’ for all but the most privileged of migrants (Goodfellow, 2020), cities are key sites for the everyday bordering of the state (Cassidy, 2019). Focusing on the UK’s accommodation of refugees and asylum seekers takes us to cities like Glasgow as the policy of dispersal is a predominantly urban process, housing asylum seekers in community settings, often in poor quality accommodation and with limited access to services and support (Darling, 2022a).
In discussing Glasgow, this chapter considers three trends in the urbanisation of asylum. First, how asylum seekers and refugees have been positioned within urban economies of value extraction. Second, how cities have been sites of considerable experimentation over the containment and accommodation of asylum seekers and refugees. Third, the frictions of government and solidarity that urban asylum foregrounds. These are often frictions between local and national governments and between community initiatives to support refugees as neighbours and the patterns of bordering practiced by various state and non-state actors. These three themes – extraction, experimentation, and friction – reflect the economic, social, and political dynamics of contemporary urban asylum.
In exploring these issues, the chapter develops as follows. In the next section, I situate the case of Glasgow within recent debates over urban asylum, foregrounding a focus on ‘local’ and urban negotiations of refuge. Drawing on such work, the chapter then considers how trends of value extraction, policy experimentation, and political friction are evident in Glasgow’s relationship to asylum. The chapter concludes by considering some of the implications of these interwoven dynamics for understanding the urban dimensions of asylum and for taking seriously the role of cities within networks of displacement and structures of social solidarity.
2 The ‘Local’ Turn in Migration Studies
The wider context within which these issues are situated is work on a ‘local turn’ in migration policy and politics that has foregrounded the growing trend for municipalities to develop responses to migration that are distinct from those of the nation-state (Bauder & Gonzalez, 2018; Spencer & Delvino, 2019). Notable within these debates has been the recognition that whilst restrictive policies towards refugees may be legislated at a national level, these are often not implemented in full at an urban level (Ataç et al., 2020). As a range of work shows, restrictions on welfare access that encourage the removal of asylum seekers, for example, are often questioned, challenged, or undermined by local governments and street-level bureaucrats (Ataç et al., 2020; Kos et al., 2016). A multitude of urban actions is in evidence through such work. We might consider the growing literature on sanctuary and solidarity cities as exemplars of this trend of divergence between national and urban scales of policy and practice (Bauder, 2021; Darling & Bauder, 2019; Kreichauf & Mayer, 2021). Or the recent European turn to examine how municipal actors publicly obstruct national policy in forms of ‘governmental activism’ (Verhoeven & Duyvendak, 2017) or ‘municipal activism’ (Spencer & Delvino, 2019, p. 27), where access to services is facilitated in spite of restrictive national policies. Reflecting on these developments, Kos et al. (2016, p. 356) suggest we witness a European context in which urban authorities find ways of ‘cushioning, bypassing, resisting, and counteracting various aspects of exclusionary asylum policies’.
The potential autonomy of cities as policy actors on asylum varies considerably across different national contexts and with different legislative regimes, with two trends evident. First, is the way in which municipal authorities are understood as one actor amongst a range of authorities who navigate and negotiate the realities of displacement. Discussions of how ‘local’ regimes of bordering, support, and settlement are produced as a response to refugee mobility, and the extent to which these may diverge from the policy intentions of national governments, are notable across work in Germany (Hinger et al., 2016; Werner et al., 2018), Greece (Sabchev, 2021), and the UK (Darling, 2022b), and have also fostered comparative perspectives that explore transnational connections and networks (Kaya & Nagel, 2021). In these discussions the significance of urban environments as sites of multiple and overlapping authorities are brought to the fore as relations between public services, private accommodation and security contractors, charities, and wider public opinion on refugees shape the discourses that surround asylum and the lived experiences of urban refugees. At the same time, work on urban asylum and the potential autonomy of the city has looked outwards too, highlighting the production of transnational networks of solidarity between cities as they seek ways to support and welcome new arrivals (Oomen, 2020). The alignment of common values of welcoming at an urban level can be a useful source of connection and support between cities, something evident in both the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe network (Spencer, 2022) and the International Alliance of Safe Harbours, a network established in Palermo and involving 33 European cities, designed to advocate for the resettlement of refugees across European cities and a reduced reliance on Mediterranean cities to accommodate refugees. Both independently and collectively, cities in Europe have become prominent actors within discussions of refuge, often presenting sites of considerable contestation and tension.
Whilst empirically these recent discussions have been driven by the growing presence of refugees and asylum seekers in European cities, conceptually they have drawn on relational accounts of the urban that foreground qualities of urban complexity, connectivity, and heterogeneity (Amin & Thrift, 2017; Magnusson, 2011). This strand of urban theory challenges assumptions of singular or coherent sovereign authority, and views politics, from the perspective of the city, as entailing not only a multiplicity of authorities vying for influence, but also the necessity of negotiation among and between these varied authorities. Approaching urban asylum from this perspective is less to see the role of the city as a regulatory device or container aligned with the imposition of sovereign authority, rather, it is to read asylum through the complexity of how urban worlds are composed, contested, and conceptualised. Whilst rarely acknowledged explicitly, this frame of thinking the complex and relational contingencies and uncertainties of asylum as a matter of situated negotiations and temporary fixes to governance challenges, informs many discussions of the ‘local’ or ‘urban’ nature of asylum governance and practice (Ambrosini, 2021; Darling, 2021). It is with these dynamics of presence, divergence, and complexity in mind, that I focus on Glasgow as a city at the centre of the UK’s politics of refuge.
3 Researching Refuge in Glasgow
Since 2000, the UK has operated a dispersal system for the accommodation of asylum seekers. After an initial period in temporary reception centres, asylum seekers are relocated to cities across the country to be accommodated whilst awaiting decisions on their asylum claims (Robinson et al., 2003). This system is almost exclusively an urban phenomenon, reflecting both the location of available low-cost housing and a presumption that for those successful in gaining refugee status, integration will be easier in cities. The regulatory role of dispersal means that the location and type of accommodation provided is on a ‘no choice’ basis, and this lack of autonomy has been argued to mean that dispersal serves to marginalise and socially isolate asylum seekers (Hynes, 2009). In this respect, the UK system bears similarities with dispersal policies in a number of other European countries (Robinson et al., 2003), with a key distinction being that in the UK dispersed asylum seekers are accommodated among urban communities rather than in segregated reception facilities.
This chapter draws on a larger project that examined the UK’s dispersal system, focusing on four cities: Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Sunderland. This project explored how changing dispersal practices impacted local authorities, refugee support organisations, advocacy groups, and asylum seekers. This project involved 105 interviews with stakeholders in the asylum accommodation and support sector to critically examine the changing nature of dispersal and its effects on refugees and asylum seekers. These interviews included local authority representatives, councillors, service providers, support organisations, third sector groups, and refugees and asylum seekers. Empirically, this chapter draws on interviews from the Glasgow fieldwork, together with a local media analysis, tracing narratives of dispersal from 2000 to 2015. Taken collectively, dispersal has placed asylum at the heart of several towns and cities across the UK and it has led to considerable economic, political, and social change. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on Glasgow as a high-profile, but by no means atypical, example to examine some of these economic, social, and political trends.
4 Extraction
The first dynamic to foreground is how urban asylum has been bound into circuits of value extraction and profit making, for both private actors and cities themselves. In this sense, there is a need for further critical examinations of how urban political economies are entwined with what Lauren Martin (2021) has termed the ‘carceral economies’ of migration control. This speaks to how the diversification of actors and agencies involved in asylum and refugee reception at an urban level has produced new governmental assemblages and new sites of value production. In particular, she argues for a concern with ‘status value’, the value specific to migration control regimes and forms of categorisation. It is this value, she argues, that circulates through the economies of migration control as
status decisions make migrants valuable to firms and NGOs working in the asylum sector, addressing the needs produced by the exclusion from work or other forms of care. Migrants’ status value rests in their potential in/voluntary labour, revenue for service contractors, transaction data and waiting time (ibid., p. 747).
In the context of asylum, status value is associated with the restricted rights of those awaiting decisions from the state and the forms of dependence this produces, aligned with the position of asylum seekers as temporary and insecure residents, subject to enforced mobility and regulation. Migration control practices thus create and organise circuits of value that both rely on, and produce, the dependence of asylum seekers and refugees (Coddington et al., 2020). In being denied the right to work in the UK, and unable to access mainstream benefits or the housing market, asylum seekers are produced as destitute subjects reliant on the state, or its outsourced contractors, for survival. Importantly though, as Coddington et al. (2020, p. 1429) note, carceral economies are often highly localised and place-specific, taking on different forms as legal frameworks differ, the actors (both public and private) involved vary, and the urban economies into which carceral conditions are entwined present their own constraints and possibilities. Thus, far from a global logic of carceral extraction, a far more localised set of extractive relations are at play, shaping local, and often quite intimate, carceral economies (Conlon & Hiemstra, 2017).
In the case of Glasgow, these contextual patterns of value extraction are evident in multiple processes. First, is the way in which accommodating asylum seekers was positioned as a form of revenue generation for the city in the early stages of dispersal. This began in 2000, when the UK government moved to distribute asylum seekers across the country and sought the support of urban authorities to provide housing. At a time when the city had a surplus of hard-to-let social housing, the offer of funding through dispersal became a means to gain an income from otherwise empty properties (Darling, 2022a). This produced two forms of value extraction. In the first instance, property that was at the end of its useable life could be employed to accommodate a social group who were a low priority in policy terms and who garnered limited public support or sympathy. Initial accommodation in a series of high-rise towers was used – blocks that were subsequently demolished when asylum accommodation contracts were outsourced a decade later. In this instance, the last vestiges of value could be extracted from poor quality accommodation before it was demolished. At the same time, dispersal also represented an opportunity as Fiona, a city councillor, noted:
with dispersal, there was the money that came in that allowed the city to bring void housing up to standard and get it back into use. And areas that had been very much in decline, the services weren’t being used, there were new people come into those areas and started to use the schools and the shops and things like that.
In this way, as dispersal progressed throughout the 2000s, asylum accommodation became a form of income generation for the local authority and also a means to promote urban regeneration through bringing properties back into use. This approach has resonances with work by Kreichauf and Dunn (2019) in Berlin, where they argue that the use of formerly industrial land for the temporary accommodation of asylum seekers was a necessary precursor to that land being reintegrated into commercial and residential use. Through this process, they argue, asylum seekers ‘recycle’ such property, as their presence as temporary residents leaves land ready for future investment. Similarly, in Glasgow, the presence of asylum seekers in formerly disused and void housing served to not only ‘recycle’ property but also to help sustain and produce demand for services, effectively positioning asylum seekers as early actors within processes of urban renewal (Phillimore & Goodson, 2006; Hill et al., 2021).
In both Berlin and Glasgow, it is the status value of asylum seekers that matters for such processes. The temporary status of asylum seekers renders them available for commodification and exploitation as Martin (2021) notes, enabling the provision of poor quality housing and the enforced mobility of asylum seekers into and out of communities and neighbourhoods. In these instances, the city extracts value from asylum directly through accommodation contracts and support service provisioning and indirectly through pathways to urban regeneration and social transformation, contributing to and reshaping urban economies in the process.
Over the last decade, however, that extractive calculation has shifted. In 2012, the accommodation and support of asylum seekers was outsourced across the UK, with three private contractors taking on the accommodation of asylum seekers and employing subcontracted housing from the private rental sector. The security contractors Group 4 Securicor (better known by their acronym G4S), the multinational services company Serco, and the housing company Clear Springs were the new contract holders. Similarly, in 2015, contracts for support and advice services to asylum seekers were outsourced and centralised into one nationwide contract with a single charity (Darling, 2022a). Aside from the dramatic impacts such a shift had on the lives of asylum seekers and refugees facing delays in decision-making and held in limbo as they wait, outsourcing diminished the role of local authorities in engaging with asylum seekers. At a time when European municipalities have found ways to assert their autonomy on asylum, the outsourcing of asylum accommodation and support served to undermine local authorities and limit their capacity to effect policy (Darling, 2022b).
For Glasgow, these shifting contractual arrangements meant both a loss of revenue for the local authority and significantly reduced the political influence and engagement in dispersal from local government. In its place has arisen a series of what Raco (2016) terms ‘public-private hybridities’, in which private contractors navigate between central government contracts for accommodation provision and local government tensions over the nature and location of that accommodation. Urban authorities such as Glasgow are not totally removed from such assemblages of governing, but their position and capacity for influence is greatly reduced, not least because they are no longer the ones extracting value from asylum. In the place of a governmental agreement between the state and the city, dispersal is now the domain of multiple, locally specific, configurations of actors, including chains of housing subcontracting, fractured support services, third-sector organisations reliant on precarious frames of funding, and local government with limited regulatory powers. It is in the negotiations of these varied actors that the status value of asylum is now to be extracted, as the capacity to decide on housing outcomes and conditions is distributed across a range of interested parties. Importantly, whilst the status value of asylum seekers remains critical, the specific dynamics of these economies of extraction vary on an urban basis. The assemblages of authority that pattern asylum accommodation in Glasgow, and that partly construct and construe value to different parts of the city, will differ to those that shape dispersal in Newcastle, Manchester, or Birmingham. In part because of devolution in Scotland, but in part because the composition of ‘public-private hybridities’ of interest are contextually located and determined (Raco, 2016), with the nature of localised support services and third-sector groups playing a role as they vie for funding and influence. For example, in the wake of outsourcing, Glasgow city council reacted with anger and frustration at the decision taken by the government in Westminster as they felt this undermined much of the good work they had invested into asylum support services and integration networks throughout the 2000s (Piacentini, 2015; Wren, 2007). Indeed, at the point of outsourcing, the municipality bid for a contract to continue providing accommodation and support services to asylum seekers, only to be undercut by bids from the outsourcing giants G4S and Serco. By contrast, in Birmingham, a city which also had a history of involvement in dispersal since 2000, local government was supportive of outsourcing, going as far as pre-emptively withdrawing from dispersal and casting asylum seekers as a ‘burden’ unfairly imposed upon the city.
Despite these shifting contexts, what remains constant throughout the period of dispersal is the ability to extract value from the lives of those seeking asylum, be that for private contractors, housing providers, landlords, NGOs, or urban authorities. In cities across the UK, a first strand of the urbanisation of asylum is how dispersal has served to integrate urban economies and accommodation practices into circuits of value and profit that accrue through the maintenance of the structures of bordering. Through dispersal, cities like Glasgow play critical roles within carceral economies of migration that produce value from the regulation, containment, accommodation, and removal of asylum seekers.
5 Experimentation
Within the turbulence of changing accommodation and support arrangements, Glasgow has seen a considerable degree of policy experimentation in relation to asylum. Asylum seekers and refugees have often been groups subject to varying forms of experimental social policy, groups on whom policy ‘innovations’ are tested before being rolled out more widely, from restrictions on work and welfare conditionality to the use of vouchers in place of cash assistance. Dispersal itself might be considered one such experiment at a national level, as the UK had no experience in such a large-scale process of population management and regulation prior to the inception of this policy in 2000. This was an experiment in migration management and regulation that was made manifest in cities across the north of England, Scotland, and Wales that had limited experience of supporting the needs of asylum seekers and refugees. One effect was to force the development of urban support sectors that were themselves experimental, untested, and often haphazard in their early iterations. As Mark, a refugee support worker, recalls in Glasgow:
A lot of that sort of support structure, obviously didn’t exist in the first place, in terms of, for example, immigration lawyers, there was nothing here, so expertise had to be built up, and expertise within the local authority. So yes, there’s a lot of community support networks and NGOs, but there’s actually a lot of expertise in terms of housing now, in terms of health and so on, but that wasn’t the case at the start.
