Infrastructuring Arrival: Envisioning the Migration-Integration Nexus Beyond Crisis

A bottom-up perspective on how newcomers do integration through arrival infrastructuring.

Based on extensive ethnographic research across diverse European contexts, this volume repositions migrants’ arrival not as an exception or a crisis, but as a constitutive condition of contemporary societies. The lively, interactive processes through which newcomers, together with a wide range of actors, rebuild and transform the socio-material settings in which they arrive and carve out their future belonging, are captured in the concept of ‘arrival infrastructuring’.

By foregrounding the everyday agency in arrival infrastructuring, this volume proposes a ‘minor integrations’ framework that re-embeds the contested term ‘integration’ within an alternative discourse of world-building, in the process closely attending to the structural forces that limit and channel such agency. The ‘minor’ in ‘minor integrations’ highlights the continuous work of arrival infrastructuring in our contemporary migration societies: the everyday practices of socialising and social reproduction through which future belonging is created, and the urban fabric maintained, repaired and transformed.

Infrastructuring Arrival is a companion volume to the Integration Otherwise Inspiration Kit. While the latter offers practical guidance for practitioners, policymakers and community builders, this book develops a deeper conceptual and analytical understanding of arrival infrastructuring.