The Urbanisation of Asylum

This chapter explores the growing prominence of urban contexts, urban authorities, and urban politics in shaping debates on asylum and refuge that have traditionally been orientated around the nation-state. Focusing on the case of Glasgow, a city at the heart of the UK’s response to refugee displacement, this chapter examines three trends in contemporary urban configurations of asylum. First, how asylum seekers and refugees have been positioned within urban economies of value extraction. Second, how cities have been sites of considerable experimentation over the containment of asylum seekers and refugees, with flexible infrastructures of accommodation being one key development. Third, the frictions of government and solidarity that urban asylum foregrounds. These are frictions between local and national governments, on the one hand, and between community initiatives to support refugees as neighbours and the patterns of bordering practiced by state and non-state actors, on the other. Taken together, I argue that these trends point to the growing influence of cities in shaping how we understand asylum and its political possibilities.