Introduction
This article reflects on the possibilities to tackle the issue of migration in Latin America from the spatial perspective. We are interested in investigating the role that architects and designers can adopt to explore the spatiality of migration in our cities and in highlighting possible guidelines towards more in-depth studies.
To do so, we review the concepts of arrival city, arrival infrastructures, and porosity. This analysis allows us to exemplify the relationship between space and the social process of arrival that the authors claim. We then confront the different concepts in order to investigate the usefulness of incorporating them into the study of migration as a theoretical framework. Finally, we highlight possible scenarios of engagement in the urban space.
The use of these concepts to describe some aspects of arrival processes in Bogotá allows us to identify departure points for a future study on arrival infrastructures. This leads us to conclude on the importance of understanding the relationship between networks, spaces and actors that the concepts reveal.
Cities and Migration
Recent global tendencies show that cities are under pressure from migration dynamics.1 Diverse studies and reports on migration describe how cities are absorbing flows and undergoing changes. From the Latin American perspective, “Inmigrando: fortalecer ciudades destino,” focuses on the regional flows. This volume stresses on how 25% of migrants move outside their country of origin and 75% do so internally. Today, migration represents 9.4% of the world’s GDP contributing to the economic development of cities.2 Due to this relationship between social and economic development, migration is a current subject of interest for urban policies promoted by international organizations.
The migrants’ space is intrinsically tied to a trajectory; the place of origin, the spaces through which they move, the destination, and, once they reach it, the place of arrival, and the way they connect and adjust over time. The last part of the trajectory is relevant to urban space and cities. It is in this scenario that the concepts, subject of this article are developed. These concepts contribute to understand the place where migrants arrive and the means on which they rely to integrate, remain, and prosper — in other words, the opportunities for social mobility. The following sections, “arrival city” and “arrival infrastructures,” describe aspects involved in the social process that inform and shape spaces, and their implications for urban design and urbanism practices.
Arrival City
Although Doug Saunders is not the first to address spatial features of migration, he coined the term arrival city.3 In the book, he defines the arrival city as the transitional space produced by rural to urban migration; it is the term used to identify the process of arrival and adaptation in relation to urban spaces. The migrant’s contact with the city is formed by the occurrence of institutional, social, economic and other circumstances in space. This will determine the migrant’s possibility to access opportunities and subsequent social mobility.
The author invites us to observe the space of arrival and the social processes that take place in it through individual stories of migrants bounded by neighbourhoods in various cities around the world. Migration manifests itself in a special type of urban space, similar in different places around the world because of the networks of human relationships and the functions that are established, regardless of its different physical and spatial features.
In Los Angeles, Saunders tells the story of how Central American migrants transform a derelict neighbourhood, from which its former inhabitants sought to getaway to the suburbs, into a thriving one. In a bottom-up dynamic, abandoned storefronts and warehouses were converted to hold diverse economic and entrepreneurial activities, enriching public life and offering networks for new migrants.4 Differing in physical features, Slotervaart, in Amsterdam, presents a case of a residential, mono-functional neighbourhood with isolated building slabs planned from a municipal desk. In the 1990s, when approximately half of its population was of Moroccan origin, the area was renewed. As illustrated in Figure 1, spaces on the ground floor of the slabs and mixed-use typologies were implemented together with legal strategies for residents to develop businesses and new ventures in the neighbourhood.5 Similar to the Los Angeles case, the local economy and its impact on the space played a big role to enable the process of integration and adaptation for migrants.
In both examples, opportunities for the community of migrant origin are generated by the type of space adapted for the ventures and the regulations that facilitate their management. As migrants stabilize their businesses, they do not prosper on their own; they become employers for local inhabitants and referrals for family members and acquaintances arriving in the cities.6
Arrival Infrastructures
The arrival city defined by Saunders triggers a response by Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut, who expand on the perspective of arrival. Their main criticism towards Saunders’ term is that it ties the process of arrival and adaptation to a certain space or limited urban area. For these researchers, although it is true that spatial processes determine the migrant’s access to opportunities, the trajectory towards stability is diverse and includes different urban systems that transcend the geographic limit of the neighbourhood. It involves other scales, while having a changing and temporary nature.7 The authors introduce the term arrival infrastructures, which refers to the networks that make feasible the production and negotiation of means to access functional, symbolic and social resources8 enabling social mobility. The construct of these networks involves interactions with different sources such as family acquaintances, information channels, mediators, facilitators, social networks on the internet, activists, organizations, and in spaces where connections occur such as public space, an internet café, a church, a language learning centre, or shelter, etc.9 The unplanned assembly of different sources generates possibilities for the migrant to settle over time.
