Renegotiating the city: refugee resettlement between surveillance, austerity, and activism in German urban communities

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newcomers and residents with different subjectivities constructed their identity, social belonging, and justified their rights-claiming? What kind of changes can be observed in city’s social spaces? Supported by critical geography, securitization, ethnographic approaches, the paper aims to identify the grey areas of the urban social spaces and presents two accounts centred on: (1) city as sites of bureaucratic politics, austerity urbanism and surveillance; (2) city as sites of sanctuary/solidarity practices. It argues that the refugees’ arrival offers the chance for German cities to envision a social project through engaging a politics of ‘bounding’ which involves the re-framing of refugee displacement in relation to urban development by covering both the lived (camp) experiences of those on the move and local population's needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral urbanism
• refugee resettlement and integration in Germany
• austerity urbanism
• surveillance measures and crimigation
• identity- and boundary-making in German cities

Acknowledgements

My great thanks go to the guest editor of the special issue ‘Contentious Politics of Migration’, Maria Koinova, and Philip Marfleet for their precious comments on earlier drafts. I am particularly grateful to the Globalizations’ anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful suggestions that helped improve the paper considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See for example the state government Baden-Württemberg’s 2018 integration report; Expert Council on Migration and Integration (SVR) (2018). Target group stratified survey conducted by the author in April 2021, details see the methodological notes below.

2 The term ‘anchor centres’ first appears in the federal government’s coalition agreement in 2018. Refugees are to be accommodated here until they are either distributed to municipalities or deported to their country of origin in case of rejection of their asylum application. The first seven centres came into being on 1 August 2018 in Bavaria, which are existing facilities (in Bamberg, Schweinfurt, Deggendorf, Donauwörth, Zirndorf, Regensburg, Manching). Later, anchor centres were also established in Saxony and Saarland. Some facilities in other federal states (e.g. in Baden-Württemberg and Hamburg (in Rahlstedt)) are called ‘Landesaufnahmestellen’ (state reception centres) or central first reception facility and are viewed to have the same function as anchor centres. See RNZ, 24.04.2018, p. 8; Philipp Woldin (2019).

3 See Nadja Schlüter (2021).

4 See Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community (2019).

5 See also Nina von Hardenberg (2021).

6 See the 2021 Study of Migrant Founders Monitors, 27th April. ‘Refugee: Success Factor for a Successful Integration’, DIW, Uni Saarland, Uni Münster, published on 23 May 2019, available at Flüchtlinge: Erfolgsfaktoren für eine gelungene Integration | marktforschung.de (visited on 6 April 2021).

7 See Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) and the German Islam Conference (2021).

8 See Rainer Link (2019); ‘Menschen ohne Papiere in Hamburg,’ available at https://hamburgasyl.de/themen/menschen-ohne-papiere-in-hamburg/.

9 See BAMF (2021).

10 Says Ulla Jelpke from the Left Partty in an interview with the Funke-Zeitung. See Finanznachrichten (2021).

11 Says Thomas Bollwein of the Bavarian Refugee Council. See Bavaria Radio (2020).

12 See the website of ANKER-Watch https://www.anker-watch.de, supported by several refugee councils based in for example in München and Würzburg.

13 See Wiebke Ramm (2021).

14 See Stefan Buchen et al. (2021) and Peter Burghardt (2019).

15 NDR Info (2018).

16 ‘Cooperation agreement. Mixing housing makes for good neighborhoods and integration.’ City Hamburg, press office of the department for urban development and housing, 17 July 2018.

17 See City Hamburg (2007).

18 LIGA Berlin (2020).

19 Barbara Caveng, a Swiss artist who works with asylum seekers, describes the life situation in the camps. Cited in Zanghi (2016).

20 The law on the rent cap in Berlin (MietenWoG Bln) has been in force since February 2020. The Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling is based on the reasoning that sees the responsibility of such legal regulation residing in the competence area of the federal government, instead of the state government. See Heidtmann and Müller-Arnold (2021).

21 See Stefan Luft (2017).

22 See Philip Oltermann (2016). Several comments of the target group survey conducted by the author in April 2021 also share this concern.

23 See RED/DPA/LSW (2018).

24 See Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg (2019).

25 See Berlin Senate Administration for Integration, Labor, and Social Issues (SenIAS) (2019) and Future Factory Heinersdorf (2018).

26 Olaf Scholz, Hamburg’s former mayor and the federal government’s Vize Chancellor between 2017 and 2021.

27 See Federal Centre for Political Education (bpb) (2019).

28 See Effern (2020).

29 Alexis Zanghi (2016).

30 See Westfälische Nachrichten (WN) (2018).

31 Information retrieved from ‘Fünf Jahre “Wir schaffen das”. Euphorie, Ernüchterung und Pragmatismus.’ German Radio Programme ‘Zeitfrage’, 2 September 2020.

32 See Nico Fried (2020).

33 Comments from the author’s target group survey conducted in April 2021.

34 See SVR (2018).

35 FN 32; Alexander Hagelüken (2020).

36 Information obtained through the author’s interview with a representative of ‘Wir Zusammen’ during an annual spring conference for small and medium-sized entreprises in Frankfurt on 16 March 2018. Further information see www.wir-zusammen.de.

37 Information gained through a participatory observation in Magdeburg in March 2017 and an expert interview in April 2021.

38 See Interview zum Interkulturellen Pendeln – Refugio München (refugio-muenchen.de).

39 See notes 4 and 5.

40 Zanghi (2016).

41 See https://amalberlin.de/de/project-de/.

42 In April 2021, Alaows decided to retreat from his candidacy supported by the Green Party based in Oberhausen and Dinslaken. See note 3.

43 See Völker (2018).

44 Insight gained from several participatory observations and interviews conducted between December 2018 and September 2019.

Additional information

Funding

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the British International Studies Association (BISA). Both have supported for the author's participation in two workshops where the early versions of the article were presented and commented for further data gathering and analysis.

Notes on contributors

Miao-ling Hasenkamp

Miao-ling Hasenkamp has worked at Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Halle (Saale) and Otto-von-Guericke University (OVGU), Magdeburg, Germany.