Abstract
Refugee reception in Germany is a primarily municipal task that relies heavily on neighborhood-based volunteering. This paper asserts that there are fundamental spatial mismatches between municipal policies and neighborhood-based approaches that place additional burden on all of the stakeholders involved. Drawing from the case of Frankfurt-Rödelheim, which is a socially and ethnically mixed neighborhood in Frankfurt am Main, I show how the way the municipality accommodates refugees disregards the politically embraced work of neighborhood-based volunteers and how the ideal of neighborhood-based inclusion creates a spatial fetish that fails the living reality of the refugees. The findings are based on my ethnographic fieldwork as volunteer in a neighborhood-based welcome initiative.
Highlights
When more than one million refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, German chancellor Angela Merkel famously responded with “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”)
Asylum seekers are required to register with a state organization in order to apply for asylum when they arrive in Germany
(Hess et al 2017), new volunteering initiatives emerged all over Germany (Hamann et al 2017). Most of these “welcome initiatives” developed spontaneously and independently of traditional civil society organizations working with migrants (Karakayali and Kleist 2016) and many organized themselves at the local level as neighborhood initiatives
Summary
When more than one million refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, German chancellor Angela Merkel famously responded with “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”). (Hess et al 2017), new volunteering initiatives emerged all over Germany (Hamann et al 2017) Most of these “welcome initiatives” developed spontaneously and independently of traditional civil society organizations working with migrants (Karakayali and Kleist 2016) and many organized themselves at the local level as neighborhood initiatives. They filled the gaps that were left by state authorities and offered assistance to asylum seekers by teaching German and supporting refugees in their everyday needs. I summarize my findings in the form of anonymized, aggregated data in the following account
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