#relocalisation

The Urbanization of COVID-19

Three prominent urban researchers with a focus on infectious diseases explain why political responses to the current coronavirus outbreak require an understanding of urban dynamics. Looking back at the last coronavirus pandemic, the SARS outbreak in 2002/3, they highlight what affected cities have learned from that experience for handling the ongoing crisis. Exploring the political challenges of the current state of exception in Canada, Germany, Singapore and elsewhere, Creighton Connolly, Harris Ali and Roger Keil shed light on the practices of urban solidarity as the key to overcoming the public health threat.

Guests:

Creighton Connolly is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and the Global South in the School of Geography, University of Lincoln, UK. He researches urban political ecology, urban-environmental governance and processes of urbanization and urban redevelopment in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Malaysia and Singapore. He is editor of ‘Post-Politics and Civil Society in Asian Cities’ (Routledge 2019), and has published in a range of leading urban studies and geography journals. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Asian Urbanisms research cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Harris Ali is a Professor of Sociology, York University in Toronto. He researches issues in environmental sociology, environmental health and disasters including the social and political dimensions of infectious disease outbreaks. He is currently conducting research on the role of community-based initiatives in the Ebola response in Africa.

Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Keil is the author of “Suburban Planet” (Polity 2018) and editor of “Suburban Constellations” (Jovis 2013). A co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA), he was the inaugural director of the CITY Institute at York University and former co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Referenced Literature:

Ali, S. Harris, and Roger Keil, eds. 2011. Networked disease: emerging infections in the global city. Vol. 44. John Wiley & Sons.

Keil, Roger, Creighton Connolly, and Harris S. Ali. 2020. “Outbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of cities.” The Conversation, February 17. Available online here: ►https://theconversation.com/outbreaks-like-coronavirus-start-in-and-spread-from-the-edges-of-ci

▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/16-covid19

Extended urbanisation and the spatialities of infectious disease: Demographic change, infrastructure and governance

Emerging infectious disease has much to do with how and where we live. The recent COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is an example of the close relationships between urban development and new or re-emerging infectious diseases. Like the SARS pandemic of 2003, the connections between accelerated urbanisation, more expansive and faster means of transportation, and increasing proximity between urban life and non-human nature — and subsequent trans-species infections — became immediately apparent.

Our Urban Studies paper contributes to this emerging conversation. Infectious disease outbreaks are now global events. Increasingly, health and disease tend to be urban as they coincide with the proliferation of planetary urbanisation and urban ways of life. The increased emergence of infectious diseases is to be expected in an era of extended urbanisation.

We posit that we need to understand the landscapes of emerging extended urbanisation better if we want to predict, avoid and react to emerging disease outbreaks more efficiently. First, we need to grasp where disease outbreaks occur and how they relate to the physical, spatial, economic, social and ecological changes brought on by urbanisation. Second, we need to learn more about how the newly emerging urban landscapes can themselves play a role in stemming potential outbreaks. Rapid urbanisation enables the spread of infectious disease, with peripheral sites being particularly susceptible to disease vectors like mosquitoes or ticks and diseases that jump the animal-to-human species boundary.

Our research identifies three dimensions of the relationships between extended urbanisation and infectious disease that need better understanding: population change and mobility, infrastructure and governance. Population change and mobility are immediately connected. Population growth in cities - driven primarily by rural-urban migration - is a major factor influencing the spread of disease. This is seen most clearly in rapidly urbanising regions such as Africa and Asia, which have experienced recent outbreaks of Ebola and SARS, respectively.

Infrastructure is also central: diseases can spread rapidly between cities through infrastructures of globalisation such as global air travel networks. Airports are often located at the edges of urban areas, raising complex governance and jurisdictional issues with regards to who has responsibility to control disease outbreaks in large urban regions. We can also assume that disease outbreaks reinforce existing inequalities in access to and benefits from mobility infrastructures. We therefore need to consider the disconnections that become apparent as rapid demographic and peri-urban growth is not accompanied by appropriate infrastructure development.

Lastly, the COVID-19 outbreak has exposed both the shortcomings and potential opportunities of governance at different levels. While it is awe-inspiring to see entire megacities quarantined, it is unlikely that such drastic measures would be accepted in countries not governed by centralised authoritarian leadership. But even in China, multilevel governance proved to be breaking down as local, regional and central government (and party) units were not sufficiently co-ordinated at the beginning of the crisis. This mirrored the intergovernmental confusion in Canada during SARS.

As we enter another wave of megaurbanisation, urban regions will need to develop efficient and innovative methods of confronting emerging infectious disease without relying on drastic top-down state measures that can be globally disruptive and often ineffective. This urges upon urban researchers to seek new and better explanations for the relationships of extended urbanisation and the spatialities of infectious disease - an effort that will require an interdisciplinary approach including geographers, health scientists, sociologists.

▻https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/resources/resource/extended-urbanisation-and-the-spatialities-of-infectious-disease
#géographie_de_la_santé #maladies_infectieuses

Cities after coronavirus: how Covid-19 could radically alter urban life

Pandemics have always shaped cities – and from increased surveillance to ‘de-densification’ to new community activism, Covid-19 is doing it already.

Victoria Embankment, which runs for a mile and a quarter along the River Thames, is many people’s idea of quintessential London. Some of the earliest postcards sent in Britain depicted its broad promenades and resplendent gardens. The Metropolitan Board of Works, which oversaw its construction, hailed it as an “appropriate, and appropriately civilised, cityscape for a prosperous commercial society”.

But the embankment, now hardwired into our urban consciousness, is entirely the product of pandemic. Without a series of devastating global cholera outbreaks in the 19th century – including one in London in the early 1850s that claimed more than 10,000 lives – the need for a new, modern sewerage system may never have been identified. Joseph Bazalgette’s remarkable feat of civil engineering, which was designed to carry waste water safely downriver and away from drinking supplies, would never have materialised.

From the Athens plague in 430BC, which drove profound changes in the city’s laws and identity, to the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which transformed the balance of class power in European societies, to the recent spate of Ebola epidemics across sub-Saharan Africa that illuminated the growing interconnectedness of today’s hyper-globalised cities, public health crises rarely fail to leave their mark on a metropolis.
Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter
Read more

As the world continues to fight the rapid spread of coronavirus, confining many people to their homes and radically altering the way we move through, work in and think about our cities, some are wondering which of these adjustments will endure beyond the end of the pandemic, and what life might look like on the other side.

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

“At the moment we are reducing density everywhere we can, and for good reason,” observes Richard Sennett, a professor of urban studies at MIT and senior adviser to the UN on its climate change and cities programme. “But on the whole density is a good thing: denser cities are more energy efficient. So I think in the long term there is going to be a conflict between the competing demands of public health and the climate.”

Sennett believes that in the future there will be a renewed focus on finding design solutions for individual buildings and wider neighbourhoods that enable people to socialise without being packed “sardine-like” into compressed restaurants, bars and clubs – although, given the incredibly high cost of land in big cities like New York and Hong Kong, success here may depend on significant economic reforms as well.

In recent years, although cities in the global south are continuing to grow as a result of inward rural migration, northern cities are trending in the opposite direction, with more affluent residents taking advantage of remote working capabilities and moving to smaller towns and countryside settlements offering cheaper property and a higher quality of life.

The “declining cost of distance”, as Karen Harris, the managing director of Bain consultancy’s Macro Trends Group, calls it, is likely to accelerate as a result of the coronavirus crisis. More companies are establishing systems that enable staff to work from home, and more workers are getting accustomed to it. “These are habits that are likely to persist,” Harris says.

The implications for big cities are immense. If proximity to one’s job is no longer a significant factor in deciding where to live, for example, then the appeal of the suburbs wanes; we could be heading towards a world in which existing city centres and far-flung “new villages” rise in prominence, while traditional commuter belts fade away.

Another potential impact of coronavirus may be an intensification of digital infrastructure in our cities. South Korea, one of the countries worst-affected by the disease, has also posted some of the lowest mortality rates, an achievement that can be traced in part to a series of technological innovations – including, controversially, the mapping and publication of infected patients’ movements.

In China, authorities have enlisted the help of tech firms such as Alibaba and Tencent to track the spread of Covid-19 and are using “big data” analysis to anticipate where transmission clusters will emerge next. If one of the government takeaways from coronavirus is that “smart cities” including Songdo or Shenzhen are safer cities from a public health perspective, then we can expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behaviour in urban areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to corporations and states.

Indeed, the spectre of creeping authoritarianism – as emergency disaster measures become normalised, or even permanent – should be at the forefront of our minds, says Sennett. “If you go back through history and look at the regulations brought in to control cities at times of crisis, from the French revolution to 9/11 in the US, many of them took years or even centuries to unravel,” he says.

At a time of heightened ethnonationalism on the global stage, in which rightwing populists have assumed elected office in many countries from Brazil to the US, Hungary and India, one consequence of coronavirus could be an entrenchment of exclusionary political narratives, calling for new borders to be placed around urban communities – overseen by leaders who have the legal and technological capacity, and the political will, to build them.

In the past, after a widespread medical emergency, Jewish communities and other socially stigmatised groups such as those affected by leprosy have borne the brunt of public anger. References to the “China virus” by Donald Trump suggest such grim scapegoating is likely to be a feature of this pandemic’s aftermath as well.

On the ground, however, the story of coronavirus in many global cities has so far been very different. After decades of increasing atomisation, particularly among younger urban residents for whom the impossible cost of housing has made life both precarious and transient, the sudden proliferation of mutual aid groups – designed to provide community support for the most vulnerable during isolation – has brought neighbours together across age groups and demographic divides. Social distancing has, ironically, drawn some of us closer than ever before. Whether such groups survive beyond the end of coronavirus to have a meaningful impact on our urban future depends, in part, on what sort of political lessons we learn from the crisis.

The vulnerability of many fellow city dwellers – not just because of a temporary medical emergency but as an ongoing lived reality – has been thrown into sharp relief, from elderly people lacking sufficient social care to the low-paid and self-employed who have no financial buffer to fall back on, but upon whose work we all rely.

A stronger sense of society as a collective whole, rather than an agglomeration of fragmented individuals, could lead to a long-term increase in public demands for more interventionist measures to protect citizens – a development that governments may find harder to resist given their readiness in the midst of coronavirus to override the primacy of markets.

Private hospitals are already facing pressure to open up their beds without extra charge for those in need; in Los Angeles, homeless citizens have seized vacant homes, drawing support from some lawmakers. Will these kinds of sentiments dwindle with the passing of coronavirus, or will political support for urban policies that put community interests ahead of corporate ones – like a greater imposition of rent controls – endure?

We don’t yet know the answer, but in the new and unpredictable connections swiftly being forged within our cities as a result of the pandemic, there is perhaps some cause for optimism. “You can’t ‘unknow’ people,” observes Harris, “and usually that’s a good thing.” Sennett thinks we are potentially seeing a fundamental shift in urban social relations. “City residents are becoming aware of desires that they didn’t realise they had before,” he says, “which is for more human contact, for links to people who are unlike themselves.” Whether that change in the nature of city living proves to be as lasting as Bazalgette’s sewer-pipe embankment remains, for now, to be seen.

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/26/life-after-coronavirus-pandemic-change-world
#le_monde_d'après

Listening to the city in a global pandemic

What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes?

This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it’s a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it’s a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise. With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a two minute report from the field about their city.

Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not great quality, but their stories certainly are. Many of those who responded to our call are struggling , just like us, to make sense of their experience in the COVID-19 city.

https://cityroadpod.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/cleansing-the-streets-digital-id-12487_a021_a021000039.jpg?w=736#.jpg

▻https://cityroadpod.org/2020/03/29/listening-to-the-city-in-a-global-pandemic

Ce que les épidémies nous disent sur la #mondialisation

Bien que la première épidémie connue par une trace écrite n’ait eu lieu qu’en 430 avant J.-C. à Athènes, on dit souvent que les microbes, et les épidémies auxquels ils donnent lieu, sont aussi vieux que le monde. Mais le Monde est-il aussi vieux qu’on veutbien le dire ? Voici une des questions auxquelles l’étude des épidémies avec les sciences sociales permet d’apporter des éléments de réponse. Les épidémies ne sont pas réservées aux épidémiologistes et autres immunologistes. De grands géographes comme Peter Haggett ou Andrew Cliff ont déjà investi ce domaine, dans une optique focalisée sur les processus de diffusion spatiale. Il est possible d’aller au-delà de cette approche mécanique et d’appréhender les épidémies dans leurs interactions sociales. On verra ici qu’elles nous apprennent aussi beaucoup sur le Monde, sur l’organisation de l’espace mondial et sur la dimension sociétale du processus de mondialisation.

►http://cafe-geo.net/wp-content/uploads/epidemies-mondialisation.pdf
#épidémie #globalisation

Città ai tempi del Covid

Lo spazio pubblico urbano è uno spazio di relazioni, segnato dai corpi, dagli incontri, dalla casualità, da un ordine spontaneo che non può, se lo spazio è pubblico veramente, accettare altro che regole di buon senso e non di imposizione. È un palcoscenico per le vite di tutti noi, che le vogliamo in mostra o in disparte, protagonisti o comparse della commedia urbana e, come nella commedia, con un fondo di finzione ed un ombra di verità.
Ma cosa accade se gli attori abbandonano la scena, se i corpi sono negati allo spazio? Come percepiamo quel che rimane a noi frequentabile di strade e piazze che normalmente percorriamo?

Ho invitato gli studenti che negli anni hanno frequentato il seminario “Fotografia come strumento di indagine urbana”, ma non solo loro, ad inviarmi qualche immagine che documenta (e riflette su) spazio pubblico, città e loro stessi in questi giorni. Come qualcuno mi ha scritto sono immagini spesso letteralmente ‘rubate’, quasi sentendosi in colpa. Eppure documentare e riflettere è un’attività tanto più essenziale quanto la criticità si prolunga e tocca la vita di tutti noi.

Appunti di viaggio – Iacopo Zetti Ho avuto modo, per una serie di evenienze, di attraversare Firenze di mattina e di sera. Aspettavo il silenzio ed infatti l’ho ascoltato. Il silenzio non è quello dei luoghi extraurbani. ...
Inferriata – Eni Nurihana L’inferriata de balcone ricorda sempre di più le sbarre carcerarie 23 marzo 2020, 15:11
Situazioni di necessità – Chiara Zavattaro Le strade della zona di Sant’Ambrogio a Firenze
Ora d’aria – Antonella Zola Ho avuto la possibilità di scattare queste foto dopo 10 giorni di quarantena completa, in cui ho rinunciato a qualunque contatto con il mondo esterno. Alla fine sono dovuta uscire ...
Firenze – Agnese Turchi Firenze - Agnese Turchi
Nostalgia di Silenzi – Gabriele Pierini
Il recinto – Laura Panichi In un libro che ho letto in questo periodo di “reclusione”, Haruki Murakami dice che quando si prova ad uscire da una gabbia alla fine si finisce sempre per trovarci ...
Spazio solidale – Jacopo Lorenzini
Castagneto Carducci – Cristian Farina Chissà se dall’alto qualcuno si è accorto che ci siamo fermati solo per un attimo Da lontano si scorgano i monumenti fermi nel tempo, quasi come noi, fermi nello spazio
Firenze, mercoledì 18/03/20 ore 15.30 circa – Leonardo Ceccarelli Firenze, mercoledì 18/03/20 ore 15.30 circa - Leonardo Ceccarelli
Firenze, marzo 2020 – Giulia D’Ercole Firenze, marzo 2020 - Giulia D’Ercole
Feriale d’altri tempi – Dario Albamonte La mia fortuna è quella di vivere in campagna e di potermi muovere liberamente e avere molto spazio a disposizione senza varcare i confini di casa mia. Quello che mi ...
L’architettura è fatta di mattoni e PERSONE – Laura Pagnotelli L’architettura è fatta di mattoni e PERSONE. Esse sono il fine ultimo del costruire, del dare vita a spazi sempre nuovi. Senza la loro presenza, dell’architettura non resta che una scatola vuota, priva ...
Il traffico di Firenze – Veronica Capecchi Il Traffico di Firenze, oggi è scomparso, e lascia intravedere la città, profondamente diversa e silenziosa. Una città che è sempre viva, oggi priva della sua vitalità, dei suoi rumori, una ...
Dalla finestra – Lucio Fiorentino Ho sentito dei rumori nella strada sotto la mia finestra e ho immaginato l’atmosfera scura di un film di Bergman, (goffamente) ho cercato di riprodurla Nel palazzo di fronte alla mia ...
Livorno, 28 marzo – Giulia Bandini Luoghi affollati di ricordi vie trafficate di emozioni ormai vinte dal tempo ma vive nella mente di chi sa sperare forte
Sesto Fiorentino: la piana senza smog – Alice Giordano Sesto Fiorentino: la piana senza smog - Alice Giordano
Lari e Pontedera – Silvia Princi Ritorno alle origini – Perignano di Lari (Pi), 23 marzo 2020 La semina del trattore, rappresenta uno dei pochi segni di vitalità umana e meccanica,in questo periodo di quarantena e di ...
A distanza sociale nel parco: Zurigo – Philipp Klaus A distanza sociale nel parco: Zurigo - Philipp Klaus
Galleggiare in un mondo irreale – Alessio Prandin

▻http://controgeografie.net/controgeografie/citta-ai-tempi-del-covid

Coronavirus Was Slow to Spread to Rural America. Not Anymore.

https://i.imgur.com/t1AXFlP.png

Grace Rhodes was getting worried last month as she watched the coronavirus tear through New York and Chicago. But her 8,000-person hometown in Southern Illinois still had no reported cases, and her boss at her pharmacy job assured her: “It’ll never get here.”

Now it has. A new wave of coronavirus cases is spreading deep into rural corners of the country where people once hoped their communities might be shielded because of their isolation from hard-hit urban centers and the natural social distancing of life in the countryside.

The coronavirus has officially reached more than two-thirds of the country’s rural counties, with one in 10 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help.

“Everybody never really thought it would get to us,” said Ms. Rhodes, 18, who is studying to become a nurse. “A lot of people are in denial.”

With 42 states now urging people to stay at home, the last holdouts are the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has suggested that the stricter measures violated personal liberties, and she said her state’s rural character made it better positioned to handle the outbreak.

“South Dakota is not New York City,” Ms. Noem said at a news conference last week.

But many rural doctors, leaders and health experts worry that is exactly where their communities are heading, and that they will have fewer hospital beds, ventilators and nurses to handle the onslaught.

“We’re behind the curve in rural America,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who said his state needs hundreds of thousands of masks, visors and gowns. “If they don’t have the protective equipment and somebody goes down and gets sick, that could close the hospital.”

Rural nurses and doctors, scarce in normal times, are already calling out sick and being quarantined. Clinics are scrambling to find couriers who can speed their coronavirus tests to labs hundreds of miles away. The loss of 120 rural hospitals over the past decade has left many towns defenseless, and more hospitals are closing even as the pandemic spreads.

Coronavirus illnesses and deaths are still overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and suburbs, and new rural cases have not exploded at the same rate as in some cities. But they are growing fast. This week, the case rate in rural areas was more than double what it was six days earlier.

Deaths are being reported in small farming and manufacturing towns that barely had a confirmed case a week ago. Fourteen infections have been reported in the county encompassing Ms. Rhodes’s southern Illinois hometown of Murphysboro, and she recently quarantined with her parents, who are nurses, as a precaution after they got sick.

Rich ski towns like Sun Valley, Idaho, and Vail, Colo., have some of the highest infection rates in the country, and are discouraging visitors and second homeowners from seeking refuge in the mountains. Indian reservations, which grapple daily with high poverty and inadequate medical services, are now confronting soaring numbers of cases.

In some places, the virus has rushed in so suddenly that even leaders are falling ill. In the tiny county of Early in southwest Georgia, five people have died. And the mayor and the police chief of the county seat, Blakely, are among the county’s 92 confirmed cases. It has been a shock for the rural county of fewer than 11,000 people.

“Being from a small town, you think it’s not going to touch us,” Blakely’s assistant police chief, Tonya Tinsley, said. “We are so small and tucked away. You have a perception that it’s in bigger cities.”

That is all gone now.

“You say, wait a minute, I know them!” she said. “It’s, like, oh my God, I knew them. I used to talk to them. I knew their family. Their kids. It’s a blow to the community each time.”

Even a single local case has been enough to jolt some people out of the complacency of the earliest days of the virus, when President Trump spent weeks playing down the threat and many conservative leaders brushed it aside as politically driven hysteria.

In Letcher County, Ky., which got its first case on Sunday, waiting for the disease to arrive has been unnerving. Brian Bowan, 48, likes the daily briefings by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, and he is glad for the governor’s relatively early actions to close nonessential businesses. Without them, Mr. Bowan said, “we could have a really bad pandemic. We could be like California or New York.”

In Mississippi, a mostly rural state, the virus had spread to nearly every county by April, with more than 1,000 cases and nearly two dozen deaths reported, causing health care workers to wonder, nervously, when the governor would issue a stay-at-home order. Last week, he finally did, and doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson breathed a sigh of relief.

“There was this chatter today at the medical center, people saying ‘Oh thank goodness — we need this to get people to realize how serious this is,’ ” said Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the hospital’s top executive.

While Americans are still divided on whether they approve of how Mr. Trump has handled the crisis, the virus is uniting nearly everyone in the country with worry — urban and rural, liberal and conservative. More than 90 percent of Americans said the virus posed a threat to the country’s economy and public health, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted from March 19 to March 24.

“Some of the petty things that would be in the news and on social media before have sort of fallen away,” said David Graybeal, a Methodist pastor in Athens, Tenn. “There’s a sense that we are really in this together. Now it’s, ‘How can we pull through this and support one another in this social distancing?’ ”

In Mangum, Okla., a town of 6,000 in the western part of the state, it all started with a visit. A pastor from Tulsa appeared at a local church, but got sick shortly thereafter and became the state’s first Covid-19 fatality.

Then somebody at the local church started to feel unwell — a person who eventually tested positive for coronavirus.

“Then it was just a matter of time,” said Mangum’s mayor, Mary Jane Scott. Before realizing they were infected, several people who eventually tested positive for the virus had moved about widely through the city, including to the local nursing home, which now has a cluster of cases.

Over all in the town, there are now three deaths and 26 residents who have tested positive for the coronavirus — one of the highest infection rates in rural America.

“You’d think in rural Oklahoma, that we all live so far apart, but there’s one place where people congregate, and that’s at the nursing home,” she said. “I thought I was safe here in Southwest Oklahoma, I didn’t think there would be a big issue with it, and all of a sudden, bam.”

Mangum now has an emergency shelter-in-place order and a curfew — just like larger towns and cities around the United States.

Just as New Yorkers have gotten accustomed to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily televised briefings, residents of Mangum have turned to the mayor’s Facebook page, where she livecasts status updates and advisories. On Monday night, it was the recommendation that residents use curbside pickup when going to Walmart, a broadcast that garnered more than 1,000 views in the hour after she posted it.

“Since we have no newspaper, it’s the only way I know to get the word out,” she told viewers, after inviting them to contact her personally with any questions or concerns.

She also has encouraged residents to step out onto their lawns each night at 7 p.m. where she leads them in a chorus of “God Bless America.”

The virus has complicated huge swaths of rural life. Darvin Bentlage, a Missouri rancher, says he is having trouble selling his cattle because auctions have been canceled. In areas without reliable internet access, adults are struggling to work remotely and children are having to get assignments and school updates delivered to their door.

Rural health providers are also challenged. A clinic in Stockton, Kan., turned to a local veterinarian for a supply of masks and gowns. One rural hospital in Lexington, Neb., was recently down to its last 500 swabs. Another in Batesville, Ind., was having its staff members store their used masks in plastic baggies in case they had to sterilize and reuse them. In Georgia, a peanut manufacturer in Blakely donated a washer and dryer to the local hospital for its handmade masks and gowns.

The financial strain of gearing up to fight the coronavirus has put much pressure on cash-strapped rural hospitals. Many have canceled all non-emergency care like the colonoscopies, minor surgeries and physical therapy sessions that are a critical source of income.

Last month, one hospital in West Virginia and another in Kansas shut their doors altogether.

“It’s just absolutely crazy,” said Michael Caputo, a state delegate in Fairmont, W.Va., where the Fairmont Regional Medical Center, the only hospital in the county, closed in mid-March. “Across the country, they’re turning hotels and sports complexes into temporary hospitals. And here we’ve got a hospital where the doors are shut.”

For now, there is an ambulance posted outside the emergency room, in case sick people show up looking for help.

Michael Angelucci, a state delegate and the administrator of the Marion County Rescue Squad, said the hospital’s closure during the pandemic is already being felt.

On March 23, emergency medics were called to take an 88-year-old woman with the coronavirus to the hospital, Mr. Angelucci said. Instead of making a quick drive to Fairmont Regional, about two minutes away, Mr. Angelucci said that the medics had to drive to the next-nearest hospital, about 25 minutes away. A few days later, she became West Virginia’s first reported coronavirus death.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-rural-america-cases.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgty
#cartographie #visualisation

Coronavirus in the city: A Q&A on the catastrophe confronting the urban poor

https://assets.irinnews.org/s3fs-public/styles/responsive_large/public/global-urban-crises-qa.jpg?.xaL8BC7JDW19RBk5jlicVeMKcHeWOuH&itok=njkpwosX#.jpg

‘While all populations are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, not all populations are affected equally.’

Health systems in the world’s megacities and crowded urban settlements are about to be put under enormous strain as the new coronavirus takes hold, with the estimated 1.2 billion people who live in informal slums and shanty-towns at particular risk.

To understand more about the crisis confronting the urban poor, The New Humanitarian interviewed Robert Muggah, principal of The SecDev Group and co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, a think tank focused on urban innovation that has worked with the World Health Organisation to map pandemic threats and is supporting governments, businesses, and civil society groups to improve COVID-19 detection, response, and recovery.

What has so far been a public healthcare crisis in mostly wealthier cities in East Asia, Europe, and the United States appears likely to become an even graver disaster for countries with far less resources in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

Cities from Lagos to Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro have started locking down, but for residents of crowded slums the unenviable choice is often between a greater risk of catching and spreading disease or the certainty of hunger. Social distancing, self-isolation – handwashing even – are impossible luxuries.

This interview, conducted by email on 29-30 March, has been edited for length and clarity.
TNH: A lot has been made about the risks of coronavirus in crowded refugee and displacement camps – from Greece to Idlib. Do you feel the urban poor have been a little neglected?

Robert Muggah: While all populations are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, not all populations are affected equally. Lower-income households and elderly individuals with underlying health conditions are particularly at-risk. Among the most vulnerable categories are the homeless, migrants, refugees, and displaced people. In some US cities, for example, undocumented migrants are fearful of being tested or going to the hospital for fear of forcible detainment, separation from their families, and deportation. In densely populated informal settlements and displaced person camps, there is a higher likelihood of infection because of the difficulties of social distancing. The limited testing, detection, isolation, and hospitalisation capacities in these settings mean we can expect a much higher rate of direct and excess mortality. The implications are deeply worrying.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a totalising event – affecting virtually every country, city and neighbourhood on the planet. It is also laying open the social and economic fault lines in our urban spaces. Predictably, many governments, businesses, and societies are looking inward, seeking to shore up their own health capacities and provide for their populations through aid and assistance. Yet the virus is revealing the extent of economic and social inequalities within many countries, including among OECD members. In the process, it is exposing the deficiencies of the social contract and the ways in which certain people – especially the elderly, poor, homeless, displaced – are systematically at-risk. While media attention is growing, there is comparatively limited investment in protecting refugees and displaced people facing infectious disease outbreaks. As public awareness of the sheer scale of infection, hospitalisation, and case fatalities becomes clearer in lower- and middle-income settings, we can expect this to change; at which point it may be too late.
TNH: Can you give us a sense of the scale of the problem in the world’s megacities and slums, where social distancing and self-isolation are a fantasy for many?

Muggah: According to the UN, there are about 33 megacities with 10 million or more people. There are another 48 cities with between five and 10 million. Compare this to the 1950s when there were just three megacities. Most of these massive cities are located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Many of them are characterised by a concentrated metropolitan core and a sprawling periphery of informal settlements, including shanty-towns, slums, and favelas. Roughly 1.2 billion people live in densely packed informal settlements characterised by poor quality housing, limited basic services, and poor sanitation. While suffering from stigmas, these settlements tend to be a critical supply of labour for cities, an unsatisfactory answer to the crisis in housing availability and affordability. A challenge now facing large cities is that, owing to years of neglect, informal settlements are essentially “off the grid”, and as such, difficult to monitor and service.

There are many reasons why large densely populated slums are hotbeds for the COVID-19 pandemic and other infectious disease outbreaks. In many cases, there are multiple households crammed into tiny tenements making social distancing virtually impossible. In Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum, there are 850,000 people per square mile. Most inhabitants of informal settlements lack access to medical and health services, making it difficult to track cases and isolate people who are infected. A majority of the people living in these areas depend on the services and informal economies, including jobs, that are most vulnerable to termination when cities are shut down and the economy begins to slow. Strictly enforced isolation won’t just lead to diminished quality of life, it will result in starvation. A large proportion of residents also frequently suffer from chronic illnesses – including respiratory infections, cancer, diabetes, and obesity – increasing susceptibility to COVID-19. These comorbidities will contribute to soaring excess deaths.

All of these challenges are compounded by the systemic neglect and stigmatisation of these communities by the political and economic elite. Violence has already erupted in Ethiopia, Kenya, India, Liberia, and South Africa as police enforce quarantines. In Brazil, drug trafficking organisations and militia groups are enforcing social distancing and self isolation in lieu of the state authorities. In Australia, Europe, and the United States, racist and xenophobic incidents spiked against people of Asian descent. There is a real risk that governments ramp up hardline tactics and repression against marginalised populations, especially those living in lower-income communities, shanty-towns, and refugee and displaced person camps.
TNH: How seriously were international aid agencies and other humanitarian actors taking calls to scale up urban preparedness and response before this pandemic, and to what extent is COVID-19 a wake-up call?

Muggah: The global humanitarian aid sector was aware of the threat of a global pandemic. For more than a decade the WHO, several university and research centres, and organisations such as the CDC, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have publicly warned about the catastrophic risks of pandemic outbreaks. The international community experienced a series of jolting wake-up calls with SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and other major epidemics over the past 20 years, though these were typically confined to specific regions and were generally rapidly contained. Although fears of potential outbreaks emerging from China were widely acknowledged, the sheer speed and scale of COVID-19 seems to have caught most governments, and the aid community, by surprise.

With notable exceptions such as Singapore or Taiwan, there has not been major investment in preparing cities for dealing with pandemics, however. Most attention has been focused on national capacities, and less on the specific capabilities of urban governments, health and social safety-net services. Together with Georgetown University’s Center for Health Sciences and Security, the Igarape Institute highlighted the importance of networks of mayors to share information and strategies in 2018. This call was highlighted by the Global Parliament of Mayors in 2018 and 2019. Starting in March 2020, the Bloomberg Foundation established a mayors network focusing on pandemic preparedness in the US. The Mayors Migration Council, World Economic Forum, and UN-Habitat are also looking to ramp up assistance to cities. What is also needed are systems to support mayors, city managers, and health providers in lower- and middle-income countries.
TNH: Part of the problem is that cities are unfamiliar territory for humanitarian responders, with many new actors to deal with, from local governments to gangs. What relationships and skill sets do they need to cultivate?

Muggah: Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, many humanitarian agencies were already refocusing some of their operations toward urban settings. International organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Oxfam set up policies and procedures for engaging in cities. There is a growing recognition across the relief and development sectors of the influence and impacts of urbanisation on their operations and beneficiary populations. This is more radical than it sounds. For at least half a century, most aid work was predominantly rural-focused. This was not surprising since most people in developing countries lived in rural or semi-rural areas. This has changed dramatically, however, with more than half of the world’s population now living in cities. Over the next 30 years, roughly 90 percent of all urbanisation will be occurring in lower- and middle-income countries – predominantly in Africa and Asia. The aid community only started to recognise these trends relatively recently.

Working in urban settings requires changes in how many international and national aid agencies operate. For one, it often depends less on direct than indirect delivery, working in partnership with municipal service providers. It also requires less visible branding and marketing strategies, shoring up the legitimacy of public and non-governmental providers with less focus on the contribution of relief agencies. In some cases, aid agencies are also required to work with, or alongside, non-state providers, including armed groups. For example, in some Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexican cities organised crime and self-defence groups are engaged in social service provision, raising complex questions for aid providers about whether and how to support vulnerable communities. Similar challenges confronted aid agencies working to provide relief in Ebola-stricken villages in eastern DRC.

