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Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence

February 2016
Progress in Human Geography 41(2)

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Durham University

This paper explores the relationship between forced migration and the city. The paper outlines four accounts of the city centred on: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the ‘re-scaling’ of borders, and the city as a sanctuary. Whilst valuable, these discussions maintain a focus on sovereign authority that tends to prioritize the policing of forced migration over the possibilities for contestation that also emerge through cities. Arguing for a fuller engagement with debates in urban geography, this paper considers how discussions of urban informality and the politics of presence may better unpack the urban character of forced migration.

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Article

Forced migration and the city:

Irregularity, informality, and

the politics of presence

Jonathan Darling

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between forced migration and the city. The paper outlines four accounts

of the city centred on: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the ‘re-scaling’ of

borders, and the city as a sanctuary. Whilst valuable, these discussions maintain a focus on sovereign

authority that tends to prioritize the policing of forced migration over the possibilities for contestation that

also emerge through cities. Arguing for a fuller engagement with debates in urban geography, this paper

considers how discussions of urban informality and the politics of presence may better unpack the urban

character of forced migration.

Keywords

citizenship, forced migration, refugees, urban geography, urban informality

The national as container of social process and

power is cracked, opening up possibilities for a

geography of politics that links subnational

spaces. Cities are foremost in this new geography.

(Sassen, 2006: 314)

Urbanism is characterised by movement, flux,

restlessness ... the politics of urbanism is a pol-

itics of movement. (Magnusson, 2000: 298)

I Introduction

It has become a relatively commonplace asser-

tion to claim that the world is becoming, if not

having already become, urban. Cities have

come to be seen as key mediators in global pol-

itics, the global economy and in the social and

cultural tensions of living with diversity (Amin,

2012; Sassen, 2006; Wilson, 2015). However, it

is only relatively recently that the urban has

been considered as an area of study for social

scientists concerned with the politics and geo-

graphy of asylum seekers and refugees. This

paper seeks to explore what is at stake in such

work and to open a dialogue between studies of

forced migration and work within urban geogra-

phy that situates the city as an ensemble of

authorities, legalizations and claims. It is

through being attentive to such connections that

we might do some of the work of critically chal-

lenging a nation-state-centric account of asylum

and refugee geographies.

As Gill (2010: 626) argues, there has always

been ‘a strong association between the notion of

a refugee and the notion of states’, such that

Corresponding author:

Jonathan Darling, School of Environment, Education and

Development, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis

Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.

Email: jonathan.darling@manchester.ac.uk

Progress in Human Geography

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DOI: 10.1177/0309132516629004

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asylum and refugee research has a tendency to

reify the nation-state and its consistency, coher-

ence and authority. Within recent work, there

has been a move to examine the implications

of this ‘national order of things’ (Malkki,

1995: 496), in producing spaces of abjection,

exception and marginality whereby a relation

to the borders of the nation-state is lived. Geo-

graphers have explored spaces of off-shore

migrant processing (Den Heijer, 2012; Hynd-

man and Mountz, 2008), and extra-territorial

detention (Betts, 2004; Mountz, 2011; Mountz

et al., 2012), as illustrative of how border

practices are increasingly detached from the ter-

ritorial framing of the nation-state and reterri-

torialized in exterior spaces (see Collyer and

King, 2015). Similarly, asylum and refugee

geographies have sought to understand the pro-

duction and maintenance of refugee camps as

technologies of regulatory provision (Agier,

2002; Bulley, 2014), which may support fragile

forms of community and political activism

(Ramadan, 2013; Rygiel, 2012).

In this paper, I argue that this focus on the

nation-state would be usefully supplemented

with a more critically reflective engagement

with the city as a space of refugee politics. A

focus on the city has both a political and an

analytic purpose. Politically, it may offer a path

to contest the exclusions of the nation-state

through presenting the urban as a contested yet

fertile ground for sequences of critique. Analy-

tically, it offers insight into the dynamics of

refugee experiences without automatic recourse

to increasingly fragmented forms of sovereign

authority or exceptional spaces of border control.

This is not to suggest that work on the spatialities

of sovereign authority has not advanced our

understanding of how the nation-state is sus-

tained through material and affective means (see

Darling, 2014a; Mountz, 2010). Rather, it is to

highlight the need to explore in similar detail,

and with similar critical nuance, the urban nego-

tiations through which many forced migrants

experience borders.

Focusing upon the question of ‘forced migra-

tion’ is not without its closures. Partly, because

any discussion of forced migration as a coherent

field conceals an array of varying statuses. As

Hyndman and Giles (2011) find, the distinctions

produced between groups of forced migrants are

greatly significant in shaping perceptions of

social worth and notions of threat. Furthermore,

a focus on ‘forced migration’ presents the dan-

ger of uncritically reinscribing the ‘administra-

tive categories through which mobility is

regulated’ (McNevin, 2013: 185). The status-

driven subjectivities of forced migration – the

asylum seeker and the refugee – name, in part,

administrative constructs that act as regulatory

responses to mobility (Papadopoulos et al.,

2008). However, whilst a focus on ‘forced

migration’ may conceal the complexity of sta-

tus, it is nevertheless useful because, as Philo

(2014: 754) reminds us, the nation-state has ‘yet

to be deconstructed out of existence’. Thus

whilst in this paper I argue for alternative per-

spectives when examining the relation between

forced migration and the city, this is not to say

that we can ignore the categories and closures of

the nation-state in doing so. A concern with

‘forced migration’ also matters because this is

a language that still dictates much policy and

academic discussion. As Bakewell (2008)

argues, there is a need to balance the closures

of such policy categories with the demand to

speak in a language that is of relevance to a

diversity of audiences. This does not mean

uncritically reproducing problematic cate-

gories, rather it reflects the careful work

required to illustrate how categories of status

are often transitory (Nyers, 2011), and to

employ such categories as means of strategic

contestation (Moulin and Nyers, 2007).

The paper proceeds as follows. I begin by

sketching four accounts of the city within recent

asylum and refugee geographies to illustrate

some of the dominant trends in this field. These

four areas comprise Sections II–V of the paper,

focusing sequentially on work on urban

2Progress in Human Geography

refugees in the context of the Global South,

work on the regulation of asylum seekers in the

Global North, a broader body of work con-

cerned with the ‘re-scaling’ of border control,

and finally a concern with the city as a space of

sanctuary. I argue that each of these areas of

work has made important contributions to

understanding how governmental impulses con-

dition contemporary forced migration in and

through cities. However, by remaining largely

wedded to an account of sovereign authority,

these current discussions tend to prioritize the

policing of forced migration over the possibili-

ties for contestation that may also emerge

through cities. In making this case in Section

VI of the paper, I argue for a fuller engagement

with debates in urban geography as a way to

advance and politically reorientate work on

forced migration. The following two Sections,

VII and VIII, propose two potential areas of

convergence between urban geography and dis-

cussions on forced migration: firstly, discus-

sions of urban informality that destabilize

sovereign authority and, secondly, work on

presence as a political tool that disrupts norma-

tive accounts of forced migration. In reflecting

on the relationship between forced migration

and the city, I argue for the need to better

unpack the urban character of asylum.

II Urban refugees and the shadow

of the camp

I begin by focusing on four areas of literature

that illustrate relations between forced migra-

tion and the city, and that have been significant

in shaping understandings of forced migration

within geography. The first of these comes from

research on urban refugees in the Global South.

Much of this work is focused upon exploring

lived experiences amidst a wider recognition

that urban growth has been achieved in part

through significant influxes of refugee popula-

tions (UNHCR, 2012). For example, Crisp et al.

