Multiplied Displacement: Governance, Profit, and Solidarity in Urban Migration Regimes in the U.S. and Germany
Where: Initiative on Cities, 75 Bay State Road
When: Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 6:30 – 8:00 PM ET
Join us for our first Boston Urban Salon speaker event featuring Dr. René Kreichauf, an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies & Planning at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). Professor Kreichauf will analyze how international and internal forms of displacement overlap and reproduce each other with urban processes through displaced migrants in New York City and Berlin as case studies. Focusing on urban governance structures and their purposes, this presentation reveals the economic logic of displacement—how multiple urban actors profit from constantly displacing migrants, the racialization processes employed to produce legitimate displacement, and forms of solidarity and engagement in support of the displaced populations. Dr. Kreichauf also aims to further our understanding of displacement: one that is related to (racial) capitalist value regimes, the position of classed and racialized populations within these regimes, and the broader structures of racial exclusion and marginalization in cities.
About the Speaker
Dr. René Kreichauf is Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning, FWO postdoc fellow, and lecturer in the Erasmus Mundus MSc 4CITIES and the MSc Urban Studies master’s degree programs at the Department of Geography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He researches and teaches about displacement, urban migration regimes, migrant activism and protest, state violence, and racial capitalism. His article “From Forced Migration to Forced Arrival: the Campaign of Asylum Accommodation in European Cities” (Comparative Migration Studies) received the Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award. He co-edited the book “Displacement, Asylum, and the City – Understanding Migration Processes through Urban Studies Approaches” (Routledge, 2023).
In his most recent article, “Accommodation for profit, not for refugees: Racial capitalism and the logics of Berlin’s refugee accommodation market” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space), Kreichauf expounds on how the development of new refugee accommodation in Berlin takes place within the logic of racial capitalism. Notably, he reveals the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way to revitalize their fiscal budgets and put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations.