Housing location is one of several characteristics that play a significant role in the future integration of asylum-seekers. Many of these characteristics or institutional arrangements are spatialized aspects relevant to urban planning. Drawing on experiences from fieldwork in Göttingen, a mid-sized city in the German Federal state of Lower-Saxony 2016–2018, this article demonstrates the local challenges, strategies and their resulting institutional arrangements on various aspects of asylum-seekers’ lives. It discusses the influence of those arrangements on the development of their social circles, and on their access to different resources, influencing their participation in and interaction with the social and urban life of their host cities; thereby influencing their integration processes. To do so, the article addresses local factors that are significant for urban planners to include into an integration plan. It observes the role urban planning can play in preventing aspects of segregation in the various life domains of refugees and in providing urban contexts that facilitate integration in European cities. The first assumption of this article is that integration, refugees’ attitudes towards it, and an urban context that can facilitate it start from day one of the arrival of new comers in their host city/town. The second assumption is that integration happens on the local level of the city, and more specifically on the level of the host neighborhood.
At the height of the “refugee reception crisis” in 2015, a large number of forced migrants had to be accommodated in Germany, which led to the transformation of old infrastructures and building of new centres. Based on extensive fieldwork in three centres in the same city, this article seeks to highlight the intersecting forms of socio‐spatial exclusion in refugee accommodations in Germany. First, we unpack how differential internal and external spatial arrangements intersect to aggravate or alleviate social exclusion of forced migrants. Second, we draw attention to the ways in which the regulation of space and social relations inside the accommodation centres intersect with the dominant gendered notions of the refugee label. Despite the potency of power relations that differentially categorizes, controls and excludes, exclusion remains ambivalent as forced migrants consistently claim ownership over the space in and around the centres and build social relationships to maintain a sense of “normalcy”.
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