(2012) suggest that Kabul, Abidjan, Bogota,

Johannesburg, Karachi and Nairobi have all

seen significant growth due to forced migration

over the last two decades. Despite this legacy of

forced migration, Marfleet (2006: 225) notes

that a concern with urban refugees has only been

a recent consideration for UNHCR, initially

being acknowledged in a 1995 report that

implied that ‘flows of refugees to cities were

undesirable’, reflecting a ‘priority of placing

refugees in camps’ (UNHCR, 2012: 22). This

logic continued with the 1997 Urban Refugee

Policy from UNHCR, which stated that ‘no

assistance should be provided ... in urban

areas ... where a UNHCR assistance pro-

gramme exists in a rural camp’ (UNHCR,

1997: 2). Indeed, it was not until 2009 that

UNHCR adopted a broader and more inclusive

Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in

Urban Areas to reflect the increasingly urban

reality of protracted refugee situations.

One of the reasons for this relative neglect of

urban refugees is the persistence of a series of

normative assumptions over refugee policy.

Thus, as Kibreab (2007) argues, in many coun-

tries the refugee camp is constructed as the

‘proper’ space for refugee populations, acting

as a technology of spatial segregation that

enables the containment of those displaced.

Moves to spatially segregate refugees reflect

attempts to ‘actively prevent refugee integration

into receiving societies’ (Fabos and Kibreab,

2007: 5), and as such:

Spatial segregation of refugees is seen as an

important instrument of preventing refugees’

integration into host societies by prolonging their

refugee status. This strategy is defeated if refu-

gees are settled in urban areas, and helps explain

why host countries in the South regulate the pres-

ence of refugees in urban areas. (2007: 3)

In this context, the refugee camp is often seen as

the best way to effect this separation, reflecting

a perception of refugees as ‘temporary guests’

that legitimates the ‘placement of refugees in

spatially segregated rural sites’ (Kibreab,

Darling 3

2007: 31). The significance of this policy for

discussions of urban refugees is that, by contrast

to the ‘official’ refugee of the camp, urban ref-

ugees are viewed as ‘spontaneous’ groups who

lack the legitimacy of those encamped, as ‘the

presence in cities of mobile, self-directed refu-

gees ... violate[s] the idea that displaced peo-

ple must be helpless and dependent’ (Marfleet,

2007: 42). As Hoffstaedter (2015) and Parker

(2002) point out, the divisive assumptions that

restrict support for urban refugees in relation to

those accommodated in refugee camps have his-

torically been held not just by ‘host’ states but

also by UNHCR and other NGOs, who have

been reluctant to respond to the complexities

of refugee provision in urban environments.

One effect of a policy of containment has

therefore been to question the rights of refugees

in urban environments, whilst a second effect

has been to focus academic and humanitarian

attention on refugee camps to the detriment of

urban forced migrants (Goodall, 2011). Recent

work on camp spaces has noted the quasi-urban

nature of these environments (see Bulley, 2014;

Sanyal, 2012) and has sought to situate camp

spaces on an urban continuum, recognizing that

many camps either become part of cities or are

located on the margins of the urban (Agier,

2002; Ramadan, 2013). However, despite the

complexities of these relations, the idealized

vision of the refugee camp as a temporary ‘solu-

tion’ to displacement continues to position the

camp as a focus of policy, legitimation and

humanitarianism, and in doing so helps to

explain the production of urban refugees as

‘problematic’ by comparison. In this way, the

refugee camp sets the terms of categorization

that shape the subjectivities of differently posi-

tioned forced migrants; it serves to insert forced

migration ‘into the productive logics of society

by making out of irregular mobility either con-

trollable populations or illegalised people’

(Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013: 180).

Whilst urban refugees have been positioned

as the ‘problematic’ counterpart of a less mobile

camp population (Hyndman and Giles, 2011),

the current context is one in which increasing

critical attention is being placed upon the ques-

tion of urban displacement. UNHCR may have

been slow to reflect the urban reality of many

refugees, but since this recognition an increas-

ing focus has been placed on the needs of urban

refugees. Such a focus might be seen to have

two drivers. Firstly, in the political claims made

by those present in urban centres of authority.

Here, for example, Lindley (2011: 38) notes that

whilst Somali refugees in Nairobi are often har-

assed by the police, there have been ‘signs of

growing tacit acceptance by the authorities of

the inevitability of the refugee presence in urban

areas’. And secondly, in the fact that despite

attempts at separation, the continuing attraction

of cities for many refugees is clear, as ‘the city

can represent a site of independence and safety

not necessarily found in camps’ (Crisp et al.,

2012: S24). Studies have thus explored the live-

lihood opportunities of refugees in Nairobi,

highlighting both the integration of individuals

into an informal economy of casual labour and

the continued vulnerability of such individuals

to abuse, arrest and harassment (Campbell,

2006; Jaji, 2009; Pavanello et al., 2010). This

tension between the prospects of temporary

safety and opportunity and the risks of exploita-

tion and marginalization is an often repeated

one in explorations of urban refugee experi-

ences, evident in work from Kampala (Bern-

stein and Okello, 2007; Dryden-Peterson,

2006), Cairo (Grabska, 2006), Dar es-Salaam

(Sommers, 2001), Bossaso (Decorte and Tem-

pra, 2010), Johannesburg (Belvedere, 2007;

Landau, 2006), and Pretoria (Rugunanan and

Smit, 2011).

The lack of formal recognition of refugee

status or citizenship afforded to urban refugees

has therefore been argued to exacerbate their

vulnerability and has ensured that forced

migrants merge into a larger pool of both undo-

cumented migrants and citizens seeking to make

a living in informal economies (Crisp et al.,

4Progress in Human Geography

2012; Lindley, 2011). At the same time, a focus

on camp spaces as the ‘appropriate’ space for

forced migration has contributed to the exclu-

sion of urban refugees by attracting resources

and attention away from the challenges they

face (Kibreab, 2007). Thus, whilst Agier

(2002: 337) claims that the ‘city is in the camp

but always only in the form of sketches that are

perpetually aborted’, I would argue that we

might invert this phrase to see that in many

discussions on urban refugees it is the camp that

haunts the city. The idealized image of the

camp, as a distant and legitimate ‘other’ of the

city, shapes both how the city is positioned and

described and how the experiences of urban ref-

ugees are understood and interpreted. From the

reluctance of UNHCR to acknowledge the chal-

lenges faced by urban refugees to policies of

spatial segregation, within both academic and

practitioner debate a framework of distinction

has often been established between the space of

the refugee camp and that of the city which

serves to maintain normative visions of both.

In this context, as Hyndman and Giles (2011)

show, it is only when refugee mobility is

ordered through practices of managed resettle-

ment that a shift from camp to city is framed as a

‘solution’ rather than an unwelcome intrusion.

It is to this question of regulated displacement

that I turn next.

