New urban orders of migration.Actor-networks of integration policy in Frankfurt am Main

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Robert Pütz
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246018384

The starting point of the proposed project is the observation of a fundamental paradigm shift in policies on migration and integration in the city. Its most outstanding attribute is the introduction of comprehensive urban strategies for the management of diversity and integration. These strategies understand policies of integration and managing diversity as a permanent mainstream task for all sectors of urban governance, which should be focused on the resources and potentials of migration for integration and city development. The paradigm shift is supposed to result in new forms of spatial-planning and community policies aiming at districts with high quotas of migrants. The proposed project aims to systematically analyse the aims of this paradigm shift and the actual practices invoked on all levels of urban governance based on a qualitative field study set in Frankfurt am Main. How is the paradigm shift related to more general processes of re-ordering the city in the age of neoliberalism? How does it change the spatiality of urban integration policies common in German cities? Which practical implications of the new programmatic focus on migrant communities are visible on the level of city districts? How are the programmatic changes embedded within the heterogeneous networks of urban governance and how are they changing in these dynamic processes? The central working hypothesis is that the shift can only be understood as part of more general processes of re-ordering the city. However, the actual social and political implications on the level of the city and its different districts, projects or interventions may be differentiated to a degree that could even be in contradiction to the programmatic intentions of the more general processes of re-ordering. Conceptionally, the project takes up on perspectives from the (geographic) literature on processes of re-ordering the city and operationalizes them drawing on concepts of actor-network theory. In this perspective, strategies and practices of urban governance may be analysed as actor-networks of urban integration policy ranging through all levels and sectors of governing diversity in the city. At the same time, it allows to relate these strategies and practices to specific and general dynamics of economic, social and political processes of re-ordering the city.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants