Norma SCHEMSCHAT, École normale supérieure, France
Refugee-centered revitalization as a strategy to slow down or halt urban decline has entered academic and policy discourse (Pottie-Sherman, 2018). The paper places the strategy in broader processes of social inclusion and exclusion, and refugee arrival within the context of global restructuring and urban competition in which forced migrants are either framed as engines of opportunity (see Pottie-Sherman, 2018; Pottie-Sherman, 2020) or avoided in fear of possible negative implications for rescaling processes (Glick-Schiller/Ça?lar, 2011).
Starting from a critique on the boosterism around refugees and their role in revitalizing shrinking cities, the paper argues that the current discourse erases the agency of refugees – and other migrants – while further strengthening existing dichotomies of migrants as either deserving or undeserving of support and inclusion (Fawaz et al. 2018).
Whether one looks critically at immigration as an element in local development programs or not, cities in decline increasingly turn into arrival places for refugees – rarely by choice, however. Part of a Ph.D. thesis project on the challenges to and opportunities of arrival and place-making under conditions of urban decline and how they relate to the concept of refugee-centered revitalization, the paper attempts to make sense of interviews and observations conducted in a mid-sized shrinking city in central France and investigates how the city’s role in accommodating refugees and their belonging is negotiated among local elites. It builds on previous work on arrival in non-metropolitan areas and on refugee-centered revitalization of shrinking cities and hopes to illuminate the complexities with regards to the actors, spaces, and temporalities involved in arrival under conditions of decline.
Mots clés : refugee arrival|urban decline|politics of belonging|urban development|growth paradigm
A103944NS