III Dispersal and managed

marginality

The second body of work that illustrates rela-

tions between forced migration and the city in

geography is that which focuses on the contain-

ment of asylum seekers and refugees within cit-

ies in the Global North. Geographers have here

examined the nature of historic and contempo-

rary processes of refugee resettlement and asy-

lum seeker dispersal (Hyndman and McLean,

2006; Phillips, 2006; Van Liempt, 2011; Zetter

and Pearl, 2000). Urban dispersal programmes

are in place in Denmark, Germany, the

Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK, and are

argued to represent attempts to ‘spread the bur-

den’ of asylum seeker accommodation (see

Arnoldus et al., 2003; Hammar, 1993; Robin-

son, 2003; Wren, 2003). Beyond this economic

argument, discussions of dispersal policies have

highlighted the political motivations behind dis-

persal, viewing the policy as a tool for the con-

trol and deterrence of asylum seekers (Boswell,

2001). For example, Schuster (2005) argues that

dispersal needs to be viewed as part of a larger

governmental formation that produces the mar-

ginality of asylum seekers through intercon-

nected mechanisms of dispersal, detention and

deportation. Frequently, dispersal is positioned

as a ‘no choice’ option, meaning that those

accommodated have no opportunity to influ-

ence their location and can often be accommo-

dated in areas of existing social deprivation. In

this context, Hynes’s (2009) study of the experi-

ences of dispersed asylum seekers in the UK

suggests that the compulsory mobility of disper-

sal creates a ‘policy-imposed liminality’, as

individuals struggle to establish social networks

within alien, and at times hostile, new surround-

ings (Hynes, 2009: 115; Netto, 2011).

Dispersal may not always be an urban policy.

Indeed, at various points different European

countries have experimented with rural accom-

modation centres, often located in former mili-

tary or institutional facilities (see Hubbard,

2005; Vitus, 2011). However, the connections

made in urban processes of dispersal between

the spatial containment of a ‘problematic’ pop-

ulation within areas of existing social depriva-

tion (Phillips, 2006) and the forms of territorial

stigma attached to such marginal environments

as ‘dumping grounds’ are significant for under-

standing how dispersal presents a marginaliza-

tion of mobile forced migrants (Cheshire and

Zappia, 2015).

Discussions of dispersal are also significant

for thinking about forced migration and the city

for two further reasons. Firstly, it is notable that

these are not widespread areas of attention

Darling 5

either within political geographies of forced

migration or within urban studies on diversity

and difference. This has meant that whilst some

work has sought to critically challenge the

exclusions of dispersal (Griffiths et al., 2006;

Squire, 2009), and some has highlighted its

potential to present opportunities for otherwise

disadvantaged cities (Phillimore and Goodson,

2006; Zetter et al., 2005), the complexities of

dispersal as an experience as much as a govern-

mental process have been left largely unex-

plored. The outcome of this is that

assumptions of dispersal as a ‘sensible’

response to asylum accommodation have often

remained unchallenged (Hynes, 2009).

Secondly, dispersal policies present a partic-

ular vision of the city and of its relation to asy-

lum seekers and refugees. This is highlighted if

we consider Robinson’s (2003: 147) study of

the early years of the UK’s dispersal pro-

gramme, in which he warned that ‘[d]ispersal

zones should not simply be areas where housing

is cheaply and readily available and within

which asylum seekers can be ‘‘held’’ for six

months. Rather, they ought to be locations sui-

ted to the long-term generation of visible and

integrated ‘‘refugee’’ communities’. Dispersal

should thus not be seen only as a response to

the question of ‘where to accommodate asylum

seekers while they await the outcome of their

asylum claims’, but should include considerable

information sharing, community preparation

work and pathways to longer-term settlement

(Robinson, 1998). It is clear from subsequent

studies that this link between dispersal and refu-

gee integration is fragile at best. Dispersal is

argued to represent a desire to ‘accommodate’,

rather than a starting point for integration (Dar-

ling, 2011a). The role of the city in this process

becomes that of a container for individuals

whose lives are placed on hold by the classifi-

cation processes of sovereign attempts to ‘man-

age migration’. Importantly, this means that the

particular characteristics of the city as a social,

spatial and political formation are either

assumed or overlooked. The city becomes a

backdrop to political actions, decisions and

exclusions practised elsewhere and imposed

upon an urban context. As a result, cities and

their inhabitants are denied the agency to shape

the dispersal process, and asylum seekers are

denied the agency to shape the city.

IV The border ‘within’

In Sections II and III, I have examined literature

that considers the often exclusionary nature of

urban experiences for refugees in the Global

South and North. In this section, I consider an

area of literature that broadens this exclusionary

account still further, considering the city as a

site of bordering. Whilst not focused solely on

forced migration, such literature provides an

essential context within which any understand-

ingofforcedmigrationandthecitymustbe

placed. In recent years, a range of work has

explored how cities practise modes of ‘local

border control’ (Lebuhn, 2013: 38), which

translate policies and enforcement measures

from the nation-state to specific urban contexts.

In short, this highlights how cities have been

central to the diversification of borders into

everyday life (see Graham, 2010; Gilbert,

2009; Varsanyi, 2008a). In these discussions,

the city is situated as a strategic location for the

enforcement of border control ‘within’ the

nation-state, thereby feeding into wider discus-

sions of the shift from territorially fixed border

‘lines’ to territorially diffuse border ‘functions’.

Cities have been argued to play a key role in

this complex re-scaling of border control, most

notably in North America (Ellis, 2006; Varsa-

nyi, 2011). This ‘re-scaling’ process has two

dimensions: a ‘top-down’ devolution of author-

ity to municipal levels and a ‘bottom-up’ asser-

tion of authority by municipalities in the form of

local ordinances on migration. In the first of

these trends, geographers have focused on the

enrolment of an expanded array of authorities,

services and professionals into the practice of

6Progress in Human Geography

immigration control, serving to extend respon-

sibility for border policing into new domains of

everyday life (Coleman and Kocher, 2011).

Urban services, civic and public spaces, and

workplaces thus become precarious sites which

may display the punitive reach of border

enforcement at any time, often at the discretion

of those enrolled as ‘responsible’ citizens (Inda,

2005; Walsh, 2014). As authority for immigra-

tion control is devolved to an urban level, it is

argued that cities have ‘become a kind of fac-

tory for the production of illegality’ (Ridgley,

2008: 56).

In the second aspect of ‘re-scaling’, geogra-

phers have noted the adoption of urban policies

on immigration enforcement that go beyond the

perceived limits of national legislation. For

example, Walker and Leitner (2011) highlight

how cities across the USA have instituted ordi-

nances focused on restricting and removing

non-citizens. Similarly, Varsanyi (2008b: 892)

notes a trend of immigration policing ‘through

the back door’ in the shape of ‘land use and

public nuisance ordinances that constrain beha-

viors and living conditions of undocumented

migrants’. For example, in July 2006 the city

of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, passed a municipal

Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which imposed

fines for landlords who rent to those in the coun-

try without authorization and created municipal

powers to remove licences from businesses that

hire undocumented workers (Steil and Ridgley,

2012).

Whilst the categorical construction of the

‘illegal’ migrant is not a necessarily urban one

(De Genova, 2002), this range of work makes

clear that practices of categorization increas-

ingly find their expression through cities where

negotiations of status, services and enforcement

come to the fore (see Bousetta, 2008; Garni and

Miller, 2008; Hiemstra, 2010). Indeed, as

Young (2011: 542) notes, the state ‘literally

takes place in the everyday spaces of the city,

which means its exclusions are also worked out

there’. What emerges from such work is not an

image of the city as a straightforward repository

for the policies of the state, but rather a sense of

municipalities interpreting, reshaping and creat-

ing modes of enforcement in response to fram-

ings of irregular migration in statist discourses

and legislation (Coleman, 2012; Walker, 2014).

Thus whilst focused on the politics of irregular

migration, this literature offers insight into the

negotiations at work in ‘localizing’ border con-

trols, responsibilities and narratives.

