A place for newcomers: inquiring arrival processes in the city of Brussels

This contribution investigates how newcomer subjectivities are (re)constructed in the process of settling (physically and affectively) in a new city, by scrutinising the spatial, temporal and power configurations that emerge in the urban places within which arrival is enacted and negotiated. By building on theoretical stances that make a plea for relational and processual approaches (Desmond, 2014; Glaeser, 2005; Lancione, 2016) to the manifoldness and complexity of urban social reality, the paper argues in favour of focussing on the unfolding emotional interactions among subjects and contexts, so as to grasp the embodied and situated features of newcomers' place apprenticeship and place making. In this sense, it considers the potentialities of these approaches in fostering non-static yet contextual reconsideration of notion of place. The paper presents the empirical outcomes of a field enquiry based in the "cosmopolite" Brussels, carried on with migrants with very diverse mobility trajectories - forced movers, such as asylum seekers and free movers, such as expats (Favell, 2009) - to investigate with ethnographic attention to newcomers' lived experiences how human and non-human affective resources are found, made and reassembled to produce a sense of place in the new city (Massey, 1993). By promoting substantive disruptions of social and geographical determinism of migrants' categorisations, the aim is to shed light on the multiple operating mechanisms - and on their unequal functioning - that configure the processual dynamics between newcomers and their place of settlement.