Producing white urban Europe? A critical and reflexive reading of academic knowledge production on urban integration of migrants in Western European cities

Abstract

In this paper, I review studies of urban integration as analyzed for two groups of mobile newcomers: those designated as “migrants”, that is, mostly marginalized cross-border movers from outside Europe, and mobile EU citizens in Western European cities. This critical and reflexive reading serves to highlight how academic knowledge production on the topic has (re-)produced an image of white urban Europe. While critics of the concept of immigrant integration have suggested that cities and neighborhoods are better sites in which to study migrant integration than the nation-state, the paper demonstrates that studies of urban integration tend to suffer from similar problems, including an ethnonationalist focus and an essentializing of (ethnic) groups. The comparison foregrounds how mobile EU citizens are implicitly thought of as white; their presence in the urban territory is rarely questioned and their practices rarely problematized. In contrast, those designated as migrants are researched with reference to integration, whereby integration means moving closer to white spaces. Thus, studies of the urban integration of migrants use an ethnic framing, while studies of mobile EU citizens focus on class and nationality. The paper thus illuminates how studies of urban integration rely on and reproduce an implicit assumption of whiteness as the norm, even in diverse urban spaces.