V The city as sanctuary

Before moving to consider the limits of current

discussion of forced migration and cities in Sec-

tions VI–VIII of this paper, I want to turn to a

potentially more progressive relation between

cities and forced migrants than those noted so

far. For whilst discussions around the re-scaling

of border practices have tended to focus on the

exclusionary nature of local immigration con-

trols, this process has not been without resis-

tance. Varsanyi (2008b), for example, notes

how a range of cities across the USA have

rejected local immigration enforcement and

focused instead on shielding their residents

from deportation (see Walker and Leitner,

2011). An emergent body of work has thus

begun to consider the potential of the city as a

sanctuary for irregular and forced migrants.

A central orientation point for such discus-

sions has been the work of sanctuary move-

ments. This image of the city can be seen, to

varying degrees, in the work of the New Sanc-

tuary Movement in the USA and Canada, the

Cities of Refuge initiative across Europe and

the UK’s City of Sanctuary movement. In the

UK, the City of Sanctuary movement seeks to

promote a culture of welcome towards asylum

seekers and refugees, based around ideals of

responsibility and hospitality (Darling, 2010;

Squire, 2011b). Similarly, the Cities of Refuge

initiative enrols urban authorities to offer sanc-

tuary to artists and writers fleeing persecution

(Derrida, 2001). Often emerging from

Darling 7

charitable and religious organizations, this pre-

dominantly European strand of sanctuary tends

to emphasize the role of asylum seekers and

refugees as contributing to the social and cul-

tural life of their ‘host’ communities (Goodall,

2010). By contrast, in the North American con-

text the emergence of a range of Sanctuary Cit-

ies, most famously San Francisco, has seen

attempts to legislate for access to municipal

services regardless of status and to protect res-

idents through non-cooperation with immigra-

tion authorities. This form of ‘urban citizenship’

does not necessarily inscribe new rights for irre-

gular migrants (Basok, 2009; Varsanyi, 2006).

Rather, these ordinances can be seen as means

to maintain informality, to ensure that the pie-

cemeal opportunities irregular migrants may

experience are sustained as part of the continued

functioning of the city.

Within these discussions of sanctuary, there

has been an emphasis on examining the prosaic

spaces through which ideals of humanitarianism

are practised. For example, Ehrkamp and Nagel

(2012) suggest that in the midst of increasingly

anti-immigrant legislation in the US South,

places of worship have become important sites

of welcome. Similarly, work on spaces of chari-

table provision has highlighted how momentary

relations of welcome may emerge in specific,

and often highly conditional, urban spaces (Dar-

ling, 2011b; Wren, 2007). These discussions are

clear on the limits of community provision, rais-

ing questions of the longer term effectiveness of

efforts to ‘welcome’ forced migrants. For exam-

ple, Ehrkamp and Nagel (2014) find that whilst

gestures of hospitality may be offered through

faith-based communities, these are often ‘under

the radar’ gestures which fail to challenge the

status quo of exclusionary and pervasive immi-

gration enforcement. These gestures may ‘on

the one hand, shield[s] immigrants from aggres-

sive law enforcement activities but, on the other

hand, do[es] very little to change the fundamen-

tal precariousness of their situation’ (2014: 321;

Bagelman, 2013).

Sanctuary and its various manifestations has

also been argued to represent a means of gov-

erning through the assertion of humanitarian

intentions (Darling, 2013). In legislative terms,

Chavin and Garce´s-Mascaren

˜as (2012: 244)

argue that ‘local incorporation practices’ reflect

‘regulatory imperatives and worries over public

safety’. Through enabling undocumented

migrants to access services and support, cities

can be seen to ‘manage’ an undocumented pop-

ulation for the wider ‘good’ of the city, thereby

allaying concerns over public health and public

order, as Mancina (2012) argues in the case of

San Francisco. Seen through this critical lens,

the language of the sanctuary city becomes less

one of rights to urban citizenship and more an

additional means to govern the presence of irre-

gular and forced migrants. As a result, the ques-

tion of who ‘deserves’ the support of the

sanctuary city comes to the fore in debating the

limits to urban hospitality (Chavin and Garce´s-

Mascaren

˜as, 2012; Marrow, 2012; Wilson,

2014; Yukich, 2013).

Discussions of the city as a potential sanctu-

ary are helpful in highlighting practices of wel-

come that assuage the effects of repressive

immigration controls. Yet they also point to the

limits of such movements, most notably in risk-

ing the reiteration of categorical assumptions

over who is ‘deserving’ of welcome. Distinc-

tions such as these are central to the categoriz-

ing processes that shape ideals of hospitality

(Derrida, 2001), and illustrate how progressive

imaginaries of the city may be enfolded into

state-centric logics of citizenship. It is to the

implications of this confluence that I now want

to turn.

VI Policing, politicization and

sovereign ‘scripts’

So far in this paper, I have highlighted four

bodies of literature in which discussions of

forced migration have engaged with cities as

locations of and for forced migration. In the

8Progress in Human Geography

remainder of the paper I want to argue that these

discussions, whilst valuable in illustrating the

resonance of regimes of citizenship and sover-

eignty within urban life, could be advanced

through a fuller engagement with the political

character of cities. To do so I argue, in the next

three sections, for the need to both foreground

the political nature of urban life, and to examine

possible convergences between studies of

forced migration and work within urban geogra-

phy that draws on urban informality (Section

VII), and the potential value of presence as a

political claim (Section VIII).

The political tension between the ‘policing’

role of cities and their potential for ‘politiciza-

tion’ is one that Uitermark and Nicholls (2014)

argue is constitutive of the urban. Cities for

them are incubators for both dissent and

mechanisms of social, political and economic

regulation which seek to ‘neutralize and pre-

empt challenges to the legal and social order’

(Uitermark and Nicholls, 2014: 975). ‘Poli-

cing’, in this context, denotes those govern-

mental technologies ‘designed to align

subjects with the state’ (2014: 975), either

directly through imposed legal frameworks,

or indirectly through rationalities of civic

responsibility (Osborne and Rose, 1999).

Whilstmethodsofpolicingseektoassignposi-

tions within hierarchies that are both social and

spatial (see Rancie`re, 1999), politicization

names processes of contestation that exceed

such distributions. A similar distinction is

notable in Isin’s (2012) articulation of two

modes of citizenship – ‘active’ and ‘activist’.

For Isin (2012: 148):

Producing scripts for active citizenship is among

the most prominent businesses of government ...

Active citizens are those political subjects that

become activated through scripts, which aim to

cultivate conducts that are conducive to strategies

articulated by governing authorities ... Activist

citizens relentlessly pursue possibilities for writ-

ing new scripts.

Whilst these tensions between the ‘scripted’

‘policing’ of urban space and a more insurgent

‘politicization’ of the city have exercised debate

within urban geography (see MacLeod and

McFarlane, 2014; Rodgers et al., 2014), their

impact has been limited when considering

forced migration. Notably, the four areas of

work discussed so far have all focused on the

city as a regulatory space that seeks to ‘align

subjects with the state’ (Uitermark and

Nicholls, 2014: 975). In each case, the result is

that the politicization of urban space is often

secondary to a reading of urban space as a

means to monitor and contain forced migrants.

