The social production of space in urban asylum regimes. Frankfurt Rödelheim and Maintal as examples

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Robert Pütz
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388015868

The project examines urban asylum regimes, which are conceptualized as a specific part of wider migration regimes. Urban asylum regimes are constituted by relations between institutional and private actors (refugees, local politicians, initiatives) as well as by nonmaterial (laws, discourses) and material elements (build environment). The project starts from the assumption that recent refugee movements rapidly transform historically grown and stable urban asylum regimes and that this transformation is connected to the production of specific urban spaces of asylum. The project focuses in particular on the reciprocal relationship between regimes and the production of space, which functions as a stabilizing force in regimes. For examining different scales and dimensions of the co-production of urban spaces of asylum - political and legal structures, (normative) knowledge and social actions - in combination and regarding their interrelation, this project draws on conceptual thoughts on the (social) production of space by Lefebvre. It focuses on the questions of how urban asylum regimes are constituted by relations between actors, discourses and materiality, how spaces of asylum are co-produced in urban asylum regimes and how the investigated spaces and urban asylum regimes are related to each other. In order to answer these questions, the project carries out an ethnographic regime analysis in two case studies in the Rhein-Main-Region (Frankfurt Rödelheim and Maintal).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants