A23 - Migrations et changement urbain en Méditerranée : une approche comparée Nord-Sud 1/2

 

Drawing on examples taken from research conducted in Tunisia, Morocco, Italy and Greece, this panel examines the connections between international migration and urbanity in Southern Europe and the Arab world, as well as the potential of a comparative approach of urban settings in the Mediterranean region. Over the last fifteen years, the societies around the Mediterranean have undergone a series of major crises and transformations that have generated multiform international mobilities and affected their urban spaces socially, politically and economically. Recently, the COVID crisis has revealed the dependence of cities on urban development models centered on mobility and circulation. In this context of major transformations of Mediterranean urban societies, traversed by complex and sometimes contradictory dynamics of change, we wish to question the way in which international mobilities contribute to the reshaping urban space, the production of new inequalities and sociabilities as well as the redefinition of orders of legitimacy at the local level. The originality our approach is based on the mobilization of comparative urbanism to confront different local configurations. On the one hand, we critically question the transferability of concepts of urban studies coming from the Global North. On the other hand, we critically examine approaches and concepts which are conventionally applied to Mediterranean cities such as urban mix and cosmopolitanism, porosity and informality.

Responsable: Camille Schmoll, EHESS Paris/umr Géographie-cités/IC Migrations, France

Tunisian cities, like many others around the Mediterranean, are migratory crossroads and places where various categories of foreigners with different trajectories and statuses meet, depending on the location of these cities, the migratory function of Tunisia (country of transit, settlement or departure) and depending on the local migratory context and the actors who intervene in receiving, assisting and regulating the presence of foreigners (refugees, asylum seekers, workers, students, single women, minors...). 

This contribution aims to understand and analyze the role of foreigners in the emergence of new experiences of local immigration management policies and in the transformation of social relations in relation to the health crisis of Covid-19 and the assistance to immigrants present in the cities on the part of town councils, associations and local communities.

In Tunisia, the reception of immigrant populations from sub-Saharan Africa is becoming increasingly visible in urban space, particularly with the arrival of migrant workers from Ivory Coast (Hassen Boubakri and Mazzella 2005, Hassan Boubakri 2015, Cassarini, 2020, 2022). By investing the most precarious and informal sectors of the labour market (Nasraoui 2017), these people have inserted themselves into the peripheries of Tunisian cities and are the vectors of new socio-urban practices. Tunis and Sfax appear to be particularly concerned, but the absence of a hosting policy challenges the local management model. The irregular legal status of these people has concrete effects on insertion strategies and the modalities of anchoring in the urban space. Around which spaces is Ivorian immigration in Tunisia articulated and anchored? In which way does its presence challenge the reception model? How do the practices of these populations participate in the transformation of urban spaces? This communication is based on ethnographic and qualitative material collected during research conducted between Tunisia and Ivory Coast between 2016 and 2021. It is composed of participative observations and 47 open interviews with migrants.

This paper develops a trans-Mediterranean perspective on migration and cities through a comparative analysis of Rome and Rabat. It focuses in particular on two apparently contradictory situations: on the one hand, the contribution of migrant labour in sustaining Rome’s tourist industry vis-à-vis the lack of policy recognition of migrants’ active role in the local economy; and, on the other, the disconnect between the marginal place of local migrant populations in the regeneration of Rabat and the opening of African Union’s Migration Observatory in the city in 2020 as part of the Moroccan state’s deployment of migration policy as a diplomatic tool for strengthening intra-African relations. By examining these two cases, I critically engage with recent attempts to develop a comparative theory of locality in migration studies and evaluate the usefulness of adopting a scalar approach to studying migrant incorporation in cities across the Mediterranean region.

In 2018, the International Organization for Migration stated that ‘migration has nearly become synonymous with urbanization, given the dominance of the city as the destination of most migrants’. The geopolitical dimension of migration governance is especially important in Mediterranean cities where the European Union’s (EU) efforts to push border management onto external actors has occurred alongside the transfer of new powers, competencies, and responsibilities for local authorities. Morocco is one such country where a number of administrative and territorial reforms have sought to transform the territoriality of migration governance, and by extension the structure of Euro-Mediterranean affairs. Our objective is to examine more fully how distinctly local aspects of Moroccan migration diplomacy have been harnessed as a force for geopolitical action today. The approach serves to decentre analysis of EU migration policy by rescaling the focus of migration to the urban peripheries of Europe, and to thereby contest Eurocentric accounts of migration governance in the region. Based on an analysis of Moroccan cities’ involvement in migration governance, including the MC2CM Project – a Mediterranean network of cities supported by EU and international actors – we argue that the rescaling of migration diplomacy aims to ‘change the narrative’ about Morocco’s capacity to manage immigration in light of international condemnation of state violence towards sub-Saharan migrants. In particular, devolution is skilfully used to cast Morocco as an advocate for the empowerment of local authorities managing migration, and migrants themselves as an opportunity for socio-economic development. At the same time, however, we observed that the rescaling of migration governance does not so much change the prevailing autocratic securitization of demographic mobility, but rather restructures its coordination through new governing actors (cities) and management techniques (migration).