The importance of a concern with the regu-

latory role of the city is that it shapes and main-

tains particular perceptual frameworks of

expectation around asylum, borders and politics

(see Darling, 2014b). In this sense, ‘policing’

refers not simply to the maintenance of social

order, but also to how specific spaces, policies

and debates are framed as legitimate. Dikec¸’s

(2007: 20) work on urban policy as a ‘practice

of articulation’ is instructive here for it high-

lights how policies act to ‘define legitimate

interlocutors, make sensible certain issues while

making others imperceptible, distinguish voices

from noises’. For example, in their account of

the debates that surrounded the implementation

of restrictive immigration ordinances in Hazel-

ton, Steil and Ridgley (2012) argue that partic-

ular histories and voices were erased from

discussion so as to sustain a narrative of a city

‘under threat’. In this case, the framing of immi-

gration enforcement as a ‘solution’ served to

shape what emerged as an acceptable political

statement.

A focus on policing alone may therefore

restrict the terms of debate on which the urban

is encountered. The spatial ‘problems’ policed

in the city are often those of a nation-state-

centric concern with citizenship as a national

project – a regime of exclusive belonging to

be closely guarded through classificatory

mechanisms of filtering and selection. In

Darling 9

response, we see the categorization of urban

refugees as illegitimate and troublesome pre-

senceswhoshouldbeplacedinthe‘official’

space of the camp, the managed liminality of

dispersed accommodation, the maintenance and

enforcement of ubiquitous urban borders and

the conditional welcoming of only those seen

to be ‘worthy’ of sanctuary. Each of these dis-

cussions poses a response to the ‘problem’ of

the refugee, yet each also employs the city as a

space produced through the desire to variously

control, contain or expel forced migrants. As a

result, the experiences of refugees are framed

less in terms of their urban character and more

in terms of how they articulate an imposition of

state authority. This is not to suggest that such

experiences are not ‘policed’. It is to argue that

by focusing upon the ‘scripted’ power relations

of the city, current discussions risk downplaying

both the political potentials of the city and the

urban character of much forced migration. This

is an urban character expressed not just through

location, but through urban attributes and con-

ditions which influence the nature of forced

migration.

There is, though, need for caution here, not

least in recognizing that the possibilities of

urban politicization are highly contingent. Any

consideration of forced migration and the city

must be wary of romanticizing urban politics for

at least two reasons. Firstly, because cities are

often themselves encountered as sites of intra-

urban displacement, violence, and transit. As

Rian

˜o-Alcala´ (2008) shows in the case of

Medellı´n, the urbanization of violence warns

against reading the city as a necessarily protec-

tive or progressive environment. Secondly,

because accessing means of urban politicization

is itself uneven. For those forced migrants with-

out formal status, the risks of political enact-

ment are far greater than for those with (even

conditional) refugee status or documentation.

As McNevin (2013: 195) argues, in many cases

politicization is ‘ambivalent’ as it may be ‘at

once, purposeful, political and born of a certain

desperation’. A concern with the political

potential of the city must thus recognize the

ambivalence of differently positioned forced

migrants.

With these caveats in mind, I want to use the

remainder of this paper to suggest two avenues

that might illustrate how cities may be not sim-

ply ‘active’ agents in the management of forced

migration, but also sites of ‘activist’ potential.

The two avenues proposed are not divorced

from the critical insights gained through those

literatures already discussed in Sections II–V of

this paper, exploring urban refugees, urban dis-

persal processes and the politics of sanctuary

cities. Rather, they seek to build upon these dis-

cussions of ‘policing’ through approaching

forced migration from a different perspective.

The politicization of urban forced migration

that orientates the final sections of the paper

(VII–VIII) thus takes inspiration from Magnus-

son’s (2011) call to expand political imaginaries

through ‘seeing like a city’ in conjunction with

‘seeing like a state’. For Magnusson (2011),

‘seeing like a state’ marks the imposition of a

singular, rational order from above, whilst ‘see-

ing like a city’ suggests the incomplete crafting

of alternative forms of order in practice. To

examine this perspective, Section VII considers

the informalities of urban life, and Section VIII

turns to the question of presence as a political

tool. Through these discussions, I argue that

geographers might consider how urban relations

may exceed the ‘scripts’ of forced migration.

VII Urban informality

The first area of potential convergence is

centred on the nature of urban informality. A

concern with informality is important as it may

be seen to run across all four accounts of the city

outlined so far. From urban refugee settlement

to sanctuary ordinances, forced migrants can be

argued to be positioned within continuums of

formal and informal status, activity and rights

(see Feldman, 2012). This is the case not least

10 Progress in Human Geography

because the categories of status that define

forced migration are often fluid. As Zetter

(2007) illustrates, the explosion of categoriza-

tion within asylum reflects a constantly shifting

attempt to fix and demarcate positions. The sig-

nificance of this, as Nyers (2011) argues, is that

conditions of status are the result of struggles

over formal and informal rights. In this context,

the complexities of informality and its defini-

tion come to the fore, as informality marks not

the evasion of regulation and ‘policing’ as noted

in some sanctuary contexts, but rather the pro-

duction and negotiation of both ‘policing’ and

‘politicization’ in context. As recent explora-

tions of the ‘improvisational’ character of gov-

ernance suggest (Jeffrey, 2013), the practice of

‘policing’ forced migration is just as much an

issue of informal practices of discretion, know-

how and interpretation as it is a matter of formal

practices of regulation. Thus whilst urban refu-

gees and asylum seekers may occupy ‘gray

space’ between legality and illegality (Yifta-

chel, 2009), in urban environments they are not

alone in this situation as a wide range of urban

subjects negotiate formal and informal practices

on a daily basis. Looking to the politics of

informality might thus enable a reconsideration

of how urban forced migration has been

imagined.

Cities themselves have been argued to repre-

sent constellations of legality, illegality, form-

ality and informality as the distinction between

the formal and the informal has served as a

‘multifaceted resource for naming, managing,

governing, producing, and even critiquing con-

temporary cities’ (McFarlane, 2012: 89).

Accounts of urban informality have thus been

extended beyond a spatial concern with specific

territories, to express forms of urban practice

that shape cities across the world (McFarlane,

2012; Fairbanks, 2011). What informal prac-

tices highlight is the ‘ever-shifting urban rela-

tionship between the legal and the illegal,

legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and

unauthorized’ (Roy, 2011: 233). These shifting

relationships are not simply a backdrop to the

lives of urban refugees and asylum seekers.

Rather, given the often uncertain legal status

and insecurity of asylum seekers, the shifting

relationships of authority, influence and nego-

tiation seen to reflect urban practices, question

‘the very basis of state legitimacy’ (2011: 233).

Informal practices constantly question the defi-

nitional limits and conditions of the formal, they

undermine the legitimacy of claims to authority

and a final or fixed sense of what – and indeed

who – is legitimate.

The questioning that a focus on the produc-

tion and negotiation of informality presents may

be of use in two ways when exploring urban

forced migration. Firstly, this questioning can

be applied to the claims of sovereign authority

that often frame forced migration. For Roy

(2005: 149), ‘[s]tate power is reproduced

through the capacity to construct and recon-

struct categories of legitimacy and illegiti-

macy’, as the designation of the informal

settlement, like the designation of the ‘genuine’

refugee, becomes a site of ‘complex political

struggle’ (2005: 150). This struggle is never

simply a task of imposing authority. Rather,

informality operates in a context where struc-

tural power is understood ‘not as a monolithic

and singular regime of rule, but rather as a frag-

mented domain of multiple and competing

sovereignties’ (AlSayyad and Roy, 2006: 12).

