Infrastructuring Arrival

A bottom-up perspective on how newcomers do integration through arrival infrastructuring.

Based on extensive ethnographic research across diverse European contexts, this volume repositions migrants’ arrival not as an exception or a crisis, but as a constitutive condition of contemporary societies. The lively, interactive processes through which newcomers, together with a wide range of actors, rebuild and transform the socio-material settings in which they arrive and carve out their future belonging, are captured in the concept of ‘arrival infrastructuring’.

By foregrounding the everyday agency in arrival infrastructuring, this volume proposes a ‘minor integrations’ framework that re-embeds the contested term ‘integration’ within an alternative discourse of world-building, in the process closely attending to the structural forces that limit and channel such agency. The ‘minor’ in ‘minor integrations’ highlights the continuous work of arrival infrastructuring in our contemporary migration societies: the everyday practices of socialising and social reproduction through which future belonging is created, and the urban fabric maintained, repaired and transformed.

Infrastructuring Arrival is a companion volume to the Integration Otherwise Inspiration Kit. While the latter offers practical guidance for practitioners, policymakers and community builders, this book develops a deeper conceptual and analytical understanding of arrival infrastructuring.

"Infrastructuring Arrival" was written by Shila Anaraki, Paschalis Arvanitidis, Paolo Boccagni, Martina Bovo, Laura Guérin, Mary Hogan, Tina Gudrun Jensen, Carolien Lubberhuizen, Tamlyn Monson, Karen Fog Olwig, George Papagiannitsis, Lucie Revilla, Dounia Salamé, Marhabo Saparova, Cornelia Tippel and Charalampos Tsavdaroglou.

Martina Bovo is a post-doctoral researcher at IUAV University of Venice and a contract professor at Politecnico di Milano. She held a post-doctoral position at KU Leuven’s Department of Architecture during the making of this book.

Mary Hogan is a scientific collaborator at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven.

Dounia Salamé is a social worker and PhD researcher at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven.

"Infrastructuring Arrival" was edited by Karel Arnaut, Luce Beeckmans and Bruno Meeus.

Karel Arnaut is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. He teaches and conducts research on migration and mobility in relation to language use, diversity and inequality.

Luce Beeckmans is Research Professor in Urbanism and Migration at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, KU Leuven, and Vice-Director of the KU Leuven Urban Studies Institute (LUSI).

Bruno Meeus is Associate Professor at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. He teaches at the Institute for Social Work and coordinates research on housing precarity within the Centre for Social Innovation.

Yes, "Infrastructuring Arrival" is published Open Access. It is available under a BY-NC-ND license.

Publication of "Infrastructuring Arrival" was funded by KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access
Open Book Collective
Horizon2020
.

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for "Infrastructuring Arrival" is 10.11116/9789461666994.