Abstract
This chapter synthesises the analytical reflections from three chapters in this volume’s fourth part on Border Cities and Migration (Chap. 13, Darling; Chap. 14, Carpi; Chap. 15, Merlín-Escorza) and links them with broader scholarly research on forced displacement, asylum, and cities. It first shows how the intersection of governance approaches with urban and humanitarian studies provides rich insights into, and novel concepts about displacement and asylum. It argues that the arrival of diverse actors related to asylum leads to physical, economic, and socio-cultural transformations in urban neighbourhoods and border towns, sometimes temporal, other times permanent. The chapter then identifies four main dynamics at play in the urbanisation of asylum: extraction, frictions, temporality, and spatial changes. It concludes with questions to consider in developing a more elaborated research agenda on politics of urban and asylum from a relational perspective.
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1 Introduction
The city has been increasingly at the heart of discussions on displacement and asylum in recent years (Glorius & Doomernik, 2020). This emphasis can be attributed to the fact that many refugees, asylum seekers, and ‘irregular migrants’ worldwide now live in urban spaces and expectations about the urban future of humanitarian crises, including climate-induced displacements (e.g. Archer & Dodman, 2017). As Kreichauf and Glorius (2021) note, ‘forced migration is an urban phenomenon – an integral part of twenty-first-century urban landscapes, as well as an urban story of those displaced’ (p. 869). In the displacement literature, any kind of physical environment outside of refugee camps is identified as ‘urban’, while terms like urban refugees (Grabska, 2006), urban mobility (Kihato & Landau, 2017a, b), urbanisation of asylum (Darling, 2020), and urban asylum policymaking (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2022) have become popular.
Although research interest on cities prioritises the spatial perspective, the temporal dimension is an indispensable part of urban and asylum discussions. The cities on the borders serve as urban spaces of transit and in transition (Dotsey & Lumley-Sapanski, 2021). Small or mid-sized border cities become important transit hubs and temporary settlement spaces for people looking for opportunities to migrate onward. Due to the protracted nature of migration journeys and associated risks, people on the move often stay in the temporal locations longer than initially envisioned, making them transit-turned-host spaces. Hence, they become critical for understanding not only accommodation and reception (Oliver et al., 2020) but also integration (Dekker et al., 2015) and protection of displaced people (Artero & Fontanari, 2021, p. 631). They emerge as ‘a place of care and control, of incentivisation and eviction and of inclusion and exclusion’ (Oginni, 2021, p.1).
With the migrants’ arrival, the cities also face the appearance of a range of service providers, from international humanitarian NGO workers and practitioners to international organisation employees (see Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume) and private housing companies (see Darling, Chap. 13, this volume). Additionally, they observe a proliferation of people who conduct research on migrants like journalists, researchers, students, and audio-visual producers (see Merlín-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume). Short or long-term stays of these diverse actors lead to physical, economic, and socio-cultural transformations in urban neighbourhoods and border towns, sometimes temporal, other times permanent. Also, the temporary and transitional nature of programmes targeting urban refugees (e.g. humanitarian aid, sheltering/housing, employment) interact with spatial dynamics, bringing new visible materials such as symbols and offices of humanitarian NGOs (Dotsey & Lumley-Sapanski, 2021).
Service fields at the local level, such as housing (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume), sheltering (Merlín-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume), and livelihoods (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume) turn into contested fields because of the entanglement of the diverse stakeholders involved and changed dynamics over time (Werner et al., 2018). The several actors involved in the urban asylum management are not only implementers of policies but also creators of local discourses and interpreters of central or international discourses on the ground (Lowndes & Polat, 2020). All these dynamics related to asylum stimulate spatial, societal, and institutional transformations in and of urban spaces.
Against this background, chapters in this volume’s fourth part on ‘Bordering Migration in Cities’ have already provided insights for debates on asylum and the city and the socio-spatial changes in border cities in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Jonathan Darling addresses the example of Glasgow, defining it as a bordered city because it is at the forefront of the UK’s approach to accommodating asylum seekers through a dispersal system. As Darling notes, ‘the policy of dispersal is a predominantly urban process, housing asylum seekers in a community setting, often in poor quality accommodations and with limited access to services and support’ (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume). Estella Carpi looks at encounters and missed encounters between the urban and the humanitarian worlds, drawing on cases of small border towns and enlarged cities in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Cesar E. Merlin-Escorza discusses the performativities of (dis)location at shelters in both the southern border region of Mexico and the eastern border region of the Netherlands. He exclusively focuses on questions of controlling and transference of knowledge.