Feeding such work back to the urban refugee,

we can consider how the varied forms of man-

agement, provision and classification that the

UNHCR (2012) note in relation to urban refu-

gees – from the nation-state, different urban

authorities, different agencies and NGOs and

UNHCR itself – produce a context of negotia-

bility, fragmentation and the incompleteness of

any form of sovereign authority. In their work

on refugee protests in Cairo, for example, Mou-

lin and Nyers (2007) highlight how refugee

groups opposed attempts at classification by

UNHCR and drew upon a range of other situ-

ated sources of legitimacy along with the global

Darling 11

connections of the city to ‘reformulate govern-

mentalities of care and protection’ (2007: 356).

A concern with urban informality thus high-

lights the necessarily limited nature of sover-

eign claims to authority. Rather than a ‘script’

of policing the city, what emerges is an account

of the negotiations that take place in attempting

to govern through distinctions of the formal and

informal. This more messy reality opens the

possibility of pragmatic compromises, incom-

plete and imperfect attempts at governance and

openings for difference.

The temporary reformulations of authority

produced through these refugee protests point

to a second connection between studies of urban

informality and forced migration. A concern

with urban informality enables a valorization

of incremental and often highly tactical prac-

tices that can constitute ‘minor’ political acts.

The informal practices of asylum seekers in cit-

ies, such as building precarious shelters, enga-

ging in black markets, identity stripping,

voluntary employment and anti-deportation

organizing and networking, suggest ‘minor’ cri-

tiques of the categorizations of citizenship that

might not otherwise register as political acts. As

Chimienti and Solomos (2011) find, the capa-

cities of asylum seekers and refugees to engage

in social movements and actively seek social

change are severely restricted, not least by the

policing mechanisms already noted. However,

an account of the urban informal suggests that

‘minor’ critiques may offer points of politiciza-

tion which, whilst not immediately ‘activist’ in

Isin’s (2012) terms, break with established

‘scripts’ of the passive and grateful refugee and

undermine fixed classifications of citizen and

non-citizen. Work on the informal urban high-

lights the contingent nature of such positions –

of vulnerability, invention, permanence and

opportunism all drawn together in the process

of what McFarlane (2011) terms ‘learning the

city’. The importance of a turn to urban inform-

ality is thus in allowing piecemeal activities to

be seen as both politically significant in

articulating a different relation to citizenship,

and as urban activities produced through the

negotiations of urban life and its multiple

authorities, interests, publics and stages. With

this in mind, I turn to the politics of presence

as a means to broaden this frame of

politicization.

VIII Presence

In referring to the politics of presence, I want to

discuss claims made through the interweaving

of rights to both mobility and political partici-

pation within the city. To start with an example,

we might look to Fernandez and Olson’s (2011)

discussion of the claims made by undocumented

migrants in Flagstaff, Arizona. In working with

migrant rights’ campaigns, Fernandez and

Olson argue that many of those without legal

status are in fact ‘fighting for the right to come

and go more than they are for the right to come

and stay’ (2011: 415, emphasis in original).

Focusing on how migrants organized to push

the city council to file an injunction against the

anti-immigrant Arizona Senate Bill 1070, they

highlight the insistence that city officials ‘hear

their collective voice and represent their inter-

ests’ (2011: 412). In illustrating the multiple

communities and mobile networks that these

migrants are engaged in, Fernandez and Olson

(2011: 415) argue that the demands they make

are to both ‘movement and place’, as ‘they are

demanding the freedom to live, raise families

and work across borders, and insisting on the

right to participate in whatever public they are

presently in’, thereby asserting that ‘the right to

belong and participate in a public realm, should

be less a matter of where you were (born) than

where you are’ (2011: 417, emphasis in origi-

nal). The politics of presence is therefore an

articulation of an openness to mobility, along-

side the ‘ability to participate in local affairs’

(2011: 418), that has often framed concerns

with the right to the city (Harvey, 2008; Purcell,

2003). As such, it reflects a demand for both

12 Progress in Human Geography

participation and mobility that may be

enhanced through the negotiations of urban life.

Drawing from this example, we might note

two orientation points for this politics. The first

of these is in returning to those sanctuary ordi-

nances that seek to protect undocumented

migrants and refugees. Whilst such ordinances

may have a regulatory function, they have nev-

ertheless been argued to present openings for

forms of ‘local citizenship’ that draw on the

‘right to the city’ (Varsanyi, 2008a; Lefebvre,

1996). Reading sanctuary ordinances through

the right to the city suggests that the legal and

social protection of sanctuary may offer a

framework on which claims to rights for ser-

vices, protection and political participation are

made. However, the right to the city is often tied

to the notion of inhabitance (Purcell, 2003),

such that those able to exercise such rights are

residents. By contrast, the value of presence

may be in critiquing this requirement of resi-

dency. Presence is about the temporary fixing

of mobilities rather than their capture within a

given spatial form. Thus whilst many urban

sanctuary movements advocate rights based on

‘the need to prove one’s residency’ (Nyers,

2010: 137), a number seek to ‘articulate ideas

of membership based on physical presence’. It

is here that a politics of presence draws on a

second orientation point.

The ‘autonomy of migration’ approach views

migration as a constituent force in social life

(Mezzadra, 2011). In doing so, it seeks to

reframe migration as having ‘the capacity to

develop its own logics, its own motivation, its

own trajectories that control comes later to

respond to, not the other way round’ (Papado-

poulos and Tsianos, 2013: 184). In this sense,

the ‘autonomy’ of migration reflects a challenge

to the perceptual ‘policing’ of migration as a

‘problem’ to be managed in particular ways.

In focusing on ‘autonomy’, Papadopoulos and

Tsianos (2013: 188) argue for a concern with the

social transformations ‘sustained and nurtured

silently through the everyday and seemingly

non-political experiences and actions of peo-

ple’. Beyond the right to the city, the politics

of presence therefore reflects a concern with a

mobile politics of everyday critique. Presence in

this context becomes ‘a matter of social fact

rather than legal status’ (Nyers, 2010: 137), and

opens for challenge the categorizations of mem-

bership associated with citizenship, residency

and formal rights to services and belonging.

Asking on what basis rights and services are

denied to those present in the city, as in the

demands made by undocumented migrants in

Flagstaff, the politics of presence names alter-

native ‘ideas of political membership’ at the

urban level as a way to influence ‘ideas of secu-

rity and citizenship’ at the level of the nation-

state (Ridgley, 2008: 65).

Presence as an orientation point for political

claims is not necessarily or inherently urban.

However, it has been argued that in the urban

we see the political possibilities of presence

most readily. For Sassen (2010: 9), this value

emerges from the fact that in cities ‘the locali-

zation of the global creates a set of objective

conditions of engagement’ through which pres-

ence may be politicized by irregular migrants,

refugees and asylum seekers. This ‘engage-

ment’ is twofold, reflecting both a presence to

power, and a presence ‘vis-a`-vis each other’

(Sassen, 2006: 317). Presence, in its urban man-

ifestation, might thus denote a point of political

potential that can be mobilized by different

causes and concerns in drawing on an engage-

ment with authority localized in the city.

For urban refugees and asylum seekers the

question becomes one of how presence may

be situated as a claim to rightfulness (Squire and

Darling, 2013). Whilst the city provides the con-

text in which claims are made possible, work on

urban refugees might explore those claims that

are centred on a framing of justice rather than

one of hospitality within the city. Presence takes

on a dual role within these discussions. Firstly, it

articulates the value of the city as a space

through which forced migrants may become

Darling 13

present to one another and to urban authorities.

