Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rise of one of the largest refugee camps in Germany - the abandoned Tempelhofer Flughafen in Berlin - to ask how the "refugee crisis" has become a site through which other crises are refracted and silenced.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the rise of one of the largest refugee camps in Germany - the abandoned Tempelhofer Flughafen in Berlin - to ask how the "refugee crisis" has become a site through which other crisis are refracted and silenced. How do the concomitant crises of refugees and of austerity, democracy, and urban infrastructure and housing intersect to become only one - "the crisis of refugees"? Who challenges these silences and how? What model of crisis eventually prevails?