The inception of dispersal was a relatively rapid policy change and one that demanded the creation of support networks that would become embedded and increasingly expert over the coming years. In this sense, given its high numbers of initial asylum dispersals, Glasgow was a key testing ground for the development of a nascent refugee sector and the embedding of that sector within the various networks and partnerships of the local state, be they legal services, healthcare, education, or integration networks (Wren, 2007). For example, Burns et al. (2022, p. 11) argue that ‘Glasgow has its own ecology of third sector expertise’ on immigration, driven by ‘a long history in the city of providing all kinds of support, information, human rights advocacy and campaigning since dispersal was introduced in 2000’ (see Mainwaring et al., 2020). As with the question of value and extraction, the multiplicity of competing interests and actors within the city comes to the fore in this history and its ongoing effects into the present.
Alongside this nascent support sector, the city has been subject to forms of political and legal experimentation following the outsourcing of accommodation and support contracts. In 2018, the international services firm Serco, which held the accommodation contract at the time, began a controversial programme of lock-changes on properties used to accommodate asylum seekers (Darling, 2021). This was a means of forcibly evicting those who had reached the end of the asylum process. Multiple legal challenges followed, and a judicial review into the practice found in favour of Serco’s right to evict asylum seekers into destitution. Whilst robustly opposed by asylum support groups, the practice has continued and in advance of the pandemic, was actively producing a destitute population on the city’s streets in an effort to force migrants to leave the country. This production of destitution is not new in the UK asylum system (Coddington et al., 2020), nor is it unique as other European countries have implemented similar measures (Ataç et al., 2020). What we witness here though is an experiment, both politically and legally, from Serco into the extent to which they will be supported by the Home Office, by politicians, and by the courts, if they enforce exclusionary measures.
A further dynamic of experimentation has been those experiments in accommodation that arose as emergency forms of provision and that have since become embedded as ‘mainstream’ forms of housing for asylum seekers and refugees. In Glasgow, the use of hotels as a form of temporary or overspill accommodation for asylum seekers provides one such example. Hotels have been used to accommodate asylum seekers and refugees throughout the dispersal policy, often as short-term gap filling measures. Yet since 2019, as demand on accommodation has risen and asylum case decisions have slowed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and systematic disinvestment in the UK Home Office, hotels have become a much more prominent form of accommodation. Indeed, in Glasgow the housing provider Mears took the controversial decision to transfer almost all asylum seekers into hotel accommodation on a temporary basis to manage demand as the pandemic hit, and suspended evictions temporarily. Restrictions on mobility and access during the pandemic translated these hotels into de facto detention facilities, as asylum seekers were confined to their rooms during lockdown. As with the use of hotel facilities for migrant accommodation and containment elsewhere in the world (Burridge, 2020; Pugliese, 2009), this use drew criticism from both asylum advocates and those on the centre and far-right who oppose the rights claims of asylum seekers.
In the first instance, the use of hotels was critiqued as an insecure and unsupportive environment that would damage the mental health of those detained. Such concerns came to a head in May 2020, when a Syrian refugee took his own life in a hotel used as emergency accommodation in Glasgow and one month later when a Sudanese asylum seeker attacked and injured six people in the Park Inn Hotel in the city, a hotel that at the time was closed to the public and only being used for asylum accommodation (Dearden, 2020). The mental health impact of containment within hotels was foregrounded as contributing to both tragedies, as hotel confinement was argued to reflect similar carceral pressures as immigration detention (Akhtar, 2022; Sullivan, 2020). As Burns et al. (2022, p. 8) find, the use of such contingency accommodation significantly increased feelings of uncertainty and isolation among those seeking asylum in Glasgow, with people moved into and out of hotels at short notice and with no sense of how long this situation would persist. At the same time, those on the political right argued that accommodating asylum seekers in hotels, however poor their condition, was ‘too generous’ a policy and risked acting as an attraction for refugees to the UK (Paxton, 2022), despite longstanding debunking of such myths. The symbolic politics of the urban hotel as a site of accommodation was mobilised by politicians such as Nigel Farage to push the government toward ever more restrictive measures, culminating in plans to offshore asylum processing entirely to ‘partner’ countries such as Rwanda.
