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Paper short abstract:

I explore the making and unmaking of two distinct, but related arrival infrastructures for migrants in Hamburg: the Lampedusa in Hamburg tent (2013-2020) and the Refugee Info Point (2022). Both infrastructures were built by and for migrants as an access point to the city.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the making and unmaking of two distinct, but related arrival infrastructures for migrants in Hamburg: the Lampedusa in Hamburg tent, which existed from 2013 to 2020, and the Refugee Info Point that existed for about six months in 2022. Both infrastructures were built by and for migrants as an access point to the city of Hamburg. While the Lampedusa-tent was a specific site for activists advocating for regularization of their status in Hamburg, the Refugee Info Point was focused specifically on the needs of African migrants fleeing from the war in Ukraine, who would be at risk at experiencing marginalization in Germany.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg between 2017 and 2022, I show that continued engagement with these arrival infrastructures enables a critical discussion of notions of infrastructures as manifest and fixed. Drawing on notions of edges as proposed by urbanist Suzanne M. Hall (2021) I explore how these infrastructures, which are positioned at the margins of society, create new “zones of interaction” (Howitt 2001) in which positionality and power are continuously negotiated. The focus on edges thus speaks to the dynamic landscape in which hospitality and hostility towards migrants existed simultaneously in the urban space of Hamburg. This approach strives to contribute to a practice-oriented and processual understanding of the notion of infrastructures.