Towards a typology of solidarity cities across Europe in the omnipresent of so-called refugee crisis since 2015

The main contribution of this paper is to develop a solidarity city typology through a comparative analysis of 14 global cities in Europe within the context of so-called refugee crisis. While sanctuary cities have taken place in migration studies over the past two decades, “solidarity cities” is a relatively a new concept in Europe. Migration scholars has primarily focused on multi-level governance of migration by considering the relationship between cities and their national governments. Yet, little is known about internal dynamics of these cities. To this end, this paper aims to explore solidarity city concept zooming into cities to distinguish the role of local governments and local civil society actors across diverse size and positions of cities in Europe. Accordingly, the solidarity typology is developed as bottom-up-(civil society oriented), top-down-(local government oriented), decoupling-(non-harmonious top-down and bottom-up solidarity), full-(harmonious collaboration of local government and civil society actors) and limited-(no established solidarity) solidarity cities. This research mainly based on official policy documents and relevant programs of local governments and registered local civil society organisations in the cities. Inspired by MIPEX index, I build a local level governance migration index for the local governments and civil society organisations. Based on this “local level solidarity index”, I mapped out 14 European Cities in terms of mentioned typology. Based on the collected data that “solidarity cities” of Europe are slightly different than their antecedents. Although sanctuary movement in the North America showed that civil disobedience followed by participation of local governments initiated sanctuary movement, in Europe, “solidarity cities” did not necessarily followed the very same path although the relations between the cities and their corresponding national governments directly affects urban solidarity and formations of solidarity within the city. Unlike the sanctuary cities, some top-down solidarity cities started their own sanctuary policies as an extension of the national migration policies without confrontation with their corresponding governments and with less collaboration with the local civil society. On the other hand, when it comes to full solidarity cities, their distinct relations with their respective national governments (e.g. contentious relations between Spain and Barcelona; collaborative relations between Germany and Berlin) changes the solidarity practices accordingly. Yet, research results show that existence of civil society is a necessary condition for an emergence of a solidarity city. All in all, this initial conceptualization highlights contextual differences at the local level. To this end, further research questions such as “under which conditions a city become a solidarity city?” or/and “how power hierarchies structured in the cities to build solidarity hub for the newcomers.” should be in the research agendas of urban migration scholars.