Experimental forms of third sector and activist response also emerged in the ‘ecology of expertise’ around asylum that developed in Glasgow (Burns et al., 2022). The structures of third-sector support developed in Glasgow throughout the 2000s sought ways to respond to the use of hotel accommodation through the delivery of food and mobile phone top-up supplies to hotels, providing toys to families, and purchasing bus passes to support people in their shopping needs (ibid.). At the same time, civil society organisations in the city had shifted their focus since the inception of dispersal, beginning to look beyond immediate integration needs and to longer-term strategies for community development. Part of this work involved broadening the range of social groups targeted for support. For example, Mainwaring et al. (2020) highlight how a number of Glasgow integration networks that had been funded initially to support refugees and asylum seekers at a neighbourhood level, broadened their focus to become place-based community projects, engaging with a wider range of diverse communities and building transversal forms of solidarity as a result. The concern with integration that underpins much of this work is, again, a specific feature of the policy landscape and possibilities within Scotland, as due to devolution the Scottish government has control over a wide range of areas of social policy.
The experiments in accommodation that occurred in Glasgow during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that continue to this day, are thus not divorced from the wider context of national debates over asylum policy, entitlements, and devolved authority. Indeed, the ongoing arguments over the use of hotels as contingency measures that have remained in place for over 2 years, highlights many of the failings of the asylum system and its impact on urban communities. In Glasgow, we see multiple experiments that may reshape how the city is experienced in the case of developing a refugee support sector, or that may push the envelope of possibility for punitive measures and conditions in the case of lock-changes and hotel-based detention. It is to these tensions between experiments and between outlooks on asylum that I turn in the final thread running through the urbanisation of asylum.
6 Friction
The final dynamic I want to note is the contentious nature of negotiations between different actors in urban asylum. This means situating the city as a space of frictions between governmental impulses and forms of solidarity. Looking to Glasgow, we might see multiple examples of such friction, be that in the tensions that accompanied the start of dispersal or in community responses to displacement. Forms of ‘municipal activism’ (Kos et al., 2016) from the city council are evident in the ways in which they have challenged government policy on dispersal, going so far as to suspend dispersals in protest at the widespread use of hotels as accommodation since the start of the pandemic. At the same time, efforts to control and order asylum in the city through the reach and authority of the Home Office and their contractors present opportunities for response, as the ‘overlaps and dissonances between competing modes of sovereignty or projects of rule create navigable channels’ for both the governed and the governing (Dunn & Cons, 2014, p. 100). It is in navigating these channels of rule that points of friction emerge between different visions of how the city should respond to the needs, and agency, of those seeking refuge.
In highlighting these frictions, I conclude not with governmental dynamics but with the unintended consequences of dispersal, as in Glasgow dispersal has produced not just the development of a skilled refugee sector or an extractive economy, but also a more assertive politics of dissent that demands rights for asylum seekers. For example, in 2009 activists in Glasgow and Bristol founded the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign aimed at challenging government policy on the removal of support for asylum seekers after decisions on their status have been taken. In opposing the use of destitution as a deterrent within the asylum system, the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign argued that asylum seekers should be provided with sufficient support so that they can meet their essential living needs and be given permission to work if their case hasn’t been resolved within 6 months. The campaign was focused on addressing demands to national government through the city as a conduit for advancing a refugee rights agenda. Through public demonstrations, lobbying of councillors, and public petitions, the campaign focused on galvanising support within urban authorities against ‘central’ government (Darling, 2017). One unintended consequence of dispersal is that it produced the conditions within which opposition to government policy could be fostered and alliances of interest between activists, local government, and asylum seekers could be forged. From efforts by asylum seekers to monitor and record their unsafe housing conditions to anti-deportation activism in support of fellow asylum seekers, forms of ‘minor’ politics of registering dissent and seeking recognition of political presence, were often the starting points on which such campaigns were built (Squire & Darling, 2013).