The city in this context provides both the battle-

ground for forming political subjectivities as

Isin (2002) sees it, and the localization and con-

centration of globalized assemblages of author-

ity as Sassen (2006) argues. Secondly, claiming

presence has the capacity to articulate a ‘polit-

ical subjectivity and its expression to rights’

(Isin, 2012: 109) that is delinked from assump-

tions of citizenship, and that is ‘transversal’ in

assuming rights not through the fixity of resi-

dence, but through presence as both a statement

of social fact and a transversal connection. Pres-

ence in the city is always the culmination of

multiple flows and linkages, and as such it poses

questions over the frames of justice and injus-

tice that have led individuals to the city (Squire

and Darling, 2013).

This approach is, of course, not without fail-

ings. Most notably, there is a need to be wary of

positioning presence as a straightforward claim

to visibility. In some cases, as May (2010)

argues, visibility may offer a valuable means

of demonstrating the political identification of

a group positioned outside the remit of citizen-

ship rights. Yet, there is a danger in visibility.

As noted in discussions of the ubiquity of urban

borders, being visibly present can invite the

increased ‘policing’ of forced and irregular

migrants. Similarly, there is also a significant

distinction to be made here between the forms

of group visibility and collective identification

that May (2010) valorizes, and the risks of vis-

ibility for the individual. The politics of pres-

ence in this sense is not equally distributed or in

any sense universal. Rather, it may reflect a

potential resource to be tactically and carefully

employed in the practice of negotiating claims

to rightfulness. In this context, a claim to polit-

ical presence centred on the city demands a

more nuanced engagement with the informal-

ities and insecurities of non-citizen subjectivity,

and demands attentiveness to the strategic use of

presence as a political tool in given urban con-

texts, some of which may produce the visible

articulation of a collective identity, some of

which may seek to avert, resist or avoid such

visibility.

Linked to such concerns, there is the ques-

tion of how practical a focus on presence may

be. The value of presence may be in offering a

different starting point for discussion – one

emergent from the relations of urban life rather

than the imposition of sovereign authority.

Thinking through the value of presence as a

social fact, and of the frames of justice and

injustice to which it may be connected, means

viewing presence as an orientation point in

exploring ‘new scripts’ on forced migration

(Isin, 2012: 148). A politics of urban presence

might be seen as an unlikely political shift in

many contexts, yet its exploration may have

the potential to shape solidarities centred on

the city as a stage of political and social con-

nection, rather than as a site for the ‘policing’

of forced migration.

Viewing rights within the city as tied only to

presence may thus disrupt governmental

assumptions that rights have to be tied to citi-

zenship and the state. Crucially, a focus on pres-

ence foregrounds the possibility of political

solidarities centred on common experiences of

the urban across otherwise distanciated consti-

tuencies. For example, in the Latin American

context the Cities of Solidarity initiative has

focused on building urban solidarity through

positioning refugee resettlement as an opportu-

nity to improve urban services for all (Varoli,

2010). Similarly, Phillimore and Goodson

(2006) argue that urban refugee resettlement

can be a means of regeneration when detached

from the exclusionary binaries of rights that

distinguish ‘host’ from ‘guest’ communities.

To focus on presence is therefore to examine

‘the hard work of ... repositioning the immi-

grant and the citizen as urban subjects, rather

than essentially different subjects’ (Sassen,

2013: 69). Urban presence may unite individ-

uals across status and reimagine the city as not

a bounded object to be welcomed to or

14 Progress in Human Geography

excluded from, but rather as a relational and

collaborative production of those present at

any given point.

This is not to suggest that a focus on presence

may overtake a concern with citizenship status

and rights bestowed by the nation-state. It is to

argue that we may see a range of alternatives if

we move away from a frame of reference that is

concerned only with the hospitable accommo-

dation of difference. Just as ‘the deployment of

exclusionary city ordinances are not only about

shaping an urban public, but about shaping a

national public as well’ (Varsanyi, 2008a: 47,

emphasis in original), so too might we think of

the kinds of rights claims enacted through cities

as not simply affecting urban imaginaries but

also affecting transnational publics too. It is this

framing of alternatives that is most readily

elided through a concern with the city only as

a space of governmental policing. In challen-

ging these elisions, I have sought in this paper

to explore how considering the city may politi-

cize studies of forced migration in new ways,

promoting critical questions of urban citizen-

ship, denizenship, and the politics of presence

itself.

IX Conclusion

In this paper I have considered how geographers

and others have imagined the relation between

the city and forced migration. Urban political

theory has a great deal to say about the nature

of urban democracy and social justice (Purcell,

2008; Soja, 2010), but such insights need to be

thought alongside the work of those exploring

forced migration. There are, of course, a range

of approaches that might be of value here. For

example, one might think of discussions over

the relational and topological nature of cities

as sites of ‘intensive’ relations of power which

enfold state authority and challenge topographi-

cal distinctions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’

(Allen, 2010). In this paper, I have outlined only

two possible connections. In doing so, I have

highlighted the ways in which taking cities and

urban theory seriously means viewing cities as

constitutive of both the policing and the politi-

cization of forced migration.

In seeking to consider how a framing of the

city might contest the dominance of statist

thinking on forced migration, it is essential to

explore how cities may do something different.

This is not, as Young (2011: 545) suggests, to

‘re-imagine the city as a refuge beyond the

nation-state’, for there is no ‘beyond’ the

nation-state in this sense. Rather, the nation-

state is entwined with the city, relationally con-

stituted through the city, but not necessarily

above or before it. Instead, examinations of the

urban nature of forced migration point to the

potential of the city to work within the inter-

stices of the state – the fractures and inconsis-

tencies that are inherently produced in claims to

authority and sovereignty (Critchley, 2012). In

this way, debates within urban geography may

contribute to the destabilization of an image of

the nation-state as a homogenous, all powerful

and consistent entity (Gill, 2010; Painter, 2006).

Exploring the politics of urban forced migration

offers one reflection on the ‘insecure’ nature of

the nation-state as a political formation striving

for security (Philo, 2014). As a focus on inform-

ality and urban presence has suggested, the city

may become a space for a politics of critique

relative to the state, a politics that refuses spe-

cific forms of governmentality – most notably

the abjection of those displaced. The task that

emerges from discussions of urban forced

migration is to examine the city as a situated

and contested interlocutor for state discourses

and practices. It is only through opening work

on forced migration to a fuller engagement with

the politicization of the city, through the oppor-

tunities it offers as much as the closures it per-

forms, that geographies of forced migration

may harness the ‘strategic importance of the

city for shaping new orders that can contest the

power of ... new transversal borderings’ (Sas-

sen, 2013: 70).

Darling 15

Acknowledgements

Earlier iterations of this paper were presented at the

RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2013, and to seminar

audiences at SOAS and Goethe University, Frank-

furt. My thanks to the organizers and audiences at

each of these forums for their engagement with my

work. Thanks to Kristian Stokke, a second anon-

ymous editor, and three reviewersfor a highly instruc-

tive and insightful set of comments. The paper has

also benefited from the insight of Bill Kutz, Martin

Hess, Lucas Oesch, and Kevin Ward; my thanks to

you all. Finally, thanks to Helen Wilson, whose

encouragement, commentary and guidance can never

be valued highly enough. All errors remain my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-

est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following

financial support for the research, authorship, and/

or publication of this article: The paper was sup-

ported by an Economic and Social Research Council

Future Research Leaders grant (ref: ES/K001612/1).

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20 Progress in Human Geography

Author biography

Jonathan Darling is Senior Lecturer in Human

Geography at the University of Manchester,

UK. His work examines the ethics and politics

of forced migration, including how practices of

urban sanctuary are understood. His current

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graphies of housing and support for asylum see-

kers across the UK during a period of austerity

and privatisation.

