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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at presenting the context of the construction of Marseille as a welcoming city for migrants by both civil society and local public actors, showing the specificities of its location in a border region, the narrative on its Mediterranean identity, and its divided urban context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a 12 months long fieldwork carried out in 2022 in Marseille as part of a PhD project in the field of geography. It relies on qualitative and ethnographic methods within migrants reception scene in Marseille (Hastings et.al, 2021).

It aims at presenting the context of Marseille as a welcoming city for migrants, showing the specificities of its location in a border region, its Mediterranean identity, and its divided urban context in the process of its construction.

I will show how the image of an open Mediterranean port, local migrations heritage and the city’s foundation myth spread the imaginary of a welcoming and mixed city are used by the municipal team (2020, various lefts) to support its commitment to building a welcoming policy.

I will argue that this welcoming city, considered by some activists as the "first big city of solidarity after the border"(1) , had developed in the context of its location in the French-Italian border region, which characterizes the migratory patterns of newcomers in the city. An analysis of local and translocal networks of actors allows to regionally scale (Brenner, 2011) the construction of this welcoming city regarding the circulations of information and actors along the region.

I will explore how the geography of the local reception scene reflects telescoping effects between reception challenges, socio-economic divisions of the city and strong issues on substandard housing, with vulnerable migrants being particularly exposed. It also shows the place of emerging cross-sectors coalitions around temporary occupation in the making of urban hospitality.

(1)Expression taken from an activist from Briançon during an inter-collective event with autonomous collectives from Briançon, Ventimiglia, and Marseille, on the 11.12.2022

References:

Brenner, Neil. “The Urban Question and the Scale Question: Some Conceptual Clarifications.” Locating

Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants, edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Ayşe Çağlar, 1st ed., Cornell

University Press, 2011, pp. 23–41, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7zh6v.5

Michel Hastings, Bénédicte Héraud et Anne Kerlan (dir.), Le sens pratique de l'hospitalité : accueillir les

étrangers en France, 1965-1983, CNRS Editions, 2021, CNRS alpha, 582 p