Welcoming Cities: Arrival Infrastructure

Welcoming Cities, Arrival Infrastructure: Introductory panel

This seminar is online only. You can join online via Zoom by registering here.

Chair: Gökçe Yurdakul, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Panellists:

• Jacqui Broadhead, University of Oxford
• Nihad El-Kayed, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Julie Kashirahamwe, Liverpool City Council
• Linda Hyökki, European Coalition of Cities Against Racism

What does it mean for a place to be welcoming? Cities in particular, as sites of migration and arrival, are often a focal point for integration, and in some cases are seen as places where national-level hostility to migration might be replaced by a welcoming approach, with some cities adopting proactive policies of sanctuary or welcome. If migration governance is understood predominantly as a national government competence, then welcoming is predominantly oriented at the local level. How do these levels of government interact, and how can we know this multi-level governance of migration and welcoming?

More broadly, how does this work function in practice? Should it be best considered through an integration lens, focusing on access to the labour market, education, and social networks, or through a more spatial approach, focusing on the role of arrival infrastructure in supporting newcomer communities through social infrastructure and the built environment (Wessendorf, 2024). Is the role of the state (at the national or local level) central, or should we instead focus on grassroots urban solidarity movements that have inspired new practices in urban citizenship (Humphris, 2025).

Cities are not homogeneous spaces and are not uniformly proactive in this space, facing different challenges and levels of demographic change. How do cities understand their role in welcoming, and how do Mayors and other actors define their leadership and convening roles?

This introductory panel aims to tackle these questions of welcoming, arrival, integration and inclusion in cities – from both a municipal and civic perspective, looking from the perspective of both the UK and Germany.

The ‘Stable Neighbourhood’ Planning Paradigm in Times of Migration and Diversity

Critical Reflections on Social Mixing Strategies – and their Relevance for Migrants' Access to Housing

This seminar is hybrid. You can join online via Zoom by registering here.

Speaker: Heike Hanhörster, Technische Universität Berlin

A growing body of research on arrival infrastructures and arrival neighbourhoods highlights how such spaces can provide newcomers with important resources to adapt to their new circumstances. These neighbourhoods also perform important integration functions for the entire city (Hanhörster/Wessendorf 2020).

In recent years, political debates across Western Europe have intensified, with renewed interest among politicians and planners in the paradigm of social mixing. The underlying assumption of these debates is that dispersing migrants and refugees might facilitate their local integration. A high proportion of migrants and high levels of fluctuation are seen as key indicators of neighbourhood instability. Allocation management is considered essential for creating 'stable neighbourhoods' through social mixing.

However, my research shows that tenant selection management aimed at stabilising neighbourhoods restricts access to the housing market, particularly for those who are perceived as potentially destabilising the neighbourhood based on their skin colour or religion. Thus, allocation strategies (unintentionally) contribute to an increase in socio-spatial inequality. I therefore advocate reinterpreting the 'stable neighbourhood' principle. Rather than using indicators such as fluctuation or the proportion of migrants, we should focus more on the functioning of local infrastructures, such as schools and other micro-publics.

The Production of (knowledge on) Urban Spaces of Asylum and Differential Arrival

This seminar is hybrid. You can join online via Zoom by registering here.

Speakers:

• Sophie Hinger, Universität Osnabrück
• Francina Guggenberger, Universität Osnabrück

The aim of this presentation is two-fold: In the first part, Sophie Hinger will present results from a study on local negotiations around asylum accommodation. In particular, she will elucidate the decision- and sense-making processes of local governmental actors regarding the placement in and transfer between different types of accommodations in Germany. Conceptualising asylum accommodation as part of go­vernmental arrival infrastructures, she will argue that asylum-seeking newcomers are chan­nelled through urban space selectively and in a step-wise manner, producing differential arrival trajectories. In the second part of the presentation, Francina Guggenberger and Sophie Hinger will share reflections from an ongoing research project on the production of (knowledge on) urban spaces of migration in German cities, in which notions such as “arrival infrastructures” or “welcoming cities” are not used as analytical concepts, but are studied concerning their production, usage and circulation – notably between municipalities and research. Our analysis seeks to provide insights into how these concepts are (not) used to govern (forced) migration in and through the city. This (self-)reflexive turn enables us to examine the transfer or translation of knowledge between science and administrative practice, and to highlight and reflect on the role of researchers in the local production of urban spaces of migration.