Suzanne Hall and Ayona Datta’s research exposes the abovementioned implications along commercial streets of multicultural areas in cities of the United Kingdom.10 Due to their crossroad character, these streets convey different scales, which support businesses supplying the local demand, as well as enabling the emergence of enterprises across generations of migrants associated with translocal and transnational scales. The streets of the study host multiple arrival networks and interactions, and the store itself and the proximity to others are spatial infrastructures. Figure 2 illustrates the typology of a local shop that provides evidence of diversity; the bilingual sign of the storefront attracts customers, national goods are arranged near the entrance, imported products further into the shop, leaving room at the back for small enterprises (remittances, internet, hairdresser salons). Migrant-driven enterprises become places to help co-nationals, sometimes supplying the needs of other migrants. In addition, other cases explored by Suzanne Hall show how maintaining connections to places in countries of origin, of transnational scale, allows migrants access social mobility in the place of arrival.
Figure 2.
Arrival infrastructures on the street. Source: Authors based on Hall and Datta, “The Translocal Street”.
Local and translocal social interactions guides the analysis and intervention of migration spaces by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Studio. Their UCSD Community Stations11 project takes shape in the Tijuana-San Diego border region. The project began with the development of Casa Familiar in the outskirts of San Diego, led by the organization that provides migrants with legal assistance and community activities in the process of integration. In Casa Familiar, the Studio promoted participation from communities and institutions to define the programme: housing, civic hall, theatre, and social service. The resulting space is meant to act as mediator. From this experience, the exchange between actors becomes a central character in the wider project. UCSD Community Stations consists of four centres situated in peripheral areas of both cities. Migrants, the University, factories (maquilas) and non-governmental organizations contribute to their construction. Figure 3 shows potential networks and interactions in these small-scale collective spaces that change according to the place of intervention. In the definition, construction, completion and implementation of the centre, the space represents the opportunity for the migrant to establish relationships or connections with the place through work.
Figure 3.
UCSD Community Stations in the border region. Source: Authors based on Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “Unwalling Citizenship”.
Both cases describe the space where knowledge and information networks, linked to accommodation, are assembled. Furthermore, they present how local and translocal trajectories interact in space, assimilating changing and temporary situations.
Destination City and Porosity
In the context of Latin America, where migration dynamics are defined by an intraregional condition, Felipe Vera and Verónica Adler propose that the function of the city, on a larger scale, is defined by its role in the migration process.12 Within the different stages of the migration trajectory, the authors assign the term destination cities to the desired place of settlement. They are destination cities because they offer attractive opportunities for arrival, integration, and adaptation.
The destination city is appealing not only because of the opportunities, but also because of what the authors describe as porosity. The porosity is defined by the institutional and legal possibilities, social networks, and quality of urban space that the city may offer in order for the migrant to connect upon arrival.13 Very much as the concept of arrival infrastructures, porosity refers to the strategies at hand to access resources upon arrival.
When discussing porosity, Vera and Adler emphasize on institutional efforts that respond to immigration without explicitly referring to the relationship with spatial and social forms of organization. Nevertheless, a spatial interpretation of their approach can be observed in the Integral Assistance Centre for Migrants (Centro Integral de Atención al Migrante) in Bogotá. The Centre gathers several state entities in one space to assist on issues such as migration status, employment, housing, and health. As a strategy to reach a wider community, the city has opened a branch of this Centre at the Bogotá bus terminal supporting newcomers directly upon arrival and providing transitory assessments.
Considering that our intention is to deal with the space of migration from the perspective of architecture and urbanism, it is relevant to study the processes that inform urban space in Latin American destination cities. Within the framework of this objective, the concept of arrival infrastructures provides the possibility of delving deeper into the assemblages of networks and spaces at the moment of arrival and adaptation. Hereunder, we discuss how aspects of destination city and arrival infrastructures are useful to frame future research for the Bogotá case.
Scanning the Migrant Space in Bogotá
Migrants coming from other regions of the country with different motives such as employment, commerce, education, or caused by violence,14 play a main role in the formation and growth of Bogotá. As the capital and economic hub, the city has attracted rural-urban migration.15 Most of the flows to the city are composed by regional displacement since 1985 and by migration from Venezuela since 2003. According to official sources, in Bogotá there are 354,633 displaced citizens who represent 4% of the total number or victims in the country,16 and 393,351 Venezuelans who represent 20% of immigrants in Colombia.17 Together, they make up 10% of the city’s population. The regional dynamics in Bogotá and its surroundings ratifies its role as a destination city, attributed mainly by Vera and Adler to Venezuela migration.
From a speculative standpoint, we recognize several processes that are part of arrival infrastructures in Bogotá. Public programs such as the Integral Migrant Assistance Centre (Centro Integral de Atención al Migrante), the special stay permit,18 the right to education and care for pregnant women, are institutional forms relevant to porosity. Remittance agencies, digital platforms and social networks on the Internet, housing and employment brokers that appear locally or remotely, in consolidated or emerging areas, influence the urban environment, broadening the spectrum towards what is discussed by arrival infrastructures. As a starting point for a study that applies the concept of arrival infrastructures, we explore three scenarios where dynamics between space and networks take place: the periphery, Cedrezuela, and El Madrugón.