A recent example of these forms of emerging solidarity came in May 2021, when community campaigners in Glasgow were successful in halting an immigration raid as over 200 protestors surrounded a UK Visa and Immigration van and prevented the removal and detention of two asylum seekers. To chants of ‘These are our neighbours, let them go’, the crowd peacefully blocked the path of the van and secured the release of the two men (Brooks, 2021). Whilst a high profile and visible event due to significant media coverage, this protest was part of a long-running campaign in the city to challenge and disrupt the practice of dawn raids by the Home Office. From establishing networks of observation and early warning of immigration enforcement on the streets to arranging shelter for those evading such raids, anti-deportation activism has a long history in Glasgow. The highest profile of which were the so-called Glasgow Girls, a group of seven young women who campaigned against deportations in the city, initially focused on protecting one of their friends (Haedicke, 2017). The group went on to gain public and political support from the Scottish Parliament and became the subject of a documentary and musical, securing national attention for anti-deportation activism in the city. What was significant in the May 2021 protest was the breadth of support this protest drew. This was an action undertaken not only by asylum advocates and activists, but by a community that saw its neighbours being targeted by the state. In this sense, the actions of a community to protect its neighbours reflects Kundnani’s (Kundnani, 2007, p. 163) argument that opposition to everyday urban bordering increasingly emerges ‘through networks of support established through schools, churches and community campaigns’ and it is in these prosaic spaces ‘that the efforts of the Home Office to remove failed asylum seekers are being thwarted’.
Whilst cities have long been argued to present ‘battlegrounds’ for competing claims to citizenship and belonging (Ambrosini, 2021; Isin, 2002), in Glasgow we see these frictions in the multiple rights claims expressed by those challenging deportation and destitution. At the same time, the conditions of such friction are founded in relation to policies of dispersal, accommodation, and the regulation of refugee lives in and through the city. The frictions of encountering asylum are a critical part of the urbanisation of asylum, as the extraction of value and experimentation with policy that has shaped Glasgow’s current relation with asylum produces fraught moments of critique and fuels alternative imaginaries of how the city might produce and perform solidarities that support those present despite distinctions of immigration status, class, community, and nationality.
7 Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, I have explored just a few of the dynamics of urban asylum through a concern with value extraction, policy experimentation, and political friction. These are by no means the only dynamics at play in the urban politics of contemporary asylum, but they do offer insight into the new configurations of power, influence, and contestation shaping how cities are playing increasingly prominent, and often contentious, roles in the politics of refuge. In Glasgow, we find a city that has been at the forefront of these debates over the last two decades, a city that has seen shifting patterns of dispersal and contentious forms of anti-deportation activism and opposition to government policy. Glasgow represents one of the many urban ‘battlegrounds’ in which asylum policy and practice are being constructed in contemporary Europe, a site of tension where competing actors and interests seek to determine how the city should respond to displacement (Ambrosini, 2021). Looking to a city like Glasgow highlights two dynamics of such ‘battlegrounds’, with implications for how we understand the urban tensions of asylum. First, is the way in which cities are constructed as battlegrounds. In Glasgow we see this through the convergence of policies of dispersal and bordering that have shaped political dissent around asylum in the city, interwoven with the varied interests of public and private actors who have a stake in the economic value, and political status, of asylum in the city (Hill et al., 2021). Cities like Glasgow do not become ‘battlegrounds’ overnight. Rather, their specific histories of migration, socio-economic disadvantage, and political situation condition the extent to which they will form contentious sites for the claiming of asylum rights. Second, looking to Glasgow highlights how ‘battlegrounds’ of asylum are relational in nature; they are situated within tensions that extend not only to national scales of policymaking and political rhetoric (Spencer & Delvino, 2019), but also to transnational connections to other cities and to struggles for migrant rights and solidarities that are not confined to any single city, territory, or national context.
To consider the urbanisation of asylum is to take seriously these varied roles and to situate cities like Glasgow within these relational networks of bordering, such that decisions on accommodation, support services, and displacement here have impacts that resonate outwards, both in terms of political effects in Westminster, Calais, and Kigali, but also in terms of personal effects for those displaced as transnational networks of kinship, solidarity, and friendship connect Glasgow to a wide range of sites of global transit, containment, and potential refuge. Looking to the urban dynamics of asylum in this way offers one means to comprehend and account for the significance of urban conditions and contexts in shaping how displacement is experienced and how displacement is situated within wider circuits of economic, social, and political turbulence and change.
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Darling, J. (2024). The Urbanisation of Asylum. In: Triandafyllidou, A., Moghadam, A., Kelly, M., Şahin-Mencütek, Z. (eds) Migration and Cities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55680-7_13
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