Urban solidarity typology: a comparison of European cities since the crisis of refuge in 2015

Abstract

This article scrutinizes how local responses to irregular migrants vary across European cities. Existing literature shows that cities develop inclusive policies and practices for irregular migrants as a response to the restrictive asylum and migration policies of welfare states. This article goes beyond this monolithic understanding of cities by unpacking city actors into local governments and local civil society organizations, as well as exploring various dynamics between them. This benchmarking study builds an overarching urban solidarity typology based on an empirical analysis of policies and practices in 13 European cities between 2015 and 2019, inclusive. Binary coding of collected data leads to an inductively built descriptive typology that consists of analytical categories of urban solidarity (top-down; bottom-up; hybrid; limited). These four different categories reveal that urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all. It emerges as a spectrum of transformative practices of various actors, as well as a constellation of displays of diverse sets of contentions, solidarity repertoires, compromises, negotiations, and consensus as well as their various combinations over a long period.