Making arrival, making the city. Newcomers' becoming through and with Brussels

This research concerns processes of arrival of international migrants to a new city, and draws on a field enquiry in Brussels, Belgium's main metropolis and European Union's de facto capital. It investigates how newcomers' actions, narratives and agencies are (re)configured, consciously and not, in the process of arriving - both physically and affectively - in the city. So doing, it examines how the process of arrival stirs mutual reconfigurations of newcomer people and ultimately of the city itself. Even though scholarship has dealt with multiple aspects of human mobility and urban migration, this work argues that the performative and mutual becoming of both people and space through their interdependent variations due to arrival has not yet been fully documented. Thus, it calls attention to the contingent relationalities unfolding among the newcomer subject(s) and the urban space(s). To look at such configurations in neither predetermined nor fixed ways, it works within the processual turn of migration studies, critical mobilities studies and post-colonial urban studies; and it builds on the work of scholars who, with relational, vitalist and situated approaches plea for the interrogation of epistemological categories of knowledge in order to foster open and vital understandings of socio-spatial phenomena. Processes of arrival are conceived as one of the open-ended configurations of urban/human relations in the ordinary experience of mobility that is so poignantly characteristic of contemporary urban social reality. The study thus focuses on these processes for understanding 1 - the emergent relations they produce between people and spaces; 2 - how those contribute to the variations of newcomers' subjectivities in becoming new dwellers of Brussels and 3 - how they impact on the changes in the city due to the existing/potential forms of sociality involved in arrival. The research is pursued through qualitative research methods. It gains on qualitative research materials, namely in-depth interviews with newcomer subjects and participant investigation in the urban space through which new dwellers make entry to the city. It considers in the study newcomers with very diverse types and conditions of access to mobility, namely international newcomers seeking asylum and intra-European migrants, referred as Schengen movers. By studying arrival processes of very different newcomers, it is possible to fathom the unexpected similarities of their processes of arrival and especially the particularities that differentiate the possibilities to work out ways to arrive. It emerges that provisionality, albeit rooted in dissimilar sources of uncertainty, is a general and ordinary condition for using, living, and being in the city. For newcomers, provisionality configures Brussels as a site of spatial temporariness, in which the temporal, the spatial and the socio-relational strategies enacted allow to potentially exceed the normative representations of being newcomers, of becoming Brussels' dwellers, and of Brussels' becoming itself. Nevertheless, being the normative frameworks of arrival very differently codified for different types of newcomers, these alternative forms of representation are nor attainable to all. Findings show that conventional categories do not correspond to actual differences in the ways newcomers envision strategies and recast narratives of arrival. Rather, categories of newcomers are produced within the making of arrival, through the differential opportunities or constraints that exist in the context for becoming new dwellers of Brussels. In fact, the differential mechanisms of migrants' reception allow for asymmetrical possibilities to enact these strategies and to aspire and attain the alternative forms of sociality that they enable, including the ones that do allow to rethink conventional citizenship.