Editorial: To 'the city of refuge'

Budapest, 4 September, 2015, the scene at the Keleti station. With historic buildings in the background, the most prominent part of the photograph-super-1 is of the camps of refugees in the brightly illuminated 'transit zone'. Considering the accents through light, there is a strong juxtaposition/connection between 'city' and 'camp'. During the night large groups of the refugees had been brought to the Austrian border in buses. Their hopes were centered on and in Germany. Not quite two weeks later, the situation here and elsewhere in Europe had changed abruptly. The Guardian , viewing this from the shorelines of Western Europe, provided a neat and moderate characterisation: 'Europe has moved from a moment of compassion and empathy with Syrian and other migrants striving to reach our shores back toward a reassertion of the fortress mentality that aims to stop them, sort them and return them, save for a proportion deemed to have a real claim to our hospitality.'-super-2 Camps have, of course, long been emerging, short-stay ones, here and elsewhere in Europe and across the globe, some having already become, some long ago, others becoming now 'durable' perhaps, others declining or eliminated. At this moment, elites and/or residents of cities have been churning with no marked preference for unison with refugees and camps. 'City' and 'camp' are both, it seems, juxtaposed in opposition and connected through sympathy and/or solidarity at different moments. What lies beneath and beyond these moments? In search of answers, drawing on and supplementing material in this and the previous issue, we make six moves. We turn, first, back to assertions investigated in our preceding editorial---'We are here' and 'We say no' with particular reference to Jerusalem in 2014 and this year in Greece---and to the territories staked out in Souza's 'From the Right to the City to the Right to the Planet'. Second, with the Special Feature in this issue, we turn to camps, 'Durable Camps', in Europe, the USA and the Middle East, with some attention to Germany. Third, to 'cities' globally, to Chinese 'small cities' and to big cities with 'Luxified skies: how vertical housing became an elite preserve'. We turn, fourth and fifth, to epistemological questions, to the theoretical and practical question of whether 'the city' can and should be saved from the apparent stranglehold of 'the new urban epistemology'; and to the question of epistemology itself, to the multi-disciplinary approach of the special feature, and to some indication of supplementary material that would contribute to a more trans-disciplinary approach, using, in this case, mainly literary accounts of the refugee crisis. Finally, we turn to futures, as implied by scholarly questionings, or to simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian insights as combined in the image of 'the city of refuge'.