This chapter aims to synthesise these chapters’ analytical insights. It identifies current debates and research fields regarding asylum and urban places. It briefly maps the most-used theoretical perspectives and concepts in the existing literature and links them to the chapters mentioned above. To do that, the chapter begins with an overview of prevalent theoretical perspectives and concepts in the existing literature. Nevertheless, the goal is not to review past literature but rather to carry the discussion further by focusing on the analytical reflections from single chapters. Next, the chapter focuses on mechanisms of interactions and concludes by outlining some key questions to consider in further debates.
2 Intersection of Governance Approaches with Urban and Humanitarian Studies
Scholarship on asylum and city draws on several theoretical frameworks to examine the web of actors, interactions, and contestations. We should consider at least three theoretical angles, namely, governance approaches, critical humanitarian studies, and critical border studies. Empirical studies in this volume tend to select one of these theoretical perspectives or adopt them eclectically to analyse complex cases.
Among the governance approaches, the multilevel perspective has been one of the dominant, putting specific emphasis on cities because the vertical dimension of multilevel migration governance (MLG) considers the relevance of local, national, and the supra- and the international (mainly EU) processes in shaping migration policies and practices (Scholten & Penninx, 2016; Panizzon & Van Riemsdijk, 2019). MLG is basically defined as the dispersion of authority away from central government – upwards to the supranational level, downwards to subnational jurisdictions, and sideways to public-private networks (Hooghe et al., 2001; Scholten, 2020). MLG scholars paid attention to theorising local turn in relation to this framework (Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017). MLG is especially used to comparatively analyse municipal responses to national policies such as welfare provisions for non-removed rejected asylum seekers (Ataç et al., 2020) or integration programmes for refugees. It helps to explain the relations, including alliance-building of municipalities with civil society actors and other local governments. Although studies adopting MLG put particular attention on asylum and cities across Europe (Bazurli & Kaufmann, 2022; Dekker et al., 2015; Oliver et al., 2020), there has been growing interest in governance and local actors in non-European cities like Istanbul (Lowndes & Polat, 2020), Cairo (Grabska, 2006), or Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Kampala (Kihato & Landau, 2017a, b).
Going beyond the lens of levels, multiscalar perspective addresses relations and power dynamics across time and space (Oomen et al., 2021; Triandafyllidou, 2021). Multiscalar perspective proposes to focus on how ‘socio-spatial spheres of practice…are constituted in relationship to each other and within various hierarchies of networks of power’ (Çağlar & Schiller, 2018, p. 10). It makes a call for critically assessing the relationships between local actors and other nodes and networks of power (Oomen et al., 2021, p. 20). In particular, it has garnered increasing attention of migration scholarship focusing on urban scales (Darling & Bauder, 2019). This research aims to comprehensively describe how cities respond to, transform, and are transformed from the refugee migration by building bridges with urban studies. Particularly, ‘the relational accounts of urban studies highlight the urban complexity, connectivity, and heterogeneity’ by ‘challeng[ing] the assumptions of singular or coherent sovereign authority (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume).
The concept urbanisation of asylum (or urban asylum) emerged at the intersection of migration governance and urban studies perspectives. Darling notes that urbanisation of asylum ‘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’ (ibid.). Rightly, the concept does not only ask to consider ‘the role of 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 words are composed, contested and conceptualised’ (ibid.).
To identify complex and relations contingencies of asylum in urban contexts, scholars use a plethora of concepts such as the politics of presence, negotiations, and battlefield. The ‘politics of presence’ refers to ways in which ‘cities become the critical space for ‘contestation over rights, refuge, bordering and control’ (ibid., citing Lebuhn 2012). The concept of ‘urban negotiations of refuge’ is adopted for foregrounding a focus on local in debates over asylum (ibid.). The contestation(s) among different actors are described with the concept of a battleground of asylum (and immigration) policies: ‘they are a contentious field in which different actors interact, cooperating or conflicting’ (Ambrosini, 2021, p. 374). It is argued that the adoption of a ‘battleground’ perspective adds ‘a more dynamic basis for the MLG approach’ (Dimitriadis et al., 2021, p. 251).
Diverse actors have their own agendas and strategies regarding integration and diversity accommodation, on the one hand, and exclusion and bordering, on the other (Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017, p. 242). The actors include local ones such as ‘pro-refugee civil society; coalitions of diverse pro-refugee actors; opponents to refugee reception; local governments acting for and against refugee and migrant reception and asylum seekers and irregular immigrants themselves’ (Ambrosini, 2021, p. 374). The list also comprises scholars, undergraduate students, journalists, practitioners, and independent/NGO researchers interested in migration-related topics (Merlin-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume) as well as humanitarian and development agencies and their partners (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). So, all these diverse actors, sites, and encounters create ‘an assemblage’ (Merlin-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume), ‘urban world’ (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume) and ‘ecology’ (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). To define this, a popular notion coined in the last years is the ‘arrival/urban infrastructure’. The term enables the capture of the spatiotemporal and material conditions of arrivals and the different dimensions of struggles in the process of arrivals (Meeus et al., 2019). These urban infrastructures (such as settlements, marketplaces, transit camps) are important as they are intertwined and constitute the displaced person’s everyday reality (Oginni, 2021, p.1). An arrival infrastructures concept seeks to merge sovereign and agency-oriented approaches by focusing on understanding the organisation, production, and power negotiations of migrants and urban space (Meeus et al., 2019; Nettelbladt & Boano, 2019).
Critical humanitarian studies also offer analytical tools to interrogate the roles of local contexts in urban displacement, given that forced migration is a central issue for providing humanitarian assistance. Cities – particularly in the Global South – increasingly turn into the main sites of humanitarian action. Humanitarian agencies respond to forced migration in meeting the acute needs of displaced people and accessing services beyond camps. Over the years, ‘the humanitarian sector began to develop a more nuanced understanding of urbanity: its infrastructure, service provisions, societal and spatial processes of segregation and fragmentation, (in)formal and community-based networks and the broader relationship between transient humanitarian actors and the population at large’ (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). In addressing the various facets of the urbanisation of asylum, humanitarian actors engage with municipal authorities, cities’ populations, and displaced people.
Drawing from the intersection of displacement, urban, and humanitarian studies, Carpi offers a new concept: ‘urban-itarian’ ecologies (ibid.). ‘Urban-itarian’ refers to a spatial and relational intersection between the humanitarian and the urban. As such, it can ‘neither be reduced to governance nor to a mere discussion around the built environment’ (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). The concept underlines that the physical importance of the humanitarian presence also means considering the impact of the ‘material expression of places and practices on the residents, the urban actors, and the humanitarian actors’ (Smirl, 2015, p. 7). Carpi (Chap. 14, this volume) argues that humanitarian and urban actors share a relational and spatial ecology (‘worlds’) made of encounters as well as missed encounters. The originality of the concept lies in that it does not only refer to actors ‘but also to symbols and other visual forms, as well as to the political negotiations and relations between urban and humanitarian actors that are normally assembled under the broad and less fluid label of “governance”’ (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). With this conceptual innovation, Carpi invites students of displacement and humanitarianism to rethink narrow understandings of urban actors or governance perspectives (which often focus on local municipality and governorate actors) and urban settings influenced by the displacement(s). She directs our attention to focus on the local people’s perspective as well as sites of entertainment and learning where locals, refugees, and humanitarian actors interact.
