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.
Highlights
At the occasion of the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the German pavilion presented the fascinating exhibition and catalogue entitled “Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country” (Schmal, Elser, & Scheuermann, 2016)
In this article we propose an arrival infrastructures 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
For Collins (2012, p. 320), the aim is to “tease out the ambiguities of transnational mobilities and their emplacement in urban space in ways that recognise how this emplacement is both facilitated and blocked.”. Tying in with this literature on migration and transnationalism studies, but at the same time in an attempt to infuse it with an infrastructures perspective, we propose in this article to broaden the existing urban planning repertoire with an ‘arrival infrastructures’ perspective
Summary
At the occasion of the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the German pavilion presented the fascinating exhibition and catalogue entitled “Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country” (Schmal, Elser, & Scheuermann, 2016). In an attempt to acknowledge such a translocal, multi-sited and relational view on urban arrival, transnationalism scholar Smith (2005) coined the notion of emplacement to situate the agency of migrants without necessarily choosing one particular spatial scale such as the neighbourhood, the city or the country as the most important scale for analysis. Instead he advocated a spatial analysis which is sensitive to the territorial and the relational constitution of arrival. This perspective does not radically replace the existing perspectives on migrants’ arrival, but rather aspires to add new layers, and to open up and enrich prevailing perspectives in urban planning
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