Broadening the Urban Planning Repertoire with an ‘Arrival Infrastructures’ Perspective

Abstract

In this article we propose an arrival infrastructure’s perspective in order to move beyond imaginaries of neighbourhoods as a ‘port of first entry’ that are deeply ingrained in urban planning discussions on migrants’ arrival situations. A focus on the socio-material infrastructures that shape an arrival situation highlights how such situations are located within, but equally transcend, the territories of neighbourhoods and other localities. Unpacking the infrastructuring work of a diversity of actors involved in the arrival process helps to understand how they emerge through time and how migrants construct their future pathways with the futuring possibilities at hand. These constructions occur along three dimensions: (1) Directionality refers to the engagements with the multiple places migrants have developed over time, (2) temporality questions imaginaries of permanent belonging, and (3) subjectivity directs attention to the diverse current and future subjectivities migrants carve out for themselves in situations of arrival. This perspective requires urban planners to trace, grasp and acknowledge the diverse geographies and socio-material infrastructures that shape arrival and the diverse forms of non-expert agency in the use, appropriation and fabrication of the built environment in which the arrival takes place.

Channelling mobilities: migrant-owned businesses as mobility infrastructures

“…In all these cases, mobile trajectories are entangled with urban infrastructures that facilitate -or even enable -the maintenance of mobile lifestyles. These places (restaurants, shops and cafés) provide the infrastructuring work (Meeus et al 2020) of mobile practices: they back them or support them in various ways. It is perhaps pointless to wonder what came first: mobile lifestyles or mobility infrastructures.…”

“…Other studies describe the infrastructuring work (Meeus et al 2020) provided by migrant businesses, although not always alluding to the notion of infrastructure. In their study about Punjabi migrants in Lisbon, McGarrigle and Ascensão (2017), for example, show the multiple modes in which migrants' trajectories are entangled with businesses that were established by earlier migrants in the city.…”

Refugee Arrival under Conditions of Urban Decline: From Territorial Stigma and Othering to Collective Place-Making in Diverse Shrinking Cities?

“…Forcibly displaced people are often depicted as passive, which neglects the many ways in which refugees prove resilience and agency in shaping their environments-even under most precarious conditions (ibid.). Such representations also neglect forced migrants' aspirations [10]. In contrast to this increasingly anti-refugee discourse, the summer of 2015 also moved some mayors of European shrinking cities to voice their willingness to welcome forced migrants.…”

Making Home(s) in Displacement

“…Yet, after leaving the asylum centre, being recognised or not as a refugee, or even without having pursued the status of asylum seeker, most newcomers 'land' in cities because of the availability of rich "arrival infrastructures" (Meeus et al 2018(Meeus et al , 2020d' Auria, Daher, & Rohde, 2018) or "arrival neighbourhoods", often vulnerable to gentrification, in which more established migrants groups play an essential role because they provide networks of kinship and information necessary to access (often substandard) housing on the over-saturated, urban housing markets (cf. Schillebeeckx et al, 2019;Saunders, 2016;Wessendorf, 2018;Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018;Beeckmans, 2020;Pemberton & Phillimore, 2018). However, while we understand cities as the place of settlement preferred by many for making a home (Glick, Schiller, & Çağlar, 2011;Hall, 2015), this city-making mostly occurs in connection to cities elsewhere (Hou, 2013;Beeckmans, 2022).…”