People, Places, and Policies
Sanctuary City: A Global Concept?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Harald Bauder
Illegalized (or undocumented) are highly precarious populations. In this paper, I assess how the communities in which these migrants live mitigate the precarious situations associated with illegalization. In this context, sanctuary cites are an innovative and promising response at the municipal scale. The concept of the "sanctuary city," however, is highly ambiguous. In Canada, the USA, and the UK, it refers to a variety of different policies and practices. In this paper, I expand the geographical scope of sanctuary policies and practices beyond Canada, the USA, and the UK, and explore urban sanctuary policies and practices in other countries. I also examine how various concepts and terms, such as “solidarity” rather than “sanctuary” are used to mobilize municipal and urban support structures. In Germany, for example, there have been calls for sanctuary as well as solidarity practices in cities like Freiburg and Osnabrück in the wake of the 2015 “summer of migration.” Similarly, Barcelona in Spain has implemented sanctuary policies under the label “solidarity.” I also use a case study in Chile representing similar policies and practices in South America. I suggest that different kinds of sanctuary and solidarity policies and practices permit illegalized migrants to cope with their situations in particular national contexts. Recognizing similarities across national contexts is important to develop international and globally coordinated and inspired responses at the urban scale. However, national, historical, and geopolitical contexts distinctly shape local efforts to accommodate community members who the national state refuses to recognize.
Mobile Fortress: Armored Personnel Carriers and the Boomerang Effect of Colonization
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Derek Denman
Images of police and National Guard occupations of Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland revealed tank-like vehicles surrounding protestors. These armored personnel carriers (APCs), many of which were military surplus vehicles transferred to police agencies, are an integral part of the spatial politics of militarized urban policing. This paper examines APCs as material and political technologies that are expanding racialized police violence and regulating democratic assembly. The paper considers the multiscalar process by which these weapons, designed to control urban space, move through transnational circuits—between colony and metropole, from occupied warzone to hyper-policed homefront, from global South to de-industrialized global North. The paper expands the study of what Deborah Avant has called a “market for force” to include the material weapons and technologies deployed in armed conflict. It asks how new lines of power enabled by these weapons emerge, in part, from the global arms marketplace and its intersection with urban life. By placing Avant in conversation with critical theorists of weaponry, including Chamayou and Latour, the paper asks how particular weapons redefine the politics of spatial control, how the rigid lines of fortified urban space are organized into mobile vectors, and where ongoing processes of colonization enter these spatial processes.
There's a Ditch on Both Sides of the Road: Immigration and Urban Space in Aging Societies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Le Blanc
Recent waves of migrants in Europe have raised intense political controversies and sparked support for anti-immigrant, far right political parties. Theorist Joseph Carens argues that basic human rights mean most forms of closed borders are ethically problematic. Political philosopher David Miller has cautioned that very open immigration policies can be detrimental to important values of social cohesion and social justice. In months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in both Bologna, Italy and Tokyo, Japan, I have examined the effects of two different approaches to migrants on social cohesion in the urban spaces of these two aging communities. Rapid immigration met with a chaotic policy response has caused social tensions, even anger, in spaces where migrant population is densest in Bologna. But tight controls on migration in Japan, in combination with the aging of the native population, has led to a hollowing out of urban space that has isolated elderly in once vibrant Tokyo neighborhoods, eroding social cohesion there, too. This Italian-Japanese comparison allows us to think more critically about the dilemma of inclusion in cities, moving beyond insider and outsider distinctions and abstract rights discourses to practical questions about how neighborhoods are held together as they change.
