Architectures of asylum: Making home in a state of permanent temporariness

Abstract

Urban research in Germany has started to address the socio-spatial distribution and architectures of so-called collective accommodation for asylum seekers, refugee camps, and new forms of ethnic segregation triggered by refugee movements in recent years. The spatial practices of refugees themselves within these processes have not yet been a subject of substantive research. Combining research methods from social and architectural sciences, this article investigates the physical, material, social and symbolic appropriation processes and the spatial dimension of homemaking by Syrian refugees currently housed in refugee accommodation in Berlin, Germany. What spatial knowledge is mobilized at the place of asylum in order to turn the accommodation into a home? How do spatial practices and knowledge hybridize practices of the place of origin, experiences made during the flight and the arriving and uncertain period of stay at an unfamiliar place of asylum? How do spatial appropriation processes collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management approaches at the place of asylum? With these questions, the article focuses on the ways in which refugees perceive, adapt to, appropriate and alter their new urban environment physically and socially, and how they thereby draw on existing and evolving stocks of urban knowledge, urban experiences and social relationships. It argues that to develop a homelike space in temporary accommodation, arriving refugees mobilize knowledge at the place of asylum which can only be understood as a re-figuration process that is equally at work in the case of other migrants, migration and translocal processes. Studying these urban re-figurations thus helps us to reveal how the interplay of refugees’ agency and their knowledge and the technocratic regime – as a state of permanent temporariness – affects the making of a ‘home’.

Multiple geographies of precarity: Accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens, Greece

“…Refugee accommodation policies have been significantly reshaped in a series of European countries since 2015, leading to renewed academic interest in the field (Darling, 2017, 2020; El Moussawi and Schuermans, 2021; Kreichauf, 2018; Novak, 2021; Semprebon, 2021; Steigemann and Misselwitz, 2020). This article, which is part of the Special Issue ‘Urban Europe, Precarious Futures?’, brings to the forefront the case of Greece as not only one of the main entry countries but also as an important part of the wider European reception system.…”

Communicative Constructions and the Refiguration of Spaces

“…In previous work, we revealed that spatial practices are also key to urbanizing refugee camps and turning them into homes (Steigemann and Misselwitz 2020;Misselwitz 2009). For instance, Romola Sanyal (2011) has explained how, despite the policing practices and attempts to maintain the temporal nature of the camp, refugees most often manage to urbanize their accommodations through the incremental practice of building under cover of their tents and bribing policemen.…”

Post‐2015 refugees in Germany: “Culture of welcome”, solidarity or exclusion?

“…While it is less common to have large‐scale camp structures in Germany that offer shelter to thousands of refugees, scholars have pointed to the “campization” (Kreichauf, 2018) of the accommodation centres to draw attention to their isolated and permanently temporary nature. Recent scholarship on post‐2015 refugees' reception conditions through different case studies have attended to the “the situated materiality” of the reception centres, that is to say to their interaction with the surrounding infrastructure (Nettelbladt & Boano, 2019), practices of bordering and debordering that are reproduced by volunteers (Blank, 2021) as well as the resistance and home‐making of refugees (Steigemann & Misselwitz, 2020). In this special issue, comparing three accommodation centres in the same city, Seethaler‐Wari and Yanaşmayan (2023) seek to reveal intersecting forms of socio‐spatial exclusion by analysing differing internal and external spatial arrangements as well as the regulation of space and social relations between forced migrants and social workers and volunteers inside the accommodation centres.…”