European Cities and the Refugee Situation: A Laboratory for Affordable Housing and Urban Resilience?
La Fabrique de la Cité is a Paris-based think tank that brings together in an interdisciplinary approach urban stakeholders, both French and international, to reflect on good practices of urban development and to suggest new ways to build and rebuild cities.
Since February 2017, La Fabrique de la Cité has been conducting a transnational research project entitled "From Asylum-Seeking to City-Making: Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in European Cities", studying urban resilience to exogenous demographic shocks through the specific example of the 2015 influx of asylum-seekers in European cities, with a special focus on German and Swedish cities.
To mark the publication of our final report, we will convene a conference in partnership with the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Making Heimat project, a vast study of the architectural and urban responses brought by German cities to the challenges of refugee housing and integration. This conference will gather a hundred policymakers, experts, and journalists with an aim to draw attention to the long-term challenges born of the reception of refugees, such as the affordable housing crisis, the continuous mobilization of civil society, or the promotion of increased cooperation between cities. The main goal is eventually to help the reflection on ways to ensure urban resilience thanks to immediate and collective actions and knowledge-sharing (see the provisional program).