A diverse range of skill sets is required to navigate support to cities affected by epidemics, including COVID-19. Some cities may need accounting assistance and expertise in budgeting to help them rapidly procure essential services. Other cities may require epidemiological and engineering capabilities to help develop rapid detection and surveillance, as well as “surge” capacity including emergency hospitals, clinics, and treatment centres. A robust communications and public outreach strategy is essential, particularly since uncertainty can contribute to social unease and even disorder. Moreover, rapid resource injections to help cities provide safety nets to the most vulnerable populations are critical, particularly as existing resources will be redirected to shoring up critical infrastructure and recurrent expenses will be difficult to cover owing to reduced tax revenue.

TNH: Name three things aid agencies need to do quickly to get to grips with this?

Muggah: There are a vast array of priorities for aid agencies in the context of pandemics. At a minimum, they must rapidly coordinate with public, private, and non-governmental partners to ensure they are effectively contributing rather than creating redundancy or unintentionally undermining local responses. Humanitarian organisations must also act rapidly, especially in the face of an exponential crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Agencies cannot let perfection be the enemy of the good, and focus on delivering with speed and efficiency, albeit while being mindful of the coordination challenges above. Aid agencies must also be attentive to the health, safety, and wellbeing of their own personnel and partners – they must avoid at all costs becoming a burden to hospital systems that are already overwhelmed by the crisis.

The first thing aid agencies can do is reach out to frontline cities and assess basic needs and their organizational potential to contribute. A range of priorities are likely, including the importance of ensuring there are adequate tests kits and testing capacities, sufficient trained health professionals, medical supplies (including ICU and ventilation capacities), and related equipment for frontline workers. Providing supplementary capacity as needed is essential. Consider that in South Sudan there are believed to be just two ventilators, and in Liberia there are reportedly only three. Other critical priorities are ensuring the integrity of the local food supply and attention to critical infrastructure. This may involve deploying a surveillance system for monitoring critical supplies, providing supplementary cash and food assistance without disrupting local prices, and ensuring a capability to rapidly address distribution disruption as they arise. Aid agencies can also help leverage resources to settings that are neglected, helping mobilise funds and/or in-kind support for over-taxed public services.
TNH: Cities like Singapore and Taipei, Hangzhou in China – to an extent Seoul – have had some success in containing COVID-19. What can other cities learn from their approaches?

Muggah: Cities that are open, transparent, collaborative, and adopt comprehensive responses tend to be better equipped to manage infectious disease outbreaks than those that are not. While still too early to declare a success, the early response of South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan to the COVID-19 pandemic stands out. Both Taipei and Singapore applied the lessons from past pandemics and had the investigative capacities, testing and detection services, health systems and, importantly, the right kind of leadership in place to rapidly take decisive action. They were able to flatten the pandemic curve through early detection thus keeping their health systems from becoming rapidly overwhelmed.

Not surprisingly, cities that have robust governance and health infrastructure in place are in a better position to manage pandemics and lower case fatality rates (CFR) and excess mortality than those that do not. Adopting a combination of proactive surveillance, routine communication, rapid isolation, and personal and community protection (e.g. social distancing) measures is critical. Many of these very same measures were adopted by the Chinese city of Hangzhou within days of the discovery of the virus. Likewise, the number, quality, and accessibility (and surge capacity) of hospitals, internal care units, hospital beds, IV solution and respirators can determine whether a city effectively manages a pandemic, or not. The SecDev Group is exploring the development of an urban pandemic preparedness index to help assess health capacities as well as social and economic determinants of health. A digital tool that provides rapid insights on vulnerabilities will be key not just to planning for the current pandemic, but also the next one.
TNH: You’ve spoken in the past about the need to develop a pandemic preparedness index. INFORM has one and Georgetown Uni has a health security assessment tool. Are these useful? What is missing?

Muggah: The extent of a city’s preparedness depends on its capacity to prevent, detect, respond, and care for patients. This means having action plans, staff, and budgets in place for rapid response. It also requires having access to laboratories to test for infectious disease and real-time monitoring and reporting of infectious clusters as they occur. The ability to communicate and implement emergency response plans is also essential, as is the availability, quality and accessibility of hospitals, clinics, care facilities, and essential equipment.

To this end, the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University has created an evaluation tool – the Rapid Urban Health Security Assessment (RUHSA) – as a resource for assessing local-level public health preparedness and response capacities. The RUHSA draws from multiple guidance and evaluation tools. It was designed precisely to help city decision-makers prioritise, strengthen, and deploy strategies that promote urban health security. These kinds of platforms need to be scaled, and quickly.

There is widespread recognition that a preparedness index would be useful. In November of 2019, the Global Parliament of Mayors issued a call for such a platform. It called for funding from national governments to develop crucial public health capacities and to develop networks to disseminate trusted information. The mayors also committed to achieving at least 80 percent vaccination coverage, reducing the spread of misinformation, improving health literacy, and sharing information on how to prevent and reduce the spread of infectious disease. A recent article published with Rebecca Katz provides some insights into what this might look like.
TNH: All cities are not equal in this. Without a global rundown, do you have particular concerns for certain places – because they are transmission hubs that might be hit worse, or due to existing insecurity and instability?

Cities are vulnerable both to the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19. For example, cities with a higher proportion of elderly and inter-generational mingling are especially at risk of higher infection, hospitalisation, and case fatality rates. This explains why the pandemic has been so destructive in certain Italian, Spanish, and certain US cities in Florida and New York where there is a higher proportion of elderly and frequent travel and interaction between older and younger populations. By contrast, early detection, prevention, and containment measures such as those undertaken in Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese cities helped flatten the curve. Yet even when health services have been overwhelmed in wealthier cities, they tend to have more capable governments and more extensive safety nets and supply chains to lessen the secondary effects on the economy and market.

Many cities in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America are facing much greater direct and indirect threats from the COVID-19 pandemic than their counterparts in North America, Western Europe, or East Asia. Among the most at-risk are large and secondary cities in fragile and conflict-affected countries such as Afghanistan, Colombia, DRC, Iraq, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela. There, health surveillance and treatment capacities are already overburdened and under-resourced. While the populations tend to be younger, many are facing households that are already under- or malnourished and the danger of comorbidity is significant. Consider the case of Uganda, which has one ICU bed for every one million people (compared to the United States, which has one ICU bed for every 2,800 people). Specific categories of people – especially those living in protracted refugee or internal displacement camps – are among the most vulnerable. There are also major risks in large densely populated cities and slums such as Lagos, Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Kolkata, Manila, Nairobi, or Rio de Janeiro where the secondary effects, including price shocks and repressive police responses, as well as explosive protests from jails, could lead to social and political unrest.
TNH: The coronavirus itself is the immediate risk, but what greater risks do you see coming down the track for poorer people in urban settings?

Muggah: The most significant threat of the COVID-19 pandemic may not be from the mortality and morbidity from infections, but the political and economic fallout from the crisis. While not as infectious or lethal as other diseases, the virus is obviously devastating for population health. It is not just people dying from respiratory illnesses and organ failures linked to the virus, but also the excess deaths from people who are unable to access treatment and care for existing diseases. We can expect several times more excess deaths than the actual caseload of people killed by the coronavirus itself. The lost economic productivity from these premature deaths and the associated toll on health systems and care-givers will be immense.

“The most significant threat of the COVID-19 pandemic may not be from the mortality and morbidity from infections, but the political and economic fallout from the crisis.”

COVID-19 is affecting urban populations in different ways and at different speeds. The most hard-hit groups are the urban poor, undocumented migrants, and displaced people who lack basic protections such as regular income or healthcare. Many of these people are already living in public or informal housing in under-serviced neighbourhoods experiencing concentrated disadvantage. The middle class will also experience severe impacts as the service economy grinds to a halt, schools and other services are shuttered, and mobility is constrained. Wealthier residents can more easily self-isolate either in cities or outside of them, and usually have greater access to private health alternatives. But all populations will face vulnerabilities if critical infrastructure – including health, electricity, water, and sanitation services – start to fail. Cut-backs in service provision will generate first discomfort and then outright protest.

Most dangerous of all is the impact of COVID-19 on political and economic stability. The pandemic is generating both supply and demand shocks that are devastating for producers, retailers, and consumers. Wealthier governments will step in to enact quantitative easing and basic income where they can, but many will lack the resources to do so. As income declines and supply chains dry up, panic, unrest, and instability are real possibilities. The extent of these risks depend on how long the pandemic endures and when vaccinations or effective antivirals are developed and distributed. Governments are reluctant to tell their populations about the likely duration, not just because of uncertainties, but because the truth could provoke civil disturbance. These risks are compounded by the fact that many societies already exhibit a low level of trust and confidence in their governments.

▻https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/interview/2020/04/01/coronavirus-cities-urban-poor

Les enjeux économiques de la #résilience_urbaine

La notion de #résilience pour qualifier la capacité d’une ville à affronter un #choc, y compris économique, n’est pas nouvelle, mais elle revêt, en pleine crise du coronavirus, une dimension toute particulière.

Les villes, en tant que #systèmes_urbains, ont toujours été au cœur des bouleversements que les sociétés ont connus. Pour autant, les fondements du paradigme économique qui gouverne les villes sont restés les mêmes. L’essor des capacités productives exportatrices et l’accroissement des valeurs ajoutées guident encore l’action locale en matière d’#économie.
Corollaire d’un monde globalisé qui atteint ses limites, la crise sanitaire ébranle ces fondamentaux et en demande une révision profonde. Ainsi, au cœur de la crise, les ambitions de #relocalisation_industrielle, de #souveraineté_économique, d’#autonomie_alimentaire semblent avoir remplacé (au moins temporairement) celles liées à la #croissance et à la #compétitivité.

https://www.pug.fr/system/product_pictures/data/009/999/740/large/Talandier_cv.jpg?1588795918#.jpg

▻https://www.pug.fr/produit/1798/9782706148668/les-enjeux-economiques-de-la-resilience-urbaine
#livre #Magali_Talandier

#Eurasian_Geography_and_Economics is publishing a series of critical commentaries on the covid-19 pandemic, with some urban dimensions.

These will be collated in issue 61(4) of the journal but will appear online first.

The first two are currently OA on the journal webpage at: ▻https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rege20/current?nav=tocList

Xiaoling Chen (2020) Spaces of care and resistance in China: public engagement during the COVID-19 outbreak, Eurasian Geography and Economics, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2020.1762690

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, the approach of the Chinese government remains under the spotlight, obscuring the complex landscape of responses to the outbreak within the country. Drawing upon the author’s social media experiences as well as textual analysis of a wide range of sources, this paper explores how the Chinese public responded to the outbreak in complex and nuanced ways through social media. The findings challenge conventional views of Chinese social media as simply sites of self-censorship and surveillance. On the contrary, during the COVID-19 outbreak, social media became spaces of active public engagement, in which Chinese citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities. This paper situates this public engagement within a broader context of China’s health-care reforms, calling attention to persistent structural and political issues, as well as the precarious positionalities of health-care workers within the health system.

Xuefei Ren (2020) Pandemic and lockdown: a territorial approach to COVID-19 in China, Italy and the United States, Eurasian Geography and Economics, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2020.1762103

Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions.

#Covid-19 : les campagnes moins touchées que les villes ?

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/851140

Pourquoi Bergame ? Le virus au bout du territoire

La région de #Bergame en Italie a été l’un des foyers les plus actifs du coronavirus en Europe. Marco Cremaschi remet en cause les lectures opposant de manière dualiste villes et campagnes et souligne la nécessité de repenser la gouvernance de ces territoires d’entre-deux.

L’urbanisme a de longue date et durablement été influencé par les épidémies. Depuis le Moyen Âge, la peste et le choléra ont contribué à sédimenter un ensemble de critiques dirigées contre la densité et la promiscuité caractéristiques du mode de vie urbain. Particulièrement prégnante aux débuts de la recherche urbaine au XIXe siècle, sous l’influence du mouvement hygiéniste (Barles 1999), cette hypothèse anti-urbaine a régulièrement refait surface au gré des crises sanitaires. C’est ainsi presque naturellement qu’elle a été réactivée en lien avec la diffusion mondiale du Covid-19, y compris au cœur des sciences sociales.

Selon certains géographes, la cause de la pandémie serait ainsi à chercher dans la « métropolisation du monde » (Faburel 2020), concept catch-all qui désigne à la fois la densification, le surpeuplement, la promiscuité des modes de vie uniformisés et la surmodernité ; en somme, tout ce qui nous aurait éloignés de la « nature ». Pourtant, si l’on exclut les situations de surpeuplement extrême de quelques mégapoles des pays en développement, rien n’indique que la densité de population soit un bon indicateur des relations humaines et en dernière analyse de la propagation des maladies. En effet, comme l’a déjà amplement montré la critique faite à la thèse « écologique » (Offner 2020), les caractéristiques de l’environnement physique ne reflètent que marginalement la culture et les modes de vie. Ce n’est qu’au niveau de la coprésence physique, telle qu’on la trouve dans les transports en commun, que la densité de la population conduit directement à une intensification des contacts humains.

Cet article ne prétend pas avancer d’hypothèses épidémiologiques relatives aux modes socio-spatiaux de transmission du Covid-19 : en la matière, la prudence est de mise en raison de la modestie des éléments empiriques disponibles. Son objet est plutôt de proposer une description du territoire bergamasque à l’aune des grilles de lecture contemporaines de l’urbain et des grands modèles interprétatifs mobilisés actuellement dans le débat public – et d’en souligner ainsi les limites. Ni métropole, ni campagne, la région de Bergame en Italie a en effet été l’un des foyers les plus actifs du virus en Europe, et les conséquences de l’épidémie y ont été dramatiques.

Cette description montre les limites des modèles interprétatifs binaires et suggère d’analyser, au-delà des causes de la pandémie, l’influence indirecte de la « formation socio-territoriale » (Bagnasco 1994), c’est-à-dire de la manière dont une société évolue et change dans les structures de la longue durée, bien plus probante que la densité ou la présumée uniformisation métropolitaine.
Un entre-deux territorial

La crise a commencé officiellement le dimanche 23 février à l’hôpital d’Alzano, à six kilomètres de Bergame : deux cas de Covid-19 sont identifiés. En dix jours, la situation s’est dégradée au-delà des prévisions les plus alarmistes. Au mois de mars, 5 400 décès ont été répertoriés dans la province, contre 900 en moyenne les trois années précédentes (Invernizzi 2020). La mortalité a donc été multipliée par six ; dans certaines municipalités, comme Alzano et Nembro, elle est même dix fois supérieure à la moyenne.

Située au cœur de la Lombardie, région la plus riche et la plus urbanisée d’Italie (et l’une des plus riches d’Europe), à cinquante kilomètres au nord-est de Milan, la province de Bergame rassemble en 2020 un peu plus d’un million d’habitants (dont 120 000 seulement dans la ville-centre). Elle est marquée par une situation d’entre-deux territorial : ce n’est ni une métropole ni une simple ville moyenne environnée d’un pays rural ; ce n’est ni une centralité ni une périphérie marginale ; son économie prospère est fortement industrielle, à la fois ancrée localement et insérée dans les réseaux économiques mondiaux.

https://www.metropolitiques.eu/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH190/figure1-2-d0f30.jpg?1590754828#.jpg

Le modèle de développement bergamasque résiste aux grilles de lecture opposant de manière dualiste villes et campagnes, métropoles mondialisées et ancrage local, densité et dispersion. Il ne peut être qualifié de « périurbain », en raison de la vitalité de ses centres secondaires ; il est sensiblement plus dense que la città diffusa du nord-est de l’Italie, vaste région sans centre dominant parsemée de maisons individuelles et de petites entreprises (Indovina 1990) ; et son industrialisation est bien plus ancienne et ses entreprises plus grandes et plus robustes que ceux des « districts industriels » de l’Italie centrale (Rivière et Weber 2006).

La population, en faible croissance depuis trois décennies, est moins âgée que la moyenne de la région. Un fort attachement territorial s’adosse à une faible mobilité géographique : environ trois quarts des habitants sont nés dans des municipalités voisines ou dans la région. Mais depuis l’après-guerre, le développement économique fulgurant a suscité une immigration de main-d’œuvre, notamment depuis l’étranger (environ 7 % de la population est d’origine étrangère en 2016). L’émergence de nouveaux besoins, liés notamment au vieillissement de la population (aides à domicile, soignants), a entraîné plus récemment une diversification des origines nationales des habitants.

https://www.metropolitiques.eu/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH222/figure2-9f4a3.png?1590754928#.jpg

Une urbanisation par bandes linéaires

Dans les communes de Alzano et Nembro, et en général dans la vallée Seriana, le bâti est dense [1], à peu près cinquante habitants par hectare (Lameri et al. 2016), mais entrecoupé de nombreux espaces ouverts, souvent des jardins avec des potagers, tandis que les champs interstitiels encore cultivés au début des années 2000 ont presque complètement disparu. Sur la bande d’en haut, les flancs des collines, les anciens pâturages, cèdent la place aux bois en expansion. À l’exception des centres-villes anciens, où les maisons sont adossées les unes aux autres tout au long d’une rue principale, les bâtiments sont presque toujours érigés sur des parcelles individuelles et organisées selon des bandes parallèles au fond de la vallée, dans un espace particulièrement étroit.

