Refugee urbanism: seeing asylum “like a city”

Abstract

This paper explores how asylum might be understood from an urban perspective. The paper focuses on a range of conceptual interventions mobilized around the notion of ‘seeing like a city’, which foreground the pragmatic and compositional nature of urban politics. These debates are placed in conversation with discussions over the changing nature of relations of power, to examine the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that current research on dispersal has tended to focus too exclusively on the regulatory and sovereign aspects of this policy. In doing so, such research has overlooked the urban manifestation of dispersal as a process that has created new knowledges and forms of expertise, whilst being sustained through spatially complex relations of present authority and distant accountability. In exploring these relations, the paper argues that a focus on ‘refugee urbanism’ may open productive new avenues for critically exploring urban asylum.