Critical border scholars have recursively denounced the structural racism subtending the contemporary European border regime, grounded on the interplay of violent repression and patronising humanitarianism, framing migrants as impending threats/disempowered victims, and counterbalanced by multivarious solidarities, supporting migrants’ autonomy. As cities are increasingly observed as sites where racialised borders proliferate beyond their geography, but also as places of potential counter-action against states’ repressive politics, this project argues that, from an urban perspective, the seemingly clear-cut categories of repression, humanitarianism and solidarity described at the borders are blurred into much grayer relationships. Focusing in particular on the dimension of solidarity, the project explores it as a layered concept, not starkly opposing the border regime, but embedded within it - and more broadly, within the racial capitalist society/economy the latter is intertwined with. Furthermore, as much attention within public/academic discourse focuses on responses towards migration, this project foregrounds migrants’ direct experience of navigating life beyond the border.
This work builds on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted between February 2022 and January 2023 within the Southern Italian city of Palermo, narrated as a ‘haven for refugees’, and undergoing a process of transformation heavily built on the imaginary of hospitality. Through participant observation across a collection of places of what I call the city’s ‘solidarity network’, this project observes how both racialised borders and multiple forms of solidarity embed within a multiplicity of other urban processes, foregrounding migrants’ complex experiences of inhabiting these intersections. Expanding across migration, border and urban scholarship from a still relatively understudied Southern European/Southern Italian perspective, I suggest a geographically and historically situated approach, attentive to the nuances and variously concealed power relations subtending solidarity spaces, as these simultaneously reproduce and contest racialised hierarchies, while advocating for foregrounding migrants’ strategic ways of navigating these spaces, along ubiquitous borders.
