REFRAME

Reframing Arrival: Transnational perspectives on perceptions, governance and forced migrants' practices from 2015/16 - 2022/23

Summary

The recent history of flight and displacement around the world shows that displacement is not a singular, temporary event, but part of an ongoing crisis. Arrival and its governance, as well as ensuring participation at the local level, are key challenges for the resilience of cities and urban societies, including in the fields of shelter and housing, neighbourhood integration and participation in everyday life. The context of multiple crises, which today poses challenges for the urban future in general, also requires a new look at migration as an important component of urban reality. Based on this situation, the REFRAME research project aims to reframe the paradigm of forced migration in the political and discursive sphere through a systematic analysis and transnational comparison of data and discourses on arrivals, the governance of forced migration at the local level in a multi-level context, and the local struggles of forced migrants for access to housing and participation. From the UFZ perspective, the (so far under-represented) view on forced migration and its impacts plays a special role in the debate on urban resilience at the city and neighbourhood level (PP6.4 Resilient Cities) as well as for the classification of the topic in the context of societal transformations towards sustainability (IP 6).

REFRAME will carry out an international comparison based on three main strands:

• Perceptions of and discourses on the arrival of forced migrants and their impact on policy approaches in the field of housing and social cohesion (processed by TU Chemnitz)
• Governance of arrival, with a focus on housing and participation at the local level, its inherent conflicts and opportunities for strengthening urban citizenship as a contribution to social resilience (processed by UFZ)
• Co-constitution of refugees/migrants' practices and housing regimes (processed by UCL)
  

REFRAME aims to collect and comparatively analyse existing and newly collected data on perceptions, discourses, policies and practices of refugee arrival, housing and participation in selected sites in four national contexts (Germany, Italy, Turkey, UK) between 2015/16 and 2022/23. The transnational multi-sited comparative approach will disentangle locally specific factors from more universal phenomena and thus make nuanced statements about different 'framings of arrival'.

In this way, REFRAME helps to identify challenges and barriers to the arrival and reception of refugees in the course of the process and in the relevant relational dimensions. In addition, REFRAME discusses the societal, social, spatial and colonial implications of arrival, integration and participation on local urban societies in the context of forced migration, both historically, socially, and emotionally. The research findings will not only advance the conceptual discourse, but also inform policy debates on local responses to forced migration.

Project Activities

The work programme is divided into five work packages (WPs) and includes cross-cutting tasks. The UFZ team contributes to all work packages in cooperation with the project partners and focuses on WP1 and WP3.

In WP1, the analytical framework for the project will be refined on the basis of a literature review and document analysis. In WP3, the governance of arrival with a focus on housing and participation at the local level, as well as the inherent conflicts and opportunities for strengthening local participation of forced migrants as a contribution to social resilience are analysed and evaluated. The research focuses on the city of Leipzig, but places it in an international context and incorporates impulses from the other case studies analysed in the project into the discussion of the Leipzig case.

News about the project activities will be available here in the future.

Publications

Relevant project results will be published here in future.