Introduction
This book project introduces a strategic interdisciplinary research agenda on arrival infrastructures . We broadly define arrival infrastructures as those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated. This composite concept of arrival infrastructures combines two aspects. First, by focusing on processes of arrival, we want to direct attention to how and where people find some stability in order to move on . To date, states and activists have mainly quarreled with regard to migrants’ rights to arrive and stay permanently in a national territory and community . Building on the call to “liberate temporariness ” by Latham et al. (2014), we argue that liberating the notion of arrival challenges the dominance of national normativities, temporalities , and geographies of “arrival” without neglecting migrants’ search for forms of stability. Second, an infrastructural perspective on processes of arrival allows for a critical as well as transformative engagement with the position of the state in the management of migration. States have continuously produced new layers of supportive and exclusionary governmental infrastructures , funneling particular groups into “permanent arrival” and others into “permanent temporariness .” As noted by Graham and Thrift (2007), a considerable amount of labor from diverse actors is needed to continuously maintain, repair, and update state infrastructures . At the same time, migrants and various other actors incrementally build up sites or vantage points of temporary deployment with whatever is at hand, including parts of these governmental infrastructures. The notion of arrival infrastructures hence emphasizes the continuous and manifold “infrastructuring practices” by a range of actors in urban settings, which create a multitude of “platforms of arrival and take-off ” within, against, and beyond the infrastructures of the state. Moreover, it opens up avenues to examine and align the resistance against exclusionary bordering practices in a multitude of sites, and to rethink the role of a supportive state that is not conditional on permanency and assimilation .
In adopting this approach, this edited volume builds on but also moves beyond existing research on cities as privileged places of arrival , which was summarized to great popular success in Doug Saunders ’ book Arrival City (2011). In this work, Saunders develops an optimistic narrative of arrival cities across the world, not as ghettos or areas of social deprivation, but as lively neighborhoods characterized by vibrant modes of formal and informal exchange. Cities, according to Saunders, can lift whole communities out of poverty and contribute to the upward social mobility of migrants. While we broadly share this sentiment of cities as sites for progressive social change, in an earlier research project on the prospects of social mobility for Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles in Brussels , Bruno Meeus had already highlighted the problematic teleological approach toward arrival that underlies Saunders’ global narrative of arrival cities: migrants are seen to occupy a certain place and temporality of arrival, and are ascribed the identity of urban entrepreneurs who, through hard work, can gain upward social mobility and enter the middle class . This is much too narrow a conception of urban arrival, which does not do justice to the diversity of migration trajectories that shape our cities today. In trying to acknowledge this diversity, emerging literature on urban infrastructures has turned out to be very useful. Initially inspired by the work of Jan Blommaert (2013, 2014) on infrastructures of superdiversity , an infrastructural approach seemed to have such a potential, and a working definition of arrival infrastructures was created to further guide the fieldwork (Meeus 2014).
It was this preliminary thinking on urban arrival infrastructures that shaped a two-day workshop we arranged in Molenbeek (Brussels ) in December 2015. Organized in the context of a larger research project on “Cities and Newcomers” at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, various papers presented at this workshop return as chapters in the edited volume here. Considered as one of the communes of Brussels most heavily transformed by generations of migrants from around the Mediterranean, Molenbeek had recently also been associated with terrorist attacks that were persistently classified as “Islamist .” Just around this time, three of Molenbeek ’s (former) residents were identified as perpetrators of the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015. Hence, by the time of our workshop, many of its participants were keenly aware that through widely mediatized associations of “migrants” and “terrorism,” Molenbeek had rapidly become a locus of the criminalization of migration, and concomitantly, of the problematization of infrastructural provisions for migrants. Another layer was added to this debate, because by the time the participants in the workshop began to seriously engage with the emerging concept of arrival infrastructure , the so-called “refugee crisis ” was challenging them, much as it did many other scholars, activists, and large sections of the population in Europe and far beyond. More than a marginal phenomenon situated at the emblematic shores of Europe—the Mediterranean and the Aegean sea (Dalakoglou 2016; Trimikliniotis et al. 2016)—the migration crisis reverberated deep into the European hinterland, in political centers, and in the heart of many cities (Catterall 2015; Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016; Wessendorf 2017).
Our workshop and this book project, in other words, could not have been more topical, and the book tackles head-on questions relating to migration, multi-scalar state politics , and the role of cities as transnationally embedded places of arrival . The combination of migratory turbulence and polycentric interventions of reception, regulation , and repression across urban spaces formed the vantage point for thinking through the notion of urban arrival infrastructures . The conceptual elaboration subsequently took place in the aftermath of the Brussels workshop, in myriad conversations among the editors and the authors, which were boosted by the rapidly expanding and entwining bodies of literature on infrastructure and the spatiotemporality of migration from different corners of the social and human sciences (Green 2017; Arnaut et al. 2016; Blommaert 2014; Kleinman 2014; Hall et al. 2015). In these conversations , the concept of “arrival infrastructure ” was further expanded by connecting it to a range of different literatures, including works on transnational migration and superdiversity, the mobilities paradigm , the autonomy of migration approach, governmentality literature, and the broad field of what can be called infrastructure studies . In the remainder of this chapter, we will not chronologically trace the development of the concept, but will focus on the two most important conceptual shifts that occurred as the research and the debates unfolded: the o...