Abstract
The last decade has seen an explosive growth in the literature on racist and exclusionary border regimes. In light of recent events, this is hardly surprising. 1 In Europe, the Dublin Regulations are debated in the media; in the United States, citizens lament the caging of children at the border; Adivasis are threatened with statelessness in Northeastern India. The global spread of the novel Coronavirus in 2020 focused attention on different kinds of mobility—the longing to travel, forced immobilization, the different experiences of rich and poor, black, brown, and white bodies. The geographies (Europe, the United States, India) and the drivers (violence, inequality, disease) of these migration and mobility regimes are different in all of the cases mentioned, but there are features common to their representation. They are all widely narrated and understood in terms of identity. And they are all profoundly entangled with the urban.
In what follows, I discuss four books that cover a wide range of disciplinary, geographical, and thematic perspectives. Each in its own way shows that migration is a complex and contradictory process, which defines the urban in more and less visible ways. All of them demonstrate how migrant experiences are produced through everyday encounters that also shape the discursive and material worlds of locals. And they all illuminate how migration, mobility, and identity can become sites of conflict which nevertheless evade easy classification. Although migration, identity, and the urban are profoundly entangled, neither the categories themselves nor the nature of their entanglement should be taken for granted.
The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City centers on Södertälje, a city of roughly 70,000 just southeast of Stockholm. Södertälje was, until the 1970s, fairly undistinguished—home to some industry but not an industrial center; neither rich nor poor; known to Swedes but not noteworthy. In the last fifty years, though, Jennifer Mack tells us that the city has become extraordinary, indeed, attracting continuous flows of Syriac Christian migrants from Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. For Syriacs, Södertälje has become the symbolic capital of their diaspora—a place where Syriacs dispersed to the far corners of the globe imagine a home complete with its own soccer teams, churches, and a prosperous and well-integrated diaspora. For “majority Swedes” and in the Swedish mass media, the town means something very different. It is a city overtaken by undesirable migrants, a place resistant to the ameliorative interventions of the welfare state. Södertälje is “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’s famous phrase, a stranger in the “people’s home” (p. 22). In short, Södertälje has been made foreign by the migrants who have made their homes there. All of these perspectives render Syriac migration discursively, but as Mack shows, Syriac identity is also materialized in the built environment; embodied in spatial practices; and negotiated in everyday urban encounters. Mack suggests that Södertälje offers an opportunity to rethink modernist public housing, urban segregation, and the meaning of diaspora.
Mack’s account begins with the aspirations of the “Million Program” (1965-1974) to build affordable public housing that would simultaneously create modern Swedish citizens. An exemplary instance of high modernist spatial, social, and design practices, the Million Program was part of a postwar social democratic consensus which aimed to build maximally functional modern housing that would encourage healthful and socially solidary living (p. 33). This social democratic consensus, which dominated Swedish political culture from at least the 1940s, began to collapse beginning with the global economic downturn in the 1970s. And this meant that, just as the “million homes” were being delivered, demand for housing in cities like Södertälje was being hollowed out. When the first large waves of Syriacs arrived in the 1970s, they found recently built public housing ready and waiting for them.
But if the Million Program was designed to create a particular kind of citizen through the rationalization of space, how well suited was it to managing difference, or accommodating different needs (p. 69)? And Mack goes to great lengths to argue that the Syriacs’ needs were in fact distinctive. Syriacs are a Christian minority population who lived in villages and small cities in present-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. As regular targets of ethno-religious violence over centuries, Syriacs lived in enclaves where they sought protection in numbers (p. 41). The historical experience of persecution is in part why Syriacs refused a national policy aimed at dispersing immigrants across the country, preferring to cluster in communities insulated from physical and cultural threats. Syriac socio-spatial practices in Sweden were, in Mack’s reading, a response to the dangers associated with their minority status.
Historical, planning, and other literatures on European public housing typically identify the “suburbs” as spaces of marginalization: inadequate services, poverty, unemployment, racism. Mack, though, argues that Södertälje tells a different story. Here, despite the views of majority Swedes, Syriacs were able to arrive, build networks, find work, become upwardly mobile, preserve and contest their culture, and create community institutions. Syriacs were not segregated by policy instruments or even racism, even if those were features of their experience in Sweden. Instead, Syriacs chose to live in enclaves where they could order space and place according to their own socio-cultural traditions.