Besides these approaches, critical border studies also feed the debates on the urbanisation of asylum. Inspired by critical border studies, previous research has examined how asylum seekers and refugees experience and negotiate borders as part of their everyday lives, including in urban/suburban neighbourhoods, naming the process as everyday urban bordering (Laine, 2016; Tervonen et al., 2018; Walsh et al., 2002). The scholars of urban asylum adopt broader interpretations of bordering. In this edited volume, chapters focus on both the border city and the bordered city. The border city is defined as an urban space situated on an international boundary. Bordered city is a cityFootnote 1 that is a key site for the everyday bordering of the state (Cassidy, 2019). Darling (Chap. 13) identifies Glasgow as a bordered city for being subject to the dispersal policy of the UK government. Carpi (Chap. 14) focuses on more diverse border settings that are primary destinations for refugees from Syria. She draws from the example of three border towns in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. Additionally, she looks at the Turkish city of Gaziantep and two Istanbul neighbourhoods that resemble bordered localities as they are subject to several bordering processes, like the Glasgow example (Karaman & Islam, 2012). Similarly, Merlín-Escorza’s case selection in Chap. 15 reflects a broader interpretation of border. He focuses on the two shelter locations. One is located at the southern border region of Mexico, where people have crossed the border from Guatemala. Another is a shelter located ‘at the eastern border region of the Netherlands, where people who have been rejected from the procedure for obtaining asylum, find accommodation next to food, basic physical and mental health care, and free legal assistance related to their asylum cases’ (Merlín-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume). All these bordered and border localities are complex environments because of often disputed and rapidly changing characteristics (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume).
Chapters in this volume’s fourth part and growing literature make calls to understand local bordering practices (occurring beyond territorial borders of sovereign states) in relation to ‘the multitude of the actors; legal pluralism; and the contextual role of social, economic, and spatial factors’ (Oomen et al., 2021, p.16). They also pay attention to the ‘relational networks of bordering’ (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume). For example, Darling argues that accommodation and support services regulations have potential impacts in a wide range of sites (e.g. transit, origin) as well as the impacts on persons and networks in the situation of containment and onward migration (ibid.). Carpi shows how ‘urbanising’ humanitarianism in these border and bordered towns and cities emerged as insufficiently responsive to local specificities and histories.
3 Encountering Mechanisms/Dynamics
There are various dynamics at play in the urbanisation of asylum. These dynamics offer insights into the ‘new configurations of power, influence and contestation that are shaping how cities are playing increasingly prominent and often contentious roles in the politics of refuge’ (ibid.). I will review some of these mechanisms drawn from chapters in this Part IV on ‘Bordering Migration in Cities’ and bring some other examples, as these trends are also observable in cases addressed here.
3.1 Extraction
It is observable across cases that accommodating asylum seekers became an opportunity for revenue generation for local authorities.Footnote 2 In earlier research, Kihato and Landau (2017a, b, p. 414) discuss how humanitarian agencies put ‘greater emphasis on market-based solutions as a means of both improving protection and limiting seeming unnecessary spending on top-heavy bureaucracies’ as observed in the cases of Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Kampala.
For the case of Glasgow, in the early stages of dispersals, a surplus of hard-to-let social housing was turned into asylum accommodation places, thus they were recycled and readied for future investments. For this trend, Darling highlights that ‘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’ (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume). Similar value extraction mechanisms are also discussed by scholars focusing on urban humanitarian actions in the Global South cities. Carpi shows that the same trend has been observable in the Syrian refugee-hosting border towns. She elaborates on the case of an internationally funded market in Halba, Lebanon, and points to wide gaps at the programming level. While refugees living in border towns ‘predominantly needed rural means of livelihoods in order to survive, international humanitarian support became growingly urban-centred’ (Carpi, Chap. 14, this volume). This, in turn, led to the emergence of hybrid economies in border towns. Her examples are also important for thinking about two consequential mechanisms: how foreign humanitarian actors ignore local urban histories and relationships and how they are usually reluctant to involve local authorities in their own work with the intention of keeping humanitarian action out of local politics.
The value extraction from refugees to urban development does not always emerge in material forms. Drawing from the example of resettling refugees to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Watson (2019, p. 983) shows that some welcoming cities ‘see building and promoting “diversity” as an economic exigency. As such, locally resettled refugees are incentivised to participate in a “symbolic economy” valuing images of diversity, cosmopolitanism, and immigrant contribution’. Merlin-Escorza, in Chap. 15, takes a similar approach, with a focus on non-material extraction(s). He relates the same concept of extraction, innovatively with the academic knowledge production processes. Drawing from the notion of cognitive extractivism, he offers to look at the mechanism of extraction in migration research. It is considered similar to the means of extraction in governance, which is marked by spatial relocation and hierarchical (also colonially-coined) power relations among migrants and governing actors. In the case of migration knowledge production, the epistemic privilege of Northern academic knowledge to fix or categorise some people as ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, and ‘asylum-seekers’ and treat experiences in some sites such as those in shelters, camps, borders, or ‘slums’ as worth being selected, taken, and processed into the knowledge (Merlin-Escorza, Chap. 15, this volume).
