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C1 The Production of Urban Spaces of Migration by Local Administrations and Science
The project examines the production of urban spaces of migration by municipalities and social scientists. It aims at a reflexive analysis of spatial patterns and distinctions in municipal regimes of knowledge and practice in dealing with migration processes as well as their interrelation with scientific practice and theory production.
Cities and urban districts play a central role in the scientific localisation of migration. Municipalities themselves also observe migration and its consequences in spatial terms and assign migration-related meanings to spaces in their own cities. Cities and their administrations produce spatialised knowledge (e.g. in form of statistics, maps and social reports), which legitimises administrative action, motivates political measures and finds its way into urban and migration research. Conversely, cities refer to analyses and concepts from academia or seek advice from it. Academic concepts and discursive patterns of interpretation such as ›segregation‹, ›super diversity‹ or ›spaces of arrival‹ circulate across locations and transnationally. Reinforced by the media, spatial semantics such as the ›ghetto‹ have had an enormous impact on the perception and ›measurement‹ of urban spaces and their influence by politics and administration. They shape social perceptions and images of migration and migrants in cities as well as the related political treatment.
The interdisciplinary sub-project addresses these findings, which have so far been largely limited to the construction of urban ›deprived areas‹. It uses historical and human geography/social science analysis to examine how and why spatialising observations and interpretations of migration in cities become dominant and have an impact in the interplay between local politics, administrative practice and academic research. Current modes of observation and interpretation are examined as well as their historical development since the 1970s. The focus here is on an assumed shift from long-dominant problem-oriented to affirmative and potentiality-oriented perspectives. Taking Germany as a starting point, the project works out the dynamics, mechanisms, conditions and functions of the co-production of urban migration spaces by municipalities and academia.
In order to achieve this, the sub-project comprises four prototypical and interlinked case studies. They deal with urban knowledge production using the example of the processing of statistical data and its visualisation in the form of maps and graphics (case study 1), cross-context actor networks (case study 2), municipal organisations and their actions (case study 3) as well as circulating concepts and spatial semantics (case study 4). In a fifth work package, the findings will be brought together and evaluated with regard to the overarching questions of the sub-project and the SFB.
