Urban solidarity and everyday politics

This paper explores everyday politics and hospitality through new practices of solidarity and inclusive forms of social integration initiatives in everyday life and urban communities in Denmark. It investigates cities centrality in the struggle for migrant rights and how local initiatives and creative social strategies in cities can empower and include refugees and immigrants in local urban communities. The paper is based on action research and participant observations of urban communities in Denmark working to welcome refugees and create new cross-cultural meeting places. In the paper we argue that people mobilize and take action when faced with emergency and crisis, and that the many welcome initiatives organized around for example theatre, food, dance and music can rework difference. Although such initiatives are sometimes exceptional and not always sustainable, they implicitly challenge the production of fear of the unknown Other, the rigidity of thinking about identities and belonging and restrictive immigration and refugee policies, which make it difficult for refugees and immigrant to become full members of the community and society at large.

The case relate to the discussion of the right to the city, hospitality, belonging, the production of meaningful meeting places in a local urban context and the embodied encounters promoted by these activities. The paper examines the city as located in the interspace of a metropolitan paradox between ‘cosmopolitan hope’ and ‘postcolonial melancholia’ seeing the city and public space as possible sites of both intercultural dialogue and racist intolerance. In the paper we develop a phenomenological reconceptualization of the political through the concept of everyday politics and politics of hospitality. Everyday politics is what we experience and live through and our shared capacity to act. It is about forms of perceiving the world and relating to it – how we make sense of the world. Everyday politics is centered in the lived world, drawing attention to the way we experience it from within. That includes the experiences of those who are living in and suffering from situations of oppression.

The recent state of emergency and crises related to processes of dehumanization; for example, growing neo-nationalism and fear of Others, Islamophobia, and the rise of right-wing parties in Europe raises urgent political and ethical question This paper discusses this crises and migrant rights, everyday hospitality and politics in light of increased border restrictions in Europe, neoliberal urbanism and the transition in the Nordic welfare states, which has made the debate around inclusion of refugees and immigrants in local urban communities and the welfare state centre.

Keywords: Solidarity, right to the city, everyday politics, hospitality, borders.

Associate Professor Lasse Koefoed, Roskilde University, Department of People and Technology, Research Unit: Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies, Denmark