CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Shaar, AlHakam |
|---|---|
| Title | Finding the Center: Placemaking by Aleppian Migrants and Refugees in Berlin |
| Summary | In Berlin, refugees and migrants from Aleppo constitute the third-largest group of foreign-born residents. Most of them arrived after 2011, as the Syrian revolution was turning into a protracted armed conflict. Arrivals from Aleppo come from different social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Like Berlin, Aleppo has its east and west. Affluent Aleppians inhabited the western, well-serviced half of the city, which has remained regime-controlled throughout the conflict and as such has suffered less destruction and displacement. On the other side, eastern Aleppo – controlled by rebel groups between 2012 and 2016 – was where most informal settlements and the Old City lay. This half of Aleppo was devastated by aerial bombardment, and the vast majority of its residents were forcibly displaced. Many of them arrived in Berlin, as did western Aleppians who fled for safety and better opportunities. In this thesis, I ask: How did Aleppians of different backgrounds make place in their new home, Berlin? I attempt to answer this question using an ethnographic approach, for which I carried out one month of fieldwork in Berlin doing participant observation and 30 semi-structured and unstructured interviews. My analysis reveals that different Aleppians in Berlin engage in a paradigm of spatial relations that differs from the geographic structuring of Aleppo. In Berlin, the appropriation of space is now defined by both the complexity and scale of engagement with space. Residents from more privileged educational backgrounds and who speak better English (not necessarily German), and who are mostly, but not exclusively, from western Aleppo, have a wider and deeper access to space in Berlin. My thesis contributes to an improved understanding of urban spatial relations which redefines placemaking by migrants and refugees away from dichotomies of center-periphery, or east-west. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel; Dafinger, Andreas |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/shaar_alhakam.pdf |
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