L’urbanisation du territoire bergamasque témoigne d’un mélange de connaissances anciennes et de techniques récentes qui permettent de mettre en valeur chaque centimètre carré. Chaque maison exploite ainsi les plis des règles de construction et la pente de la vallée, sur la base d’un savoir local difficile à standardiser : un garage accessible depuis la rue du bas, la cour depuis celle située au-dessus, un étage supplémentaire sous les combles.

Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, de nombreuses personnes ont restauré la cabane de leurs grands-parents dans la bande urbanisée près des pâturages et ont construit la maison de leurs enfants dans la bande inférieure, en investissant les fruits du travail industriel : c’est la génération qui était jeune pendant les trente glorieuses qui est aujourd’hui décimée par le virus, avec les conséquences dramatiques en matière de mémoire et de perte culturelle que l’on peut imaginer (Barcella 2020).

Il ne s’agit donc pas d’une ville linéaire, mais d’une organisation urbaine par bandes linéaires. Les rues sont les repères de ce ruban urbain, qui fait l’effet d’un code-barres vu d’en haut : si vous le « coupez » perpendiculairement, vous y rencontrez en premier la zone habitée la plus ancienne, disposée tout le long de ce qui était autrefois la route romaine puis vénitienne ; en parallèle, se trouvent l’ancienne et la nouvelle route départementales, en alternance avec les fossés industriels du XIXe siècle.

https://www.metropolitiques.eu/local/cache-vignettes/L585xH210/figure3-a0a44.png?1590755633#.jpg

De la première mondialisation à la métropole régionale

L’industrialisation commence au milieu du XIXe siècle : des protestants suisses et des industriels milanais trouvent dans la vallée des ressources en eau bon marché et s’approprient et complètent le réseau médiéval de canaux (Honegger fit l’histoire du textile, l’Italcementi celle du béton ; les usines de papier de Pigna, aujourd’hui propriété du groupe Buffetti, y ont déménagé en 1919 en provenance de Milan). Ces industries s’installent dans le lit majeur du fleuve et occupent l’autre rive, souvent inondée jusqu’au milieu du XXe siècle. Le coût environnemental de ce développement est considérable : destruction de terres agricoles, pollution croissante, exploitation de la nappe phréatique.

Entre Nembro et Albino, on peut observer le cœur du système productif bergamasque : des centaines de petites et moyennes entreprises se juxtaposent et font travailler près de 4 000 employés. C’est un système totalement intégré dans les réseaux de production mondiaux : l’entreprise Acerbis, par exemple, transforme la matière plastique en réservoirs et composants pour motos ; Persico produit les coques des bateaux de la Coupe de l’America ; Polini Motori est spécialisée dans les kits de mise à niveau pour les cycles et les motos.

Ces entreprises génèrent un trafic incessant de voitures et de camions qui encombrent l’ancienne route nationale de Val Seriana, l’autoroute qui relie Cene à Nembro et atteint Seriate, et l’autoroute qui relie Venise à Milan. Depuis 2009, un tramway relie la vallée à la gare de Bergame et transporte environ 13 000 passagers par jour.

Le mode de vie y dépend donc autant du réseau familial organisé dans le voisinage, autour du palier ou de l’autre côté de la rue, que de l’enchevêtrement des autoroutes et des lignes aériennes qui traversent la région et mènent presque partout en quelques heures : Bergamo Orio al Serio est en effet le siège du hub italien de Ryanair et le troisième aéroport du pays, 17 millions de passagers par an et des liaisons avec le monde entier.
Le système territorial bergamasque face au Covid-19

L’hypermobilité (Verdeil 2020) est une des clés pour comprendre l’effet de la pandémie sur ces municipalités qui sont en même temps villageoises et métropolitaines : un exemple tragique est l’itinéraire de vacances d’un couple, elle d’Alzano, lui de Nembro, parti en vacances à La Havane le 29 février et terrassé par la maladie à Madrid le 19 mars (Nava 2020).

Mais les contacts humains dépendent de nombreux autres facteurs, comme l’interdépendance (Baratier 2020) liée aux formes sociales et culturelles. En effet, la forme des établissements humains (la sociabilité, l’organisation spatiale, les institutions) a une influence importante, et la densité n’est plus la bonne mesure. Il semble que la sociabilité augmente les contacts sociaux qui répandent le virus, tandis que les nœuds infrastructuraux les démultiplient sur des échelles territoriales variées. Toutefois, les institutions de ces territoires n’ont aucune capacité de gouverner les effets croisés de ces différents facteurs. Du point de vue territorial, cette pandémie est une nouvelle manifestation de la discontinuité entre le politique et le territoire, qui s’était déjà manifestée bien avant le coronavirus.

On pourrait même émettre l’hypothèse contraire, selon laquelle le modèle métropolitain est plus efficace dans la gestion de distances sociales et sa gouvernance plus résiliente face au risque de propagation liée à la sociabilité de province : les distances physiques sont mieux respectées, les institutions ont un accès privilégié aux réseaux mondiaux, et si les nœuds de transports y sont plus fréquentés, la mobilité des habitants des campagnes s’étale sur des échelles bien plus vastes.

Comme nous ne disposons pas de données stabilisées, nous ne savons pas si la crise du virus s’ajoute à la déconnexion entre la sociabilité individualiste, les réseaux technologiques indifférents à l’environnement et les institutions, ou si elle est générée par cette déconnexion. Ce qui est certain, c’est que la région de Bergame additionne et multiplie les risques et les limites qui sont propres à la sociabilité paysanne, aux nœuds infrastructuraux urbains et aux institutions métropolitaines.

Une fois l’urgence passée, cette crise devrait conduire à ouvrir une réflexion critique sur la gouvernance de ces territoires intermédiaires. L’examen des éléments proposés ci-dessus montre que la densité, la concentration, la promiscuité ne sont pas des indicateurs suffisants de l’uniformité du modèle de développement ; il indique également le rôle à multiples facettes des formations socio-territoriales.

Si on doit reconnaître que le monde est urbain, comme l’a montré Henri Lefebvre, on peut sans doute questionner la métropole sans ignorer la variété de projets de métropolisation ou de rapprochement de la nature dans les différentes régions du monde. On n’a pas encore une explication exhaustive des causes de l’origine du virus, et encore moins de sa propagation : les hypothèses sous examen considèrent les déséquilibres environnementaux, les maladies pulmonaires, la capacité de réponse, les modèles de santé autant que la proximité et la distance physique. Tout résumer sous l’étiquette de métropolisation risque de ressusciter la mythologie des grandes explications, quand les spécificités des territoires réclament l’accompagnement des sociétés locales par l’étude et la compréhension de leur diversité.

Bibliographie

Angel, S., Parent, J., Civco D. L. et Blei, A. M. 2012. Atlas of Urban Expansion, Cambridge : Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Bagnasco, A. 1994. Fatti sociali formati nello spazio : cinque lezioni di sociologia urbana e regionale, Milan : Franco Angeli.
Baratier, J. 2020. « Pandémie, résilience, villes : deux ou trois choses que nous savons d’elles », Linkedin [en ligne], 29 mars.
Barcella, P. 2020. « Cartolina da Bergamo. Perché proprio qui ? », La Rivista del Mulino, 2 mars.
Barles, S. 1999. La Ville délétère, Ceyzérieu : Champ Vallon.
Faburel, G. 2020. « La métropolisation du monde est une cause de la pandémie », Reporterre [en ligne], 28 mars.
Indovina, F. 1990. La città diffusa, Venise : Quaderno Iuav-DAEST.
Invernizzi, I. 2020. « Coronavirus, il numero reale dei decessi : in Bergamasca 4.500 in un mese », L’Eco di Bergamo, 1er avril.
Lameri, M. et al. 2016. Trampiù : studio delle esternalita’ territoriali generate dall’ipotesi di prolungamento della linea tranviaria T1 da Albino a Vertova, Bergame : TEB.
Nava, F. 2020. « Mancata zona rossa nella bergamasca : storia di un contagio intercontinentale, da Alzano Lombardo a Cuba, passando per Madrid », TPI, The Post International, 31 mars.
Offner, J.-M. 2020. Anachronismes urbains, Paris : Presses de Sciences Po.
Rivière, D. et Weber, S. 2006. « Le modèle du district italien en question : bilan et perspectives à l’heure de l’Europe élargie », Méditerranée, n° 106, p. 57-64.
Verdeil, E. 2020. « La métropolisation, coupable idéale de la pandémie ? », The Conversation [en ligne], 9 avril.