3.2 Frictions, Battlegrounds and Solidarities
One important mechanism discussed in the literature and chapters reviewed here concerns the frictions and struggles observed during the urbanisation of asylum. These frictions may occur 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. Recent discussions on these frictions adopt the battleground notion (Ambrosini, 2021) to focus on governing actors operating at different levels (local, national). For example, refugee placement has become politicised and a point of struggle between state and city governments in many parts of the world due to the contradictions inherent to resettlement policies and backlash from local actors (indicatively, for the US, see Benson et al., 2022). In other instances, frictions may arise when municipal actors like mayors seek to engage more interactively with the national scale (e.g. ministries or directories) or transnational scale via city networks or humanitarian actors, leading to institutional changes or empowerment (Betts et al., 2021) and may take advantage of new opportunity structures to promote their leadership (Sabchev, 2021).
Carpi, in Chap. 14, opens a new perspective in considering frictions that emphasise the encounters of urban and humanitarian actors. It is common that international humanitarian actors (and donors) serving refugees find themselves in highly politicised and politically fragmented urban spaces. They operate amidst conflicting global norms about protection, the needs of vulnerable populations, and local struggles for limited resources, on the one hand, and humanitarian principles (neutrality, impartiality, and independence), competition for donor resources, and expectations about quantifiable efficiency, on the other (Kihato & Landau, 2017a, b). Carpi argues that both actors build a complex ecology in which ‘urban-itarian’ encounters occur. These encounters also ‘involve a discussion about coordination/lack of coordination in aid and service provision, and deliberate or unwilling modalities of co-governance’ (Chap. 14, this volume). It is important to understand how humanitarian assistance influences urban setting and how it increasingly interrelates with development assistance that often directly targets the transformation of urban infrastructures. Nevertheless, the physical humanitarian presence needs to be negotiated in some city spaces like Istanbul or Gaziantep, where local repercussions are likely (ibid.). Carpi thus highlighted similar power relations and negotiations around the humanitarian presence in the border and bordered cities.
Interestingly, Merlin-Escorza focuses on the potential frictions emerging between two archetypical actors present at the shelters, i.e., the hosts and guests or migrants and volunteers. His chapter turns the analytical gaze to researchers. He argues that researchers are also are part of this ‘battleground’ as players, and they may encounter frictions with other actors when focusing on urban refugees as in shelters. His reflective research questions – whose and which knowledge and experiences are essential for the production of academic migration-related knowledge and how has the shelter been naturalised as a space for doing fieldwork – can be raised in other research contexts as well.
Darling’s case pushes us to consider how the frictions at the governance levels interact with the forms of emerging solidarities run by communities, asylum advocates, and asylum seekers together as in the contentious forms of anti-deportation activism and opposition to government policies in the city. This can be situated within the debates on inclusive policymaking of cities vis-a-via the regulatory policies of the national state (Ataç et al., 2020; Bauder, 2021). This mechanism is termed urbanising migration-policymaking (Kaufmann & Strebel, 2021). In the European context, for instance in the example of Dutch municipalities, these actors may find ways of ‘cushioning, bypassing, resisting and counteracting various aspects of exclusionary asylum policies’ (Kos et al., 2016, p.356).
Besides debates about contestations, the existing literature provides ample examples for solidarity, in particular dynamics in sanctuary cities (Bauder, 2017), solidarity cities, or cities of refuge (Christoph & Kron, 2019; Koellner, 2019). These cities develop urban actions or policies that address the precarious situation of irregular migrants. Their policies, such as regularisation programmes, counter the national policymaking by challenging the national state’s authority as the only regulatory body over immigration.
