The Importance of 'Arrival Cities'

Heimat is a German word with no direct translation in English, like schadenfreude, or zeitgeist. It describes the relationship between a person and their built environment, somewhere between the feeling of home and homeland. Since August of 2015, Germany has become home to more than 1.1 million refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers. This influx has German architects and urban planners asking the question: “Do we have a refugee crisis on our hands? Or a housing crisis combined with huge challenges to the ability of cities, job markets, and schools to integrate the newcomers?”

Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country is Germany’s publication for the starchitectural extravaganza that is the 2016 Venice Biennale. Featuring writing from prominent German architects, urban planners, and sociologists, Making Heimat examines how to create immigrant communities in today’s Germany and builds on the lessons from Doug Saunders’ 2011 book Arrival City. Published well before the current diaspora to Europe, Arrival City argues that the ad hoc, self-determined neighborhoods that emerge out of mass migrations, termed “arrival cities,” are integral to integrating newcomers in their destination country. Saunders contributes an essay to Making Heimat. In it, he cautions that arrival cities are “where the new creative and commercial class will be born, or where the next wave of tension and violence will erupt.” The difference, he adds “depends on how we approach these districts both organizationally and politically, and, crucially, in terms of physical structures and built form.”