Mack isn’t only arguing that Syriacs chose to create a more or less hermetic space (p. 187). She argues that this was possible precisely because of the “modernist flexibility” (p. 83) of Swedish design. Syriacs transformed libraries and post offices into cultural centers, grocery chains into local markets, indistinguishable public housing units into distinctive and visible spaces. The functionality of high modernist planning may not have been designed for the distinctiveness of Syriacs, but it did allow Syriacs to repurpose space to fit their needs. And as the community became more established, Syriacs have moved beyond tactical interventions to more strategic ones. Homeowners push the building code to its limits when they build extravagant homes to the boundaries of a plot; the new church is quietly modified to avoid confrontation with planning offices. In short, Syriacs have adapted the vernaculars not just of Swedish modernist design but of building codes, municipal bureaucracy, and more.
Mack does some really interesting things, not least bringing the Syriac diaspora and this spatially peripheral center of the Syriac imaginary to a broader audience. But it turns out that this is actually a pretty familiar European story. Postwar public housing across Europe aimed to create particular kinds of urban subjects; migrants from all over the world arrive in, adapt to, and intervene in the cities where they make their homes. In other words, Södertälje may be interesting, but it is not particularly distinctive. Indeed, Mack’s project of making Södertälje distinctive actually raises some serious questions.
The single-family homes built by prosperous Syriacs in recent decades, for example, may not be designed according to the functional and fungible principles of modernist design. But in the last fifty years haven’t majority Swedes also moved away from the design principles that animated the Million Program? And are Syriacs actually unusual in the ways that they signal distinction through conspicuous displays of wealth? After all, income inequality has grown massively in Sweden since the 1970s, and visible markers of class proliferate in the increasingly neoliberal Sweden of the twenty-first century. If Mack had made less of the distinctiveness of Syriac identity, it would have been clear that—in the ways that they design, modify, appropriate, and inhabit public and private space—Syriacs are not in fact so different from majority Swedes after all.
Mack’s work is arguably most successful when showing how Syriac migrants transformed Södertälje through socio-spatial interventions aimed at modifying existing material and regulatory forms. In Marco Buttino’s edited volume Changing Urban Landscapes: Eastern European and Post-Soviet Cities since 1989, authors show that similar processes were at work in cities like Almaty, Berlin, Sarajevo, Samarkand, and even the Albanian village of Ksamil. All of these cities experienced intensive in- and out-migration; all negotiate history, memory, and belonging. And in all of these places, different actors contest urban futures with and through the city.
Founded by Russian settlers in the Tsarist era, later the capital of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, and still the nation’s largest city, Almaty was and continues to be profoundly shaped by Soviet-era mobility and minority policies that blurred distinctions between ethnonational populations. During the Soviet era, Russian-speaking elites—some Kazakh, some from elsewhere—inhabited the city center, while poorer, less educated Kazakh speakers lived in poorly serviced, often unauthorized settlements on the urban periphery (p. 24). And as Giulia Panicciari tells us in her chapter, the legacy of Soviet colonization remains powerful into the twenty-first century, visible in socio-spatial inequalities that privilege Russian-speaking elites independent of their ethnicity. This fascinating history suggests that fractured Kazakh identities in the present are produced through everyday encounters with exclusion: in Almaty, socioeconomic tensions are coded in a language of ethnonational identity despite the fact that both those who claim to be “the people” and those they identify as foreigners are ethnically Kazakh (p. 48). Panicciari has the opportunity to show us how “Kazakhness” is being renegotiated through a range of material-spatial contests. Instead, Panicciari tells us that “(R)ural Kazakhs better represent Kazakhness as they speak Kazakh and have preserved their cultural traditions better than city dwellers . . .” (p. 57). “Identity” is, without doubt, often one of the critical vectors along which exclusionary boundaries are forged; a vehicle for social and other inequalities; or a terrain for the mobilization of political publics and counter-publics. In Panicciari’s essay, though, “identity” explains none of these things, serving instead to obscure the actually existing relationships between diverse urban actors.
Identity is also central to Marco Buttino’s essay, and it leads to similarly confused outcomes. Buttino tracks migration and mobility patterns of minorities in Samarkand and argues that access to education, transnational networks, and the ability to consolidate financial resources were all important in determining life chances in this ancient city. But it is extremely unclear what, in the author’s mind, constitutes these minorities—he looks at Bukhara Jews, Lyuli, and Koreans—as discrete populations, and whether this remained consistent before, during, and after the Soviet hegemony. Bukhara Jews, for example, did not have an exclusive occupational profile and were educated primarily in Russian; Lyuli were registered in the Soviet-era census as Tajik or Uzbek (p. 61). Most puzzling of all, “Koreans” who were deported “from the far east” in the 1930s, who self-identified primarily as Uzbek or Russian, who were by the 1990s typically unable to speak Korean, and who no longer knew “Korean traditions” are also defined by Buttino as a distinct minority population (p. 81). What could justify this reading beyond the author’s assertion that they were “different in every way and could be distinguished by their facial features” (p. 60)? There is much that is interesting and informative in Buttino’s chapter, but the focus on group identity obscures these potentially productive elements.
Chapters about Roma and gagè in the Banat region of Romania by Pietro Cingolani and internal migration to the Albanian seaside town of Ksamil by Francesco Vietti show that identity can be used in analytically productive ways when research attends to the historical processes through which it is formed. In both of these excellent essays, capital flows as materialized in the built environment, constitute identity groups in practice. In the case of the Banat region, Cingolani shows how a Roma population identifiable through discursive, regulatory, institutional, social, and economic practices changed in their relationships with other Romanians through practices of real estate development rooted in transnational networks. And in his analysis of the Albanian seaside town of Ksamil, Vietti shows that socio-spatial conflicts between townspeople were based not on difference per se but on generational waves of in-migration that destabilized patterns of landownership and capital accumulation. In both of these cases, we see how migration and mobility produce identities which are simultaneously meaningful and inherently unstable.
The very impressive volume Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday, edited by Britt Baillie and Wendy Pullan, addresses some of the same themes, demonstrating how hegemonic narratives about identity are contested, deformed, ignored, or selectively enforced in the everyday lives lived in cities. In thirteen chapters written by urbanists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and architects, and covering cities from Odessa to Ceuta, Locating Urban Conflicts shows both how identities are produced in “contested cities” and how they fail to capture the complexities of everyday urbanism. Editors Baillie and Pullan are searching for a way toward a pluralism that rests in a “tolerance for ambiguity,” and they suggest that paying greater attention to “everyday urban(ism)” might be a step in the right direction (p. 5).
The first section, Spatial Horizons, shows how urban space reproduces—but can also potentially short circuit—conflict. In “Borderlands of the EU: The Spanish Enclave of Ceuta in Morocco,” for example, Felipe Hernández and Maximilian Sternberg show how a range of planning instruments, architectural interventions, and legal infrastructures serve—wittingly or not—to reinforce a segregation between Christians and Muslims (whether Moroccan or Spanish nationals). In this Spanish exclave—“the EU’s only land border with Africa” (p. 57)—the authors suggest that better integrated and less conflictual socio-spatial forms become visible when we focus attention on everyday cross-border interactions between EU and non-EU citizens and away from a “theatrical performance” of Fortress Europe (p. 60).
Wendy Pullan highlights something similar in her own chapter on the “conflict infrastructures [which] dislocate city spatial structures to cause severe spatial discontinuities” (p. 19). Pullan distinguishes between “thin” boundaries—spatial interventions defined with a single purpose in mind and that resist alternative usages—and “thick” ones. To illustrate the complex signification of a “thick” barrier, she points to the Damascus gate in Old Jerusalem’s city wall (p. 24). At this ancient wall, security “remains a chief concern . . . Yet even in this volatile and conflict damaged city, the gate thrives and is constantly reinvented by its changing contexts” (p. 27). The Damascus gate is “thick” because it tolerates the ambiguities that are produced in “life as it is lived and understood” (p. 27). In Pullan’s view, thick walls are a critical tool for thinking realistically about post-conflict urbanism: while sharing space in everyday ways may not qualify as intentional acts of peacemaking, everyday interactions are ultimately the ties that bind cities together. Even as they divide, thick walls sustain the possibility of actually living together in a plural space.
The second section, Reassessing Divisions, reinforces some of the insights highlighted above. Craig Larkin, for example, shows how young people in Beirut understand and experience the neoliberal restructuring of the urban core after the Civil War (1975-1990). Many observers were appalled at this attempt to erase violence from Beirut’s recent past by building a new city center using the aesthetic and spatial scripts of global city urbanism. But how did young people feel, and what might that tell us about Beirut’s future? Interviews reveal that while young people—Muslim, Druze, Christian—had diverse perspectives on their new city center, many experienced the neoliberal downtown as a place where chance encounters, political protests, or other everyday events consistently happened. In short, the neoliberal city unexpectedly produced spaces where interaction, exchange, and encounter could be enacted—where the urban was practiced and the city took place. While this is not to say that neoliberal urbanism is a vehicle for conflict resolution, it does remind us that “post-conflict” entails a return to everyday ways of interacting with other people. The urban everyday may hold out some hope for less conflictual urban futures, but Britt Baillie’s excellent piece on Vukovar suggests just how difficult it can be to tolerate ambiguity.
