Infrastructures in the context of arrival – multidimensional patterns of resource access in an established and a new immigrant neighborhood in Germany

Abstract

Recent debates on arrival cities, neighborhoods, or other scales of local contexts tend to focus on aspects of local areas which support new migrants in accessing resources such as social networks, organizations, and other kinds of local infrastructure that give access to (multilingual) information, housing options, first jobs, or a sense of belonging and conviviality. These features are often concentrated in long-standing immigrant neighborhoods. In this contribution, we compare different kinds of local infrastructure in two German local contexts – in an established immigrant neighborhood and a rather new immigrant neighborhood – and how they have shaped the arrival of refugees who have come to Germany since 2014/15. We emphasize the need to understand infrastructures and the way they shape arrival, first, in a multidimensional way that, second, comprises inclusive as well as exclusive aspects of local infrastructures. This, third, includes the need to specify for which category of people infrastructures work in an inclusive or exclusive way as they work differently along a range of social boundaries.