Everyday Negotiations of Space and Place Amongst Refugees and Asylum Seekers Living in the North West of England

The UK's asylum dispersal and refugee resettlement schemes place asylum seekers and refugees in various locations around the UK, often on a 'no choice' or limited choice basis and disproportionately in poorer, working-class areas in the north of England (Phillips 2006: 542, Darling 2010: 128). The North West houses 16 times the number of refugees and asylum seekers (9,491) than the South East (580), despite having a smaller population by 1.7 million (Lyons & Duncon 2017). Furthermore, the Greater Manchester region in particular houses 60% of the North West's refugee and asylum seeker population (NWRSMP 2020). Because dispersal and resettlement policies are dependent upon the availability of cheap housing, increasingly more displaced persons are directed towards smaller and predominantly white working-class towns on the periphery of the urban, where the inexorable existence of multicultural space and the complex and multi-faceted migration patterns which constitute the inner city are considerably less pronounced (Hynes & Sales 2009: 40). As highlighted within literature on cosmopolitanism (see Warf 2015) and recent political debate surrounding the 'left behind' (see Ford & Goodwin 2014), such areas are dismissed as particularly exclusionary, resistant to difference and thus harder to penetrate by those considered Other. This research considers the veracity of such ideas by exploring the differing ways in which new migrants engage in the process of place-making in the multicultural city and in the post-industrial, working-class towns of northern England. By focusing upon practices of place-making in very different urban environments, this research will challenge the tendency to frame migrant belonging in terms of levels of integration and alignment with the symbolic space of the nation state. Rather, the nuanced nature of everyday geographies of space and place will offer a level of site-specific, textual detail that is rarely found within policy evaluations of asylum seeker dispersal and refugee resettlement schemes, as well as contributing to existing work within migration studies which focuses upon the relational, spatial and temporal nature of attachment and belonging (see Ryan 2018, Ryan & Mulholland 2015, Erel 2010).