Although ‘arrival infrastructure’ is central to the experience of migrants arriving in a new city, is it sufficient to form a ‘hospitable milieu’? Our article compares newcomers’ experiences with ‘arrival infrastructure’ in two European cities: Brussels and Geneva. Based on ethnographic research with 49 migrants who arrived a few months earlier, we show that arrival infrastructure is Janus-faced. On one hand, it welcomes newcomers and contributes to making the city hospitable. On the other hand, it rejects, deceives and disappoints them, forcing them to remain mobile—to go back home, go further afield, or just move around the city—in order to satisfy their needs and compose what we will call a ‘hospitable milieu.’ The arrival infrastructure’s inhospitality is fourfold: linked firstly to its limitations and shortcomings, secondly to the trials or tests newcomers have to overcome in order to benefit from the infrastructure, thirdly to the necessary forms of closure needed to protect those who have just arrived and fourthly to those organising and managing the infrastructure, with divergent conceptions of hospitality. By using the notion of milieu and by embedding infrastructure into the broader question of hospitality, we open up an empirical exploration of its ambiguous role in the uncertain trajectories of newcomers.

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Individual life courses are marked by residential mobility often associated with family and workplace changes and therefore likely to be related to the types of personal relationships people develop and maintain. Evidence about the relationship between residential mobility behaviours over the life course and personal network composition is however scarce. This study investigates this relationship among 747 individuals living in Switzerland using regression models and standard deviational ellipse for analysing all residential locations in Switzerland and their duration over the life course. Results show that people with low residential mobility have personal networks centred around the partner and vertical family ties (parents and children), confirming that strong intergenerational ties develop in close proximity. By contrast, longer distance residential moves at the regional level are associated with small personal networks centred around peers and horizontal ties (such as friends and siblings). The network composition of people with mobility experiences at the national level does not differ from the network composition of non‐movers when controlling for socio‐demographic characteristics. Likewise, networks including in‐laws and extended family members and large mixed networks including both family and friends were not associated with a particular residential mobility trajectory. The density of the Swiss transport system enabling people to stay connected to family and friends may partly explain the weak association between residential mobility behaviours and the composition of personal networks.

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