Ukrainian Forced Migrants and Their Civic Right to the City in Four European Capitals

This paper presents the results of exploratory qualitative project which studies four European cities and their “civil regimes” (Henrekson et al. 2020), through the eyes of Ukrainian forced migrants. Analyzing the perception those newcomers have of their new urban environment, we focus on civic dimension of their right to the city (Lefebvre 1968), namely opportunities to engage and integrate in civil society and entrepreneurial activities. Through our study we put forward a question concerning enablers and barriers to the refugees striving to exercise their right to the (new host) city as active agents instead of passive receivers of support (Darling 2017). Our study covers four European capitals: Berlin (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), Vienna (Austria), and Warsaw (Poland) which received significant numbers of war refugees since 2022. In each city, 10 individual in-depth interviews are conducted, based on the same interview guide. City-level study allows us to better understand local context and specific opportunities and threats refugees encounter in pursuit to exercise their rights. In our interpretations, we employ the concept of civic traditions as described by Putnam (1993) and urban citizenship in transnational context (Purcell 2003). As the research is ongoing, we were able to formulate first reflections concerning local urban civic traditions and civil regimes as experienced by Ukrainian refugees. We describe them using a metaphor of two (sometimes interconnected) ladders of civic participation relating to home-city and host-city engagement and rights-exercising opportunities. We found that digital technologies have a crucial role in sustaining civic engagement in home-city, but also navigating refugees' engagement in host-cities. Also, opportunities to exercise newcomers' right to participate depends on “local civil regime” in their host-city. While Warsaw and Berlin context enabled a more smooth continuation of the previous forms of engagement, in Stockholm and Vienna refugees had to adapt to different rules and opportunities.