In a study carried out by the Venezuela Migration Project Observatory (Observatorio Proyecto Migración Venezuela), Diva Marcela García and José Mario Mayorga mapped settlement trends of Venezuelan migrants in Bogotá and adjacent municipalities. The research indicates that migrants settle according to socioeconomic circumstances relative to the city of origin, grouping in areas were socioeconomic stratification is lowest in the city.19 In the case of Bogotá, this distribution responds to peripheral districts, Suba, Engativá, Kennedy, and Bosa.20 50% of the victims of the armed conflict living in Bogotá also live in the western and southern areas of the city, Suba, Kennedy, Bosa, Ciudad Bolivar, and Usme.21 Housing options are limited to a socioeconomic condition that deepens the dynamics of segregation. These areas far from the urban centre take on the highest densities in a low-rise typology, visible in Figure 4. The place of arrival in the periphery raises questions about settlement patterns, access, and proximity to a means for survival. Mapping the networks through which housing and employment supply is produced in these areas would allow us to observe and make visible conditions that, as the UCSD Community Centres show, can focus interventions on spaces that promote interaction with local and translocal actors (organizational, business, emerging, etc.) and on housing supply.
Figure 4.
The arrival periphery in Bogotá. Source: Authors based on mapping by Diva Marcela García y José Mario Mayorga for “Proyecto Migración Venezuela Observatory”.
The case of the area around the 140 Street gastronomic district, known as Cedrezuela, is a potential place to study the relationship between arrival and social mobility through transnational relationships similar to Hall and Ayatta’s case studies. This area is popular for Venezuelan food driven by the arrival migrants to the city and the sector. Studies from other disciplines recognize patterns of arrival and the role of social support networks associated with opportunities to settle, such as the Facebook group, that takes on the name of Cedrezuela, created by and for Venezuelan nationals.22 The urban structure of the sector organized around superblocks and gated communities is not permeable, as shown in Figure 5. In this case, a morphological and ethnographic approach to an urban study23 would be useful to identify the relationship between spatial dynamics, support networks, and the evolution of settlement patterns.
The space of negotiation, understood as the space that is not formally defined,24 is a place where interactions are encouraged, useful for the understanding of arrival infrastructures. El Madrugón, in the San Victorino area, is an example of this type of space. San Victorino is a retail sector originated by a historical migration dynamic at a crossroad in the downtown area of the city. Today, brokers and retailers organize themselves in warehouses under an association scheme resembling a shopping mall. The association carries out the Madrugón, or “early bird,” on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 4:00 am to 10:00 am, when stalls or cots in the aisles inside the warehouses are rented on a weekly lease and at Christmas on a monthly lease.25 The temporary nature of this rental allows upcoming enterprises, with not enough capital, to access contact with customers and network of suppliers, a system that eventually allows them to access better commercial conditions. The spaces of negotiation in Figure 6 illustrate the flexible and temporary conditions of the stalls and cots.
Figure 6.
El Madrugón as example for spaces of negotiation and social mobility. Source: Own photograph.
The variables involved in spaces of negotiation offer opportunities for interaction at different levels, enabling social mobility. Counter wise, some interactions provoked in precarious situations carry the risk of allowing practices among brokers who take advantage of people in vulnerable situations26 creating negative effects. Here, the task at hand consists of identifying positive practices in the space, and from lessons learned, ask how and where is it possible to replicate a scheme for negotiation where exchanges that support self-organization strategies help migrants exercise their own agency?
Conclusions
The review of concepts allows us to understand that the space of migration is not a defined, designated or permanent space. The concepts help explain that arrival in a city implies a process of accommodation through the assembly of networks, spaces, and agents. The definition of the concept of arrival infrastructures clarifies the relationship between space and migration, suggesting aspects to study and intervene, thus providing architecture and urban planning tools to attend processes of arrival and settlement in the city. The cases of Bogota support the idea that, from architecture and urbanism, we can broaden our scope and support transdisciplinary studies.
In the Latin American context, migrant space has yet to be studied from questions such as: what are the networks and structures of arrival, what are the places of arrival like, and how are networks and spaces intertwined? The role of architects and designers is to recognize strategies grounded on existing social organization, to establish the relationship between networks and spaces, and to participate in the production of the spaces that propitiate exchanges. From the architectural and urban scales, the places we can investigate and propose are related to the street and public space, such as ground floor levels and multifunctional centres.
Once the processes are understood, the precariousness and institutional gaps are the working place to contribute to the care of migrant groups in our destination cities. The real challenge is providing conditions for the emergence of arrival infrastructures bottom-up, without predetermining them. Social mobility from arrival to stabilization and then to settlement and permanence requires simultaneous interventions that foster multiple structures whose assembly is flexible and of plural nature.