Debates around cities can be also linked to citizenship and rights discussions, introducing the notion of ‘urban citizenship’ (Varsanyi, 2006; Prak, 2018). Kihato and Landau (2017a, b, p. 420) note that ‘as rights are increasingly negotiated “horizontally” (cf. Kabeer 2005) with neighbours, not states, a state-centred language of rights can be impotent and potentially perilous’. Ethnographic studies focusing on the everyday practices of refugees in certain neighbourhoods of Istanbul and Athens illustrate that refugees take action against top-down social segregation and exclusion through their communing practices; hence they claim spatial justice, visibility, and the right to the centre of the city (Tsavdaroglou, 2020; Tsavdaroglou & Kaika, 2022). Refugees thus emerge in the battlegrounds through claim-making, negotiation, acts of everyday resistance, and organised opposition. Nevertheless, there are also cases in cities and towns that refuse asylum seekers despite the national allocation plans’ requirements (Marchetti, 2020). In both situations – accommodative and restrictive – urban settings turn into the site of negotiations and argumentations, politicising the topic of asylum and reception further.
3.3 Temporality
Temporality is often a vital component of encounters and outcomes in the urbanisation of asylum. Although many forced migrants arrive in cities via their own spontaneous journeys, it is also the case that some are settled in cities because of dispersal, allocation, residential obligations, and resettlement policies set by national governments (Robinson et al., 2003). In some cases, the urban refugee population increases due to the closures of refugee camps. Hence, temporality emerges as an essential part of the experiences of asylum seekers awaiting settlement or processing and refugees in conditions of protracted displacement and onward migration (Brun, 2016; Fontanari, 2017). It is not rare that ‘arrival [is] practised and lived temporally and relationally among the displaced persons’ (Oginni, 2021, p.1).
In many situations, cities become sites of a considerable degree of social policy experimentation in relation to asylum. These policy innovations have impact on cities, for example, forcing ‘the development of urban support sectors that were themselves experimental, untested, and often haphazard in their early iterations’ (Darling, Chap. 13, this volume). Examples include outsourcing accommodation and support contracts to private companies or using hotels as a form of temporary or overspilled accommodation for asylum seekers (ibid.). This experimentation also related to the fact that governance challenges, including uncertainties, divergences, and complexities in the field of asylum are often responded to either by authorities’ ‘temporary fixes’ or by ‘situated negotiations’ of diverse actors (ibid.). Regarding temporalities, Carpi’s chapter makes us think on the temporariness of encounters between the urban and the humanitarian worlds. Humanitarian actors’ permanent or temporary presence not only influences the refugees but also impacts local residents’ perception of them. One site of intense temporal encounters is shelters. Merlin-Escorza situates shelters as spaces characterised by the transit and transition of people, their knowledge, and experiences.
Temporality of actors (e.g. volunteers), sites (e.g. shelters), and relations emerge as important components of the ‘battlegrounds’ mentioned above. No doubt engaging on the battleground necessitates choosing some tactical moves and building alliances, on the one hand, and being subject to unexpected outcomes, on the other. Drawing from empirical research in three African cities – Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Kampala – Kihato and Landau (2017a, b, p. 408) rightly underline that ‘promoting rights for refugees living amongst equally poor and vulnerable host populations requires tactical political alliances with community-based organisations and local actors. In many instances, humanitarians need to be all but invisible, promoting rights indirectly to avoid political ire and popular backlash’. In many cases, humanitarian programming remains inconclusive despite attempts to transform refugees’ urban life (or assimilate the rural and peri-urban). Instead, migrants lead hybrid lifestyles and develop complex livelihood strategies, as Carpi shows. Accordingly, Carpi’s chapter urges us to think on hybrid lifestyles of displaced people living in border cities because some may have to build their worlds across the urban and the rural. Hence, it makes us reconsider urban-rural dichotomies. Merlin-Escorza’s reflexivity about his engagements in the shelter as a volunteer/researcher also offers us nuanced understanding of temporalities experienced by different actors. He notes that ‘many volunteers are only present at the shelter for short periods of time’ and that ‘shelters are thus, defined by the inward and outward mobilities of actors, whose life-trajectories are characterised by movement and stillness, loss and hope, and emplacement’ (Merlín-Escorza, Chap. 15 , this volume).
3.4 Spatial Changes
It should be added that material spatial changes may occur in the bordered and border cities. In particular, control policies subject some border cities to top-down physical changes, such as the construction of border walls, accommodation centres, or camps, deployment of extra security measures, and even the creation of cemeteries for unclaimed corpses of migrants. Some material changes remain permanent, while others (like camps or accommodation centres) might be temporal, as they are dismantled over time.
