Refugee Migration to Europe – Current Challenges and Potentials for Cities and Regions

Abstract

“Europe’s migrant crisis: The year that changed a continent” (Evans 2020) is a contribution published in BBC news in August 2020. Whether one should speak of a crisis is a question of perspective. However, it is undisputed that European society has changed in many fi elds by the refugee movements that took place in 2015 and 2016. Since migration processes always materialise in concrete places, the spatiallocal level, in which migrants are mobile and also immobile during a migration and at the (temporary) end of a migration movement, is omnipresent in research processes. Migration without space does not exist, neither in the imaginaries of migration nor in the practice of migration. All levels of space are addressed, from the EU level to the municipal level, for example, when it comes to political-administrative spaces, or neighbourhoods and individual fl ats of a household, when it is more the sociospatial dimension that is addressed. In this respect, all spaces are also present in this Special Issue, with a particular focus on the regional and municipal levels with their concrete places of organisation and materialisation of fl ight. For refugee studies, the municipal level is also of great importance, because fi rst, the basic necessities of life, from food to shelter, must be provided by local institutions. And second, integration processes, even under the restrictive conditions for refugees, e.g. due to the usual work ban in the initial phase, primarily take place at this level. In contrast to other forms of migration, this dependency of refugees on local authorities is signifi cantly greater, as is the challenge for local offi ces to organise the fi nancial and human resources to meet the obligation to secure basic needs. The fact that studies at the small-scale level are always linked to all other levels and thus determine the everyday lives of refugees as well as challenge research concepts is particularly evident in the study by Bolzoni et al. (2022) in this Special Issue. Comparative Population Studies Vol. 47 (2022): 513-532 (Date of release: 21.12.2022)