“On a side street in Buch, a peripheral district of Berlin, one of the Berlin government’s newest MUFs, or modular housing projects for asylum seekers, sits behind a chain link fence.”

In this NCHS paper, “From spaces of containment to spaces of conversion: Berlin’s integrative approach to accommodate forced migrants”, Rene Kreichauf and Elizabeth Dunn examine the impacts of Berlin’s modular housing projects (MUFs) used to accommodation refugees and migrants.

Kreichauf and Dunn argue that “the result of these negotiations, this humanitarian diplomacy, is a new form of refugee management and discipline that we call ‘sheltering,’ that groups refugees with the urban poor and holds them in a permanently marginal position in urban society rather than either fully excluding or integrating them.”

You can access and download a copy of the full paper here.

René Kreichauf is an Postdoctoral fellow at Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research and Elizabeth Dunn is a Professor at Indiana University Bloomington.