The winner was René Kreichauf's paper, ‘From Forced Migration to Forced Arrival: The Campisation of Refugee Accommodation Centres in European Cities’.
On June 30, 2017 - the last day of the 14th IMISCOE conference in Rotterdam - the Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award was announced.
The winner was René Kreichauf's paper, From Forced Migration to Forced Arrival: The Campisation of Refugee Accommodation Centres in European Cities. The jury appreciated René Kreichauf ’s paper because it is a highly topical contribution addressing the notions of this year’s IMISCOE conference (migration, diversity and the city) in a perfect and clear way and at the same time speaking to research on migration, its governance as well as urban research. The paper describes and analyses camp-like asylum centers in Berlin, Copenhagen and Athens. These accommodations are obligatory arrival infrastructures - politically and socially produced spaces aiming at concentrating, controlling and excluding asylum seekers. Kreichauf’s paper analyses the development and socio-spatial characteristics of these asylum centers and the political and administrative objectives behind their implementation in three different national and local settings. Methodologically, a qualitative design includes a socio-spatial analysis of eleven centers, an analysis of policy documents and 34 interviews with a wide range of actors. His analysis strikes a nice balance between a descriptive-inductive approach and an interpretative-theoretical one. It is innovative and multi-disciplinary. The paper opens and interesting field of research in which policy is translated into space.
The Prize was handed to René Kreichauf by Rinus Penninx in the name of the coordinator of IMISCOE and of the chief editor of the journal Comparative Migration Studies.