Infrastructures of Kindness in the Context of Migrant Arrival

This seminar is hybrid. Join us in person at The Hub, Kellogg College, or participate online via Zoom by registering here.

Speaker: Susanne Wessendorf, Coventry University

Much social scientific research on migrant arrival and settlement has examined these processes through the lens of ‘integration’, investigating how migrants access societal realms such as the labour market, education, civil society, and social networks. A complementary body of work has looked at how socio-economic contexts shape integration and social mobility. This paper expands on this work by highlighting the importance of place in the context of migrant arrival. It builds on an emerging body of literature on ‘arrival infrastructures’ that has emphasised that where migrants arrive, and the related place-based opportunity structures they encounter, play a crucial role in their ability to access resources. Arrival infrastructures consist of a range of places such as civil society organisations, religious sites, informal sites like barbers or cafés, as well as publicly funded places like libraries and support services.

Drawing on ethnographic research in East London, the paper analyses the opportunities and barriers that migrants encounter in accessing support through arrival infrastructures. It demonstrates how individual factors, such as cultural and social capital, combined with systemic barriers, including migration status and limited welfare entitlements, differentially shape access to support. It also highlights the crucial role of intermediaries or ‘brokers’, ranging from civil society actors to local pastors, shopkeepers and street-level bureaucrats, many of whom go beyond the remit of their everyday jobs. By drawing on the notion of ‘infrastructures of kindness’, the paper highlights how, in light of unprecedented cuts to welfare provision and their exacerbated effect in arrival areas (which are often amongst the most disadvantaged areas of the country), it is often thanks to these local acts of informal care that newcomers manage to forge a living.

The Politicisation of Local Integration Policy-Making in Western European Small and Medium-sized Towns and Rural Areas

This seminar is hybrid. Join us in person at The Hub, Kellogg College, or participate online via Zoom by registering here.

Speakers:

• Tiziana Caponio, Università di Torino & Collegio Carlo Alberto
• Andrea Pettrachin, Università di Padova

This seminar explores how small and medium-sized towns and rural areas in Western Europe have responded to the arrival and integration of refugees since 2014. While scholarly and policy debates on migration governance overwhelmingly focus on large cities, the majority of asylum-seekers were in fact dispersed to smaller localities, many of which had little prior experience with migration. Drawing on findings from a forthcoming book and a series of published articles (outputs of the EU-funded Whole-COMM project), the presentation examines refugee integration policymaking across 36 towns in seven European countries (rigorously selected), complemented by large-scale survey data on public attitudes in small localities across Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. The talk highlights two central contributions of our work. First, it shows that local integration policies in small Western European localities are often fragmented and underdeveloped. Yet, they display striking variation: some localities disengage entirely, while others design proactive inclusion strategies in education, labour market access, healthcare, and/or housing. Second, examining the causes of such observed variation, the seminar introduces a new theoretical framework that challenges the dominant view of local policymaking as pragmatic and problem-solving. Instead, it argues that local integration policymaking is shaped decisively by political constellations – specifically the political affiliation of local executives, the presence of radical right parties within local councils and multilevel party dynamics. To make this argument, besides showing (applying QCA) that political factors are the best predictor of the emergence of different local policies in small towns, we show (using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods) that such factors also powerfully shape other recognised drivers of local policymaking processes. These include: the structure and key features of local policy networks, how local actors frame refugee integration, and how they perceive public opinion (which often contrasts with evidence on residents’ attitudes).

Welcoming Cities: How newcomers shape urban policy making

Book Launch

This seminar is hybrid. Join us in person at The Hub, Kellogg College, or participate online via Zoom by registering here.

Chair: Sunder Katwala, British Future

Panellists:

• Jacqui Broadhead, University of Oxford
• Fuad Mohammed, Ashley Community Housing
• Nihad El-Kayed, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

A truly welcoming and inclusive city is not just an aspiration—it is essential to the future of our increasingly diverse urban societies. Yet too often, policy and practice lack the theoretical and research foundations needed for meaningful and effective implementation.

Welcoming Cities is a book which bridges this gap, offering an interdisciplinary framework grounded in empirical research and case studies from 12 UK cities and international partners. Engaging with key governance challenges, it explores how cities define and implement welcoming policies across multiple sectors.

Moving beyond critique, this book offers a constructive and action-oriented approach to integration and social cohesion. Sitting at the crossroads of academic research and policy and practice, this panel also aims to bridge this gap, drawing together insights from across the seminar series and engaging the key questions raised by Welcoming Cities.