MiReKoc Wednesday Seminar Series by Claire Dorrity

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the lived experience of migrants interacts with and produces new spatial relations in urban spaces. It specifically analyses the challenges faced by migrants in navigating new city spaces, and highlights how, despite encountering many barriers to integration, migrants continue to transform cities by their very presence within them. The paper specifically examines how poor conceptual understanding of migrant everyday life, give way to norms of segregation, exclusion, marginalisation and expulsion. The paper draws on empirical studies using two case studies: 1) the perspectives of young Tunisians crossing borders into Europe and 2) the case of Sub-Saharan Africans who have taken up residence in Tunisia. Both cases highlight the complexities of migration processes and structural weaknesses of integration in contemporary urban spaces. The research investigation is based on discussions from empirical studies undertaken in Tunisia with young people who had successfully crossed the border into Europe, making a new life in Italy and Germany, but been forcibly returned, and Sub-Saharan Africans who had intended to reach Europe but found themselves making Tunisia their home. Drawing on the lived experience of migration and the city, the paper emphasizes both migrant vulnerability and migrant resilience. Drawing from the narratives of participants in the research, the paper argues for the need for creating better planning and inclusive policies for migrants within cities and the need for a broader understanding of the complex factors that drive migration. Most specifically, it focuses on the need to connect migrant and local communities through promoting an understanding of the rich and positive outcomes of co-existence, diversity, and migrant active participatory and integration.