Darling 21

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As two settler societies with long histories of accommodating newcomers, the United States and Canada are adopting exclusionary and restrictionist approaches to immigration. The second Trump administration’s proposal to deport mixed migrant families and to deny natural citizenship to newborns whose parents are non-citizens, along with the former Immigration Minister’s use of the phrase “not everyone is welcome” to Canada, jeopardize the realization and preservation of cosmopolitan ideals—freedom to voyage across borders and rights of residence without being treated as outsiders or enemies. Within this context, the present paper observed that the cosmopolitan ideals publicly embraced by both states are primarily confined to a performative realm. By examining Jacques Derrida’s identification of the irreconcilable tension between universalism and particularism, this paper argued that this contradiction lies at the heart of migration governance. The paper theorized the gap between symbolic commitments to inclusivity and the enactment of exclusionary, self-serving policies as a form of performative cosmopolitanism. This concept explains how immigrant-receiving countries continually negotiate between universalist ideals and particularist interests, yet remain unable to achieve a meaningful balance. The paper concluded by advocating for the integration of cosmopolitan moral principles into immigration policy as a pragmatic solution for addressing such irreconcilable tensions and advancing a more inclusive approach to global mobility.

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The economic, political and social situation in Venezuela has forced millions of its citizens to leave their country (Mazuera-Arias et al., Sociodemographic Profiles and the Causesof Regular Venezuelan Emigration. International Migration, https://doi.org/10.1111/IMIG.12693 (2020)). Over the past eight years, we have witnessed an unprecedented exodus of this nature. In June 2024, there were 7.7 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees worldwide, of which 1.5 million have settled in Peru. Lima, the city hosting the majority of Venezuelans in Peru (R4V 2022), seems to be the final destination on their migration trajectory. Despite challenges and barriers related to the complex legal status landscape, the city fulfils aspirations and needs that drove Venezuelans to leave their country. Most importantly, Lima allows them to fulfil economic needs that are sufficient to survive and support those left behind. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the principal challenges confronted by forced migrants from Venezuela on the labor market of Lima (Peru), the adaptation and coping strategies they employ to overcome them and how this situation influences their decisions on further (im)mobility. The results are based on a mixed-method approach with the use of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative methods employed include questionnaire interviews with Venezuelans in Lima and their Peruvian neighbors, while the qualitative methods comprise in-depth interviews with Venezuelans in Lima, their Peruvian neighbors, and experts in Peru, as well as observation during study visits to the research area.

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A solidarity city for everyone. Postmigrantist inclusion epitomised by the Zuri City Card

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This contribution uses the example of the Zuri City Card to study the opportunities afforded by solidarity city concepts from the perspective of a protagonist involved in the process. The Zuri City Card prompts us to ask some very basic questions about the unifying potential of urban solidarity initiatives to create connections that rise above border-drawing processes based on legal status, nation state, or descent (Terkessidis 2017). The chapter starts from the thesis that this campaign in Zurich is also relevant for other cities and regions in Europe since the Zuri City Card can serve as a model for urban options for action in restrictive national policy environments. After a brief introduction to the history of solidarity city campaigns (section 2) and setting out the state of the research on solidarity city movements in Europe (section 3), the article sets out our theoretical approach in further detail, inspired by the approaches of urban citizenship, inclusion and postmigration (section 4). The chapter then examines the introduction of the Zuri City Card based on an interview with Bea Schwager, one of the card’s proponents (section 5). The contribution ends by considering future implications of solidarity city concepts in an unequal world (section 6).

Why Governments Prefer Spatially Segregated Settlement Sites for Urban Refugees

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The urbanization of Africa has been recent, rapid and notably disimllar from the pattern of urbanization that occured previously in Europe. Significantly, the urbanization of Africa has occured in the absence of structural transformation. Within this reality, refugees are viewed by African host governments as exacerbating the problems of urbanization and are most often located in government-designated and spatially segregated sites - refugee camps or settlements. Often in defiance of such policies, most refugees with urban backgrounds tend to congregate in urban centres. The case study of Sudan illustrates that even where the stay of certain refugees in urban areas may be formally regularised by governments there are nonetheless identifiable common patterns and problems arising out of and causing the spatial segregation of refugees away from urban centres. It is argued that the underlying reality of urbanization in Africa plus the protracted problems for governments created by urbanisation generally and cross-border ethnic solidarity in the case of many refugee movements in Africa, shape current hostile refugee policies towards urban refugees.

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Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in Action

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Feb 2010

Todd May

This book shows how democratic progressive politics can happen and how it is happening in very different arenas. The author takes an intensive look at a range of contemporary political movements and shows how, to one degree or another, they exemplify the political thought of Jacques Rancière. Following an overview of Rancière's thought, the author considers the following groups: the Algerian refugee movement in Montreal for citizenship, the first Palestinian intifada, the politics of equality and identity politics in relation to the Zapatista movement, a local food co-op in South Carolina and an anarchist press in Oakland. Essentially, the book shows how political theory and practice can enlighten one another, and in an age of cynicism, fear and despair, the author suggests that there is hope for the possibility of progressive democratic action.

Seeking Spatial Justice

Book

Apr 2010

Edward W. Soja

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also a concrete example of spatial justice in action. This book argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, the book interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, it demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. The book focuses on such innovative labor-community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice.

Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière, Equality in Action

Article

Feb 2010

Todd May

Between a rock and a hard place

Chapter

Apr 2015

Gerhard Hoffstaedter

“Forgotten,” “Hidden”: Predicaments of the Urban Refugee

Article

Jan 2007

Philip Marfleet

Urban refugees are widely viewed as anomalous—people who stand outside a refugee regime which, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is based upon rural encampment. This article considers why states and humanitarian agencies view urban refugees in this way. It examines the history of the refugee as an urban person and the recent change in perspective which has enforced a rural norm. It considers the extreme pressures placed upon displaced people in the city and the consequences for communities which contest their marginal status.

Insiders but Outsiders: The Struggle for the Inclusion of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in South Africa

Article

Jan 2007

Florencia Belvedere

This article examines the politics of urban refugees in South Africa. It shows that despite South Africa’s adoption of an encompassing rights-regarding legal framework that has the potential to be inclusive towards asylum seekers and refugees in the country and afford them basic human rights and protection, asylum seekers and refugees nonetheless remain “internally excluded,” predominantly as a result of practices adopted by a nationalist Department of Home Affairs to implement refugee legislation and by the UNHCR in its quest to prioritize the safeguarding of the institution of asylum. The article also shows how the adoption of these practices has been facilitated by a construction of asylum seekers and refugees as “bogus” claimants who have no place in post-apartheid South Africa.

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness

Book

Jan 2001

Jacques Derrida

Seeking Spatial Justice in Los Angeles

Chapter

Mar 2014

Edward W. Soja

A vital but often neglected part of the urban restructuring of Los Angeles has been a resurgent activism that has created some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. The Justice Riots of 1992, as they are now called, stimulated vigorous grassroots and place-based coalitions of labor unions and community-based organizations seeking to deal with the enormous inequalities and injustices brought about by globalization and the formation of the New Economy. Affected to some degree by the critical spatial perspective espoused by the Los Angeles research cluster, these new coalitions were among the earliest in the United States to adopt specifically spatial strategies, and in these cases, thinking spatially about justice made a difference. This spatial turn in the justice movement is traced through three organizations: the Bus Riders Union and its initiating sponsor, the Labor/Community Strategy Center; the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE); and, most recently, the Right to the City Alliance.

Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence

Abstract

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