Immigration and the city: between state planning and residents’ practices and representations

Abstract

This paper proposes to explore the role of immigration in the making of places. Departing from the assumption that “[…] the reconstruction of spaces and places within the City [i]s an active part of the reordering of the wider relations within which the City is set […]” (Massey et al. in City worlds. Routledge in association with the Open University, London, p 107, 1999), it addresses the relations between place, placemaking and immigration. The article draws on an empirical study carried out in an Israeli town located at the border of Lebanon, which was established in the 1950s with the purpose of settling new Jewish immigrants. It stages the life stories of various informants to the research, and the embodied character of these experiences, which all contribute to the production of the place under scrutiny. This micro-history of a place enables to identify the current immigration policy in place, and the motives which underlie it. As the article demonstrates, the narratives of each informant, inscribed in collective patterns, show the extent to which immigration is a crucial issue through which the city repositions itself within national narratives of nationbuilding. Additionally, they inform the transformations of power relations both in and out of the city, and the way the ‘imaginaries of place’ (Walker and Leitner in Urban Geogr 32(2):156–178, 2011) have shifted.