Infrastructures of reception: The spatial politics of refuge in Mannheim, Germany

Abstract

This article investigates the spatial politics at play in the urban reception of refugees by proposing an infrastructural conceptualisation of humanitarian spaces. In doing so, it destabilises the assumption that urban infrastructures form the mere backdrop of humanitarian government by thinking the city as socio-technical networks. By advancing the notion of infrastructures of reception, we draw attention to those parts of urban space that establish relationships between refugees and the cities that host them. Thus, building on ethnographic material collected in and around a state-managed reception centre in Mannheim, Germany, the article advances a critical reading of the universal, humanitarian gestures the German state has employed towards refugees since 2015, juxtaposing the state's rhetoric with the actual spaces of refuge. An attention to the situated materiality of the reception centre and its policy framework exposes on one hand that Mannheim's reception gesture towards refugees was the outcome of risk-benefit calculations, and on the other that its spatiality contributes to its residents' immobility, containment and suspension. Ultimately, the article argues that an infrastructural approach to urban reception practices offers a pertinent theoretical and methodological tool to uncover its political trajectories through highlighting the refugee centre's ambivalent relationship with the city.