In Vukovar, the Civil War between ethnic Croats and Serbs left profound traces in the everyday life of citizens and the city itself. Buildings were destroyed; people—mostly Croats—were the victims of violence and displacement. A city shared by Serbs and Croats was transformed—first by ethnic cleansing, later “into a Croat memorialscape” (p. 117). It is hardly surprising that ethnic violence can “harden” identities that are historically plural. Baillie, though, shows how memorialization sometimes creates exclusionary public spaces that limit the everyday encounters through which modest solidarities are formed. In Vukovar, memorials keep memories of Croat victimization alive, and commemoration of this sort is important. By excluding the memories and experiences of minority Serbs who are fossilized as “aggressors,” though, Vukovar’s memorials also keep conflict alive (p. 125). Baillie’s chapter implicitly suggests a framework for rethinking memorial practice as part of a more integrative post-conflict urbanism.
The final section, unfortunately titled Being Modern, is comprised of four excellent essays on Belfast, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Ottoman Palestine. Milena Komarova and Liam O’Dowd’s chapter “Territorialities of Capital and Place in ‘Post-Conflict’ Belfast” is the best of an excellent bunch. Komarova and O’Dowd challenge the idea that urban renewal projects are, in themselves, adequate tools for redressing post-conflict sectarian divisions. As they point out, renewal “by its very nature also exposes and often reproduces the very antagonisms that are materialized when space, place and territory are intensely contested” (p. 233). In one sense, this is unsurprising. After all, and as James Anderson shows in chapter 11 of Locating Urban Conflicts, ethnocratic policies build sectarian identity into urban geographies in material and other ways. But while Komarova and O’Dowd explore and explain precisely how ethnocracy shaped the sectarian geographies of Belfast, they are also trying to explain how and why neoliberal urban renewal so often reproduces the very same geographies despite its structural opposition to ethnocratic governmentalities. Put simply, the authors want to understand how “the capitalist space of flows resonates with the city of places and territories” (p. 235).
In some ways, this chapter challenges the modest proposition that the city as a place of everyday interaction can itself function to mitigate conflict: Belfast—like Beirut, Jerusalem, or Nicosia—has become “disarticulated into a series of poorly connected districts and neighborhoods, within which communal segregation along ethno-national lines was further solidified” (p. 238). But in bringing together the “space of flows with the city of places and territories,” Komarova and O’Dowd suggest that cultivating public spaces that create possibilities for everyday interaction has the potential to disrupt practices of sectarian place-making. This kind of spatial project is only possible, though, if actually existing inequalities reproduced through ethnocratic governmentality are also addressed.
Ethnonational identity is fundamental to the past and present of many contested cities, but as the chapters in Locating Urban Conflict show, identity and its practice is extremely unstable. How, though, can researchers effectively render a category made up of diverse individuals; a phenomenon that is a process; something durable that is also ephemeral? These are difficult questions, but certainly not new ones. In the important volume Arrival Infrastructures: Migration and Urban Social Mobilities, editors Karel Arnaut, Bruno Meeus, and Bas van Heur argue that an infrastructural approach provides an analytical framework that addresses many of these questions.
“Infrastructure” has become a familiar feature across urban inquiry, but Arnaut, Meeus, and van Heur argue that an infrastructural perspective can help us rethink (urban) migration in general and refugee arrival in particular. Essays by Mara Sidney, Anna Nikolaeva, and Eva Swyngedouw show, for example, how non-governmental organizations (NGOs), legal instruments, and policy are entangled infrastructures that are negotiated and contested by a range of stakeholders across scales. Anna Steigemann’s impressive chapter demonstrates the different ways that refugees experience their arrival and integration into two small cities in the German state of Thuringia, and how these experiences are shaped by historical demographies and geopolitical transition but also the attitudes and constraints that define municipal political institutions and community-based NGOs. And René Kreichauf shows how regulatory, political, and policy instruments have driven a “campization of refugee accommodation” in Europe (p. 261). The politics of infrastructure constitute a central part of all of these contributions, but how does the infrastructural perspective help researchers and practitioners to better engage with diverse migrant experiences? The editors argue that the politics of directionality, temporality, and subjectivity (p. 4) are a way to flexibly engage with the complexities of urban migration and mobility—challenging and stretching our thinking about the ways that migrants negotiate border regimes and build lives.
Take, for example, the “politics of directionality” (p. 4). We know that migrant trajectories are often characterized by trans or serial migration, with the place of arrival functioning as one among many steps along a journey toward future homes. And migrants often maintain intensive ties with homes left behind, using new technologies to communicate with significant others, to remit earnings or for other purposes. By taking seriously the politics of directionality, the editors suggest that we can illuminate the diverse pathways that migrants travel—pathways that far exceed policy and media debates about integration, assimilation, and so on.
