The article analyses and discusses the development of Leipzig and especially its inner east as an ‘urban space of arrival’ since 1990. It represents a study about arrival in the post-socialist context that is fairly rare in the international debate so far, since most of the arrival debate builds on western European evidence. Leipzig’s inner east was characterised by shrinkage until the end of the 1990s and by new growth, especially after 2010, as the whole city grew. Since the second half of the 1990s the inner east has developed into a migrant area, referred to here as an ‘arrival space.’ Today, in 2020, it represents the most heterogeneous part of the city in terms of population structure and is one of the most dynamic areas in terms of in- and out-migration. At the same time, it represents an area where large amounts of the population face different types of disadvantage. Set against this context, the article embeds the story of Leipzig’s inner east into the arrival debate and investigates the area’s development according to the characteristics discussed by the debate. Our results reveal that Leipzig’s inner east represents a meaningful example of an arrival space in a specific (post-socialist, shrinkage followed by regrowth) context and that arrival and its spatial allocation strongly depend on factors like population, housing, and real estate market development, as well as policymaking and, significantly, recognition.

The article examines how the German city of Leipzig governs the housing of asylum seekers. Leipzig was a frontrunner in organizing the decentralized accommodation of asylum seekers when adopting its accommodation concept in 2012. This concept aimed at integrating asylum-seeking persons in the regular housing market at an early stage of arrival. However, since then, the city of Leipzig faces more and more challenges in implementing the concept. This is particularly due to the increasingly tight situation on the housing market while the number of people seeking protection increased and partly due to discriminating and xenophobic attitudes on the side of house owners and managers. Therefore, we argue that the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 has to be seen in close interaction with a growing general housing shortage in Leipzig like in many other large European cities. Furthermore, we understand the municipal governing of housing as a contested field regarding its entanglement of diverse federal levels and policy scales, the diversity of stakeholders involved, and its dynamic change over the last years. We analyze this contested field set against the current context of arrival and dynamic urban growth on a local level. Based on empirical qualitative research that was conducted by us in 2016, Leipzig’s local specifics will be investigated under the umbrella of our conceptual framework of Governance of Arrival. The issues of a strained housing market and the integration of asylum seekers in it do not apply only to Leipzig, but shed light on similar developments in other European Cities.

In the context of the massive refugee influx from Ukraine to its European neighbouring states over the last months, this update reflects on the experiences of two international exchanges led by HOUSE-IN: a JPI Urban Europe-funded project that deals with challenges at the housing-integration nexus. The exchanges revealed the impacts of this forced migration at the intersection of housing and integration in several European cities. The update analyses the civic and temporal nature of responses to this refugee movement, which have challenged major assumptions about practices of settling and integration under uncertainties of war, as well as those around access to housing and support.

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