Besides permanent or temporal top-down spatial transformations, urbanisation of asylum may lead to bottom-up changes in the cities. Some neighbourhoods may observe spatial changes due to the arrival of many refugees, solidarity groups, and multiple humanitarian actors. In such neighbourhoods (called urban refugee neighbourhoods), communal houses, social centres, and collective kitchens are created through the cooperation of refugees, humanitarian organisations, and local solidarity groups. In some cases, the simultaneous arrival of refugees and humanitarians may make ‘urban space more urban than ever’ or transform peri-urban spaces (like some towns) into real cities or enlarge cities. Meanwhile, as Carpi notes, ‘humanitarian symbols, logos, flags, and offices appear as temporary to international dwellers, for local and refugee residents, they are often a “permanent topography of assistance”’ (Chap. 14 , this volume). These play a sizeable role in making cities.
Merlin-Escorza’s chapter is illustrative to think on the transformative power of spaces of ‘transit and in transition’. He highlights that although ‘shelters have been long understood in literature from a spatial/material perspective as places in which temporary protection is provided’, they are more than this because they serve to meet of needs of people in mobility across national borders along with those of the ‘host communities and environment’ in the crisis-like emergencies, as well as they work for the advocacy of migrant’ lives. With these characteristics, they are not solely a humanitarian service actors/site, but rather among forces contesting the state-led migration management architectures (ibid.). Nevertheless, as observed in other sites, ‘the power relations inherent to sheltering practices, especially when migration research is performed while or within sheltering’ (ibid.).
4 Concluding Remarks
As the brief review of existing scholarship and chapters in the fourth part of this volume reveals, a local turn in Migration Studies has been well received by scholars studying asylum in urban settings. Diverse relations and various entanglements in urban spaces are created and transformed by migrants and asylum seekers, often in the shadows or against national and urban migration management policies. All these developments also influence power relations horizontally and vertically.
Chapters in the volume’s concluding part offer thoughtful insights into the new power, influence, and contestation configurations. They also provide some ideas for the temporality of changes. They contribute to developing an ‘interdisciplinary way to urbanise debates on forced migration’ (Kreichauf & Glorius, 2021). They provide insights into multiple actors, spatial transformations, and engagement mechanisms. Nevertheless, they warn us against the dangers of binary thinking, suggesting relational thinking instead. For example, Carpi (Chap. 14) notes that ‘the urban-itarian does not focus on urban refugees versus camp-based refugees and their respective urban demands (citing Azizi et al., 2021, p. 4455), but rather on the urban-itarian ecology: namely, the relational and spatial interplay of humanitarian and urban actors’.
Although there is no doubt that cities are playing an increasingly prominent role in the politics of refuge, we still face some difficult questions in developing a more elaborated research agenda on politics of urban space and asylum from a relational perspective. These include: one, how to analytically focus on the temporality dimension (constant change of socio-political dynamics); two, how to better identify diverse relations and mechanisms of negotiating among multiple actors; and, three, how do practical and political realities of displacement and asylum in urban settings show similarities and differences across countries and various localities. All these questions also bring us back the broader question of the extent to which we can treat cities as autonomous policy actors on asylum. It further raises the issue of whether we can expect that the gap between restrictive legislation and (liberal/positive) urban actions facilitating migrants’ access to services will reform the asylum regime from the bottom up through practices. An initial response to the first question is that cities are only one among the range of authorities navigating and negotiating the realities of displacement, but not the sole actors. Regarding the second issue, it can be tentatively said that actions taken by cities undoubtedly make changes in the life of asylum seekers and may strengthen democratic policymaking, even triggering some policy changes, but they rarely turn into a deeply-rooted reformist wave.
Notes
- 1.
‘Bordered city’ is also used to refer cities where polarisation and deep-rooted dichotomies of communities take place in the everyday engagements in the streets, neighbourhoods, meeting places, and other communal or public spaces.
- 2.
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Mencütek, Z.Ş. (2024). Temporality and Permanency in the Study of Border Cities and Migration. 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_16
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