Introduction

Staring through the windows of a community centre in the east of Amsterdam, we see newcomers and their teachers leaving the different classrooms and heading to the central room. There, they meet other people, have a chat and intermingle while queuing for a warm, free lunch. Once they have received a plate, they try to find a seat to have their lunch on one of the six-person tables in the central room and continue their conversations or start a new one with other people. These newcomers with different nationalities, ethnicities, ages, gender and legal statuses (refugees and asylum seekers as well as unauthorised migrants), meet and interact with each other and with Dutch volunteers, neighbours and employees of the centre.

Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this scene could be observed in a community centre in the east of Amsterdam on a daily basis. It illustrates how newcomers are engaged in remaking everyday life in a new context after their migration. These processes are not only taking place in their own neighbourhoods, as sometimes is suggested in classical migration literature. They also take place in the dynamic space of the city, where there is a wide range of opportunities to make connections with others. As such (semi-)public spaces within cities offer great potential for the inclusion and participation of new groups (for example, Caglar and Glick Schiller, 2018; Darling and Bauder, 2019; Nettelbladt and Boano, 2019). However, participatory fieldwork among refugees in a community centre shows that it is not that straightforward for refugees to exploit the potential of public spaces in the city immediately after arrival.

Building new connections through (semi-)public space

Our conceptualisation of public space in this chapter refers to a variety of physical places (topographies) in the city, like streets, pavements, parks and squares, which are accessible to ‘the public’ (Carr et al, 1992). This accessibility is important and refers to the dimension of ownership that has traditionally been the distinguishing factor between the public and the private (Madanipour, 2003). This understanding suggests a somehow binary opposition between public and private space, whereas in practice the degree of ‘publicness’ of urban public spaces differs from place to place and from time to time, and is constantly shifting (Mitchell, 2003).