Negotiating Arrival and Place-making: Migrant-Led Arrival Infrastructures in Urban Egypt

Migrants have long been studied as homogenous groups subject to aid and policies, obscuring their roles as active agents who shape urban life. In Egypt, primarily a country of transit, over nine million migrants from Sudan, Syria, Eritrea, South Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere reside mostly in urban settings in Cairo, the North Coast, and Aswan. Within marginalized and informalized neighbourhoods, migrants and non-migrants experience similar economic hardship and limited access to resources, with migrants facing additional barriers to education and basic services, as well as racialization and securitization. To fill key infrastructural and service gaps, migrants establish organizations that provide an array of services, opening up spaces of informal governance as well as place-making and solidarity practices. These are viewed as arrival infrastructures, founded in negotiations with different actors and national and global migration policy domains. Community learning centres (CLCs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) are key examples of urban arrival infrastructures, with more than 200 CLCs and CBOs present in Cairo and tens recently emerging in Aswan. Three research questions guide this project: (1) In what ways can the emergence of arrival infrastructures -such as CLCs and CBOs in Cairo and Aswan- be explained in the context of national, transnational, and global migration policy frameworks? (2) What roles do community learning centres (CLCs) play within arrival infrastructures, particularly in relation to barriers to education, and place-making and solidarity practices? (3) How do community-based organisations (CBOs) relate to informal modes of governance, place-making, and solidarity within arrival infrastructures? Through policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo and Aswan, the research examines how CLCs and CBOs emerge, navigate policy environments, and contribute to place-making and solidarity.