This politics of directionality is tightly entangled with that of temporality. Many researchers now describe the experience of displacement as one of “permanent temporariness”—a continuum that sees mobility suspended through encampment, arcane asylum, naturalization, or other processes (p. 233). The Dublin Regulations are just one obvious attempt to interrupt transmigratory practice through the multiplication of (internalized) border regimes and “intensification of migration infrastructures” (p. 16) inside and outside the EU. In Ragne Thorshaug’s chapter on asylum centers in Norway, for example, we see how asylum seekers inhabit and contest infrastructures that are manifestly designed to limit mobility while also enforcing temporariness. In Thorshaug’s case, the Norwegian migration regime aims to govern the temporalities of asylum seeking and manage its directionality while migrants find ways to negotiate the frictions of this “arrival in between” (p. 225).
But in his wonderful chapter on the Al-Husseini camp in Amman, Lucas Oesch shows that even terms like “arrival” and “in between” raise complex questions. The Al-Husseini Camp was created in 1952 near Amman’s city center, and today it is home to 30,000 registered refugees. In the intervening decades, the camp has evolved, with tents being replaced by more permanent structures, single- and double-storied buildings being expanded, connections to municipal infrastructure extended, shops and recreational spaces multiplying. While Al-Husseini is in many ways indistinguishable from its surroundings, it is nevertheless a camp. And this complex morphology raises challenges, because some Palestinian refugees are anxious to preserve the temporariness of Al-Husseini: to ensure that it does not simply become another neighborhood on Amman’s periphery. For these refugees—made up largely of the generation arriving in Jordan in the 1960s—the transition from temporariness to permanence, from arrival to integration, is thought to jeopardize the bitterly contested right of return. Building on important scholarship by Abourahme, Al-Husseini, Gabiam, and others, Oesch shows that directionality, temporality, and subjectivity are all contested in Al-Husseini’s spatial and material form. But it is not just the spatial form that resists easy classification, because the Palestinian refugees who live in Al-Husseini themselves live the politics of directionality, temporality, and subjectivity as they make political claims about belonging, dwelling, and return.
It is widely recognized that migrants are diverse in their aspirations, and that their (future) selves cannot be defined as “narrow objects of governance” (p. 7). Simply recognizing this point, though, is not enough to generate nuanced renderings of the experiences and governmentalities of migration regimes on a global scale. But as Steigemann, Thorshaug, Oesch, Oosterlynck, and the editors argue, directionality, temporality, and subjectivity make it possible to think through “arrival infrastructures” without reifying infrastructure, homogenizing migrant subjects, or forcing migrants into sovereign frameworks structured by the logics of welcome, assimilation, integration, or, for that matter, life at the margins. Arrival Infrastructures is so useful in part because it explicitly thematizes these difficulties, while suggesting ways to engage with the perspectives of migrants negotiating the process of creating new lives.
All the books reviewed here address entanglements between migration and the urban, and I found it noteworthy that so many of the authors chose to put identity at the center of this entanglement. I suggested at the outset that this conceptual orientation has much to do with the global present, and indeed the vast majority of contributions attend to history in only the most cursory way. But, of course, history holds methodological and interpretive keys which would have been extremely useful in unlocking entanglements between migration and the urban. Take, for example, the Second World War and its aftermath, which saw tens of millions of persons across Europe searching for new homes. In many cases, these journeys lasted for years and even decades. And in the course of those journeys, migrants—some were stateless, some were refugees, some were displaced by wartime destruction—were continually forced to tell and retell their stories, to narrate fractured selves, to forge identities that were legible to migration officers, new neighbors, potential employers, and to themselves and their loved ones. The Care and Maintenance (CM1) Files created by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) have allowed historians Ismee Tames, Christoph Rass, and a team of international researchers to engage with these stories about self that vulnerable migrants told about themselves. 2 And what is extraordinary about their research is that they are able to show how, in successive interviews, the stories displaced persons told shifted in relation to changing circumstances and aspirations, policies, regulations, and even interviewer. The postwar journeys of millions of migrants, recorded by officers of the IRO over a period of years, are useful in thinking the complexity of migrant identity, in reminding researchers that migrant selves are plural and changing.
It is entirely understandable that people of goodwill who research migration strongly oppose the violence of contemporary border regimes (as I do), and therefore take exclusionary practices as the basis for understanding migration. To take exclusionary practices as a starting point, though, threatens to reduce the migrant experience to a singularity that it is not. To take exclusion based on race, ethnicity, religion, or other signifier of identity as given threatens to reduce migrant selves to “narrow objects of governance,” and this is something worth resisting—not least because it is something that migrants in all their diversity themselves resist.