Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper explores how asylum might be understood from an urban perspective. The paper focuses on a range of conceptual interventions mobilized around the notion of ‘seeing like a city’, which foreground the pragmatic and compositional nature of urban politics. These debates are placed in conversation with discussions over the changing nature of relations of power, to examine the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that current research on dispersal has tended to focus too exclusively on the regulatory and sovereign aspects of this policy. In doing so, such research has overlooked the urban manifestation of dispersal as a process that has created new knowledges and forms of expertise, whilst being sustained through spatially complex relations of present authority and distant accountability. In exploring these relations, the paper argues that a focus on ‘refugee urbanism’ may open productive new avenues for critically exploring urban asylum.
Highlights
It’s 2014 and I’m sitting in a café talking with Anna, an asylum seeker originally from Eastern Europe, who has lived in Glasgow for two years
In considering what seeing like a city may offer to an understanding of urban asylum, the paper draws on an empirical project exploring the relationship between asylum seekers, dispersal and urban governance in the UK (Darling, 2016a)
I have explored how urban asylum might be approached by employing an emergent set of debates on what it may mean to see like a city
Summary
It’s 2014 and I’m sitting in a café talking with Anna, an asylum seeker originally from Eastern Europe, who has lived in Glasgow for two years. In considering what seeing like a city may offer to an understanding of urban asylum, the paper draws on an empirical project exploring the relationship between asylum seekers, dispersal and urban governance in the UK (Darling, 2016a).
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