Reframing arrival: Transnational perspectives on perceptions, governance and practices - REFRAME.

Recurrent large movements of forced migrants from sub-Sahara Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the last decade, and since February 2022, from Ukraine, show how displacement has become part of an increasingly protracted condition and an unfolding moment rather than a single time-bounded event. Whether related to conflict, disaster, persecution, or climate change - displacement is defining our time and is entangled with crises related to housing, energy, democracy, and care. REFRAME takes this notion as a starting point and aims at reframing the paradigm of forced migrants' arrival as both a policy framework and a discursive realm, through a systematic analysis and transnational comparison of different arrival situation of forced migrants since 2015. The research collaboration between the three partner institutions Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany), University College London (United Kingdom) and Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig (Germany) is grounded in their extensive preliminary research activities related to the discursive constructions and co-production of knowledge around the arrival of forced migrants.
REFRAME looks at arrival through the example of housing and will conduct a comparison around three interrelated strands: a) discourses on and perceptions of arrival and their impact on policy approaches to housing and social cohesion in the neighborhood; b) governance of arrival and housing, its inherent conflicts and opportunities to strengthen urban citizenship; c) the co-constitution of forced migrants' practices and housing regimes. The project seeks to compile and compare existing and newly collected data, discursive and policy considerations on the arrival and housing of refugees in 2015/16 and in 2022, and the time in between, in seven localities in four countries: Leipzig, Ibbenbüren, and Dessau-Roblau (Germany), London and Hastings (United Kingdom), Istanbul (Turkey) and Brescia (Italy). The transnational multi-sited comparative analysis of seven reception contexts across Europe and the Middle East in cities of different size and structural condition will help us to disentangle locally specific factors from more universal phenomena, thus supporting a nuanced reframing of arrival in the sense of the 'local turn'.
Overall, REFRAME contributes to a critical problematization of arrival and reception around their processual and relational dimension and examines the spatial and colonial implications of arrival and reception, both historically, socially and emotionally. The project aims at bringing forward theoretical development in migration research, human geography and anthropology and it will inform policy debates on new foundations for urban citizenship.