▻https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Pourquoi-Bergame-Le-virus-au-bout-du-territoire.html

Rethinking the city: urban experience and the Covid-19 pandemic

Whilst the full effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are yet to be seen, the near-global lockdown of urban centres has been a jarring experience for city-dwellers. But how does the rapid spreading of the virus change our perception of the city? Here, Ravi Ghosh argues that these conditions prompts us to see the city differently, and sets us the urgent task of extending the right to the city to all its inhabitants.

https://cdn-ed.versobooks.com/blog_posts/000004/648/coronavirus-covid19-newyork-kentucky-derby_wide-0d2ae9fd2f87970c4a116bf71df49a2b6ad66fd7-.jpg

Whilst the full effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are yet to be seen, the near-global lockdown of urban centres has been a jarring experience for city-dwellers. The optimisation narrative has been stopped in its tracks. The speed, number, and efficiency of available urban experiences are now fixed somewhere close to zero. And even the things we do to escape this logic of urban gratification — to calm the pace of everyday life — are now increasingly unavailable; without culture, community, and recreation, people are beginning to wonder what they’re actually doing here, squashed into crowded cities across the world. But, as the peak of the pandemic approaches in many countries, there are more profound forces at play beyond just the individual’s loss of activity and communication.

To be isolating in the city is to embody an agonising contemporary paradox: that, although the coronavirus is now moving rapidly through regions like New York State and London, the connectivity, medical resources, and infrastructure in these centres means that local health prospects may actually be higher than in less infected areas. Having already spread along the avenues of globalisation — holidaying, business travel, and international supply chains — the virus is now recreating a familiar Western narrative: that of the city under siege. Whether via cabinet-war-room style depictions of central government, or makeshift hospitals in the triangle of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, cities will inevitably emerge as defiant symbols of human endeavour and resilience, irrespective of the harm their cramped organisation may also have caused.

But what of this desire for an active city? In Urban Revolution (1970), Henri Lefebvre uses a rough axis (marked from 0 to 100% urbanisation) to imagine the city space. It starts with the political city — marked by bureaucratic power — before progressing through mercantile and industrial phases. Postindustrial society is termed ‘urban’, at which point the city undergoes a process of ‘implosion-explosion’ as it approaches the end of the axis. This rampant expansion of the ‘urban fabric’ which Lefebvre describes will evoke nostalgia to anyone living in a major hub, but unable to enjoy it:

the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space.

For Lefebvre, these ideas were both a loose historical commentary and a starting point for his own socialist reimagining of ‘complete urbanisation’. This is apt given the current lockdown; the current pandemic may well be an acid test for society’s infrastructure and economic model. Watching from behind closed doors as they mobilise in tandem offers an historically unique, often painful perspective. Flaws are revealed gradually, and with great cost to human life. However painful these may be now, in time they could offer a unique opportunity to remake society with the lessons learned.

Perhaps most relevant to our current situation is Lefebvre’s broad understanding of the urban fabric; he includes vacation homes, motorways, suburbs, and even countryside supermarkets in his definition. In normal circumstances, these structures are self-sustaining and peripheral, but what we see in the current crisis is the power of individuals to balloon the city by flocking to its fringes — often at the expense of fellow citizens. When movement is coded with infection, urbanisation suddenly becomes a form of domination. Under this kind of siege, it’s better to sit tight than to flee.

It’s interesting to see this being acknowledged by some sections of the media, even if the socio-cultural consequences remain largely unexplored. The New York Times states that to make meaningful per capita comparisons for Covid-19 cases, its data focuses upon ‘metropolitan areas’ rather than cities or countries, as they more accurately account for ‘the regions where the virus might spread quickly among families, co-workers or commuters’. The statistics for the New York area therefore include nearby suburbs in Westchester, Long Island, and northern New Jersey. And although there’s no immediate way of determining whether people are moving out of necessity or choice, a fairly obvious distinction can be made between displaced workers moving from Delhi, for example, and those in prosperous Western centres — where movement is contingent on financial stability. The pushback against needless migration is mostly anecdotal, seen through viral images of angry placards in British seaside towns, and local news stories of overwhelmed health services. The pandemic has caused a retreat into the familiarity of nation states: not just in the literal sense of repatriation, but also as a means of civic organisation, internal governance, and statistical monitoring. What some call ‘de-globalisation’ reveals what we already know: that not all nations, governments, or health services are created equal — and that this applies to sub-national groupings too. Spatial inequality will play a huge role in determining the eventual death map of the pandemic.

In such strangely out-of-time situations, what constitutes the normal is thrown into sharp relief. Activities normally taken for granted are judged by how easily they can be replicated while upholding their essential values — which in our current time usually means a relocation to the internet. What emerges is a familiar gulf between the professional and the social. Whereas for most office-based employees, work can continue with the assistance of specialised software, communications, and adaptable management structures, the integrity of social relationships suffers far more when human contact is removed.

We feel an acute yearning for companionship, not just because we miss our friends more than we miss our bosses, but because for the most part, the means of reproducing social intimacy online are far inferior to those which ensure the fulfilment of economic roles. That video calling is the go-to for both spheres demonstrates this; it’s somehow the optimal social medium, but exists alongside far more complex tools within the work of work, especially in highly adapted corporate industries. The overlap is somewhat inevitable given that work needs a social element to function, but it’s still grimly remarkable that to evoke all the tenderness and multiplicity of friendships, the best we’ve come up with is drinking a beer while watching someone else do the same on our phones.

It’s tempting to read the digitalisation of work as a direct transposition of the relations of production. This may be roughly the case, but in reality, there are obvious (and often welcome) differences between urban work culture and the current isolation, which speak to Lefebvre’s earlier ideas on ‘everyday life’ (not to mention that work has been at least partially online for decades). By theorising new forms of alienation within modernity — the unpaid labour of the daily commute, for example — Lefebvre in many ways anticipated common qualms about 21st century work life. These are familiar to us, now mostly expressed in the pithy, resigned idiom of being ‘chained to the desk’, ‘meetings that could be an email’, and the general exhaustion of 24/7 communications. The lockdown has stripped back many of these rituals, revealing that much of face-to-face professional life is made up of parade, gesture, formality, and convention — even if there is enjoyment to be found in the structure and atmosphere of the office. Doing more online, and crucially, from not-the-office may be a lasting result from the current changes.

As William Davies has recently suggested, rather than viewing the pandemic as a crisis of capitalism, ‘it might better be understood as the sort of work-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings’. While this is not the dawning of Lefebvre’s ‘urban utopia’, conceiving of digitalisation as a form of urban progression does point to potential improvements in everyday life, even if the existing internet hierarchy hardly favours citizens. As Joe Shaw and Mark Graham from Oxford Internet Institute argue in a 2017 paper, in order to democratise the city space, we need to understand contemporary urbanisation “as a period where the city is increasingly reproduced through digital information’. They focus on Google’s ability to control the reproduction of urban space through features like maps and email: ‘this is a power to choose how a city is reduced to information, and to control the manner in which it is translated into knowledge and reintroduced to material everyday reality’. Companies are utterly dominant in this area, though the relocation of work and social relations to the digital space — coupled with an overdue revaluation of critical work, a recognition of the service industry’s precarity, and an increase in corporate responsibility — could provide a turning point for some urban hierarchies. The case for universal low-cost internet will be made with renewed urgency after the pandemic; access to accurate information has suddenly become a matter of life and death. If the oft-mentioned global solidarity outlasts the pandemic, then meaningful progress could be made against tech monopolies, resource inequality, and climate breakdown.

For all the difficulties of the lockdown, it does refine our appreciation of what came before. Social existence is naturally incidental and unpredictable — there’s a kind of randomised joy borne of living amongst others. In the city, this effect is amplified. As Lefebvre says of the city’s streets, they are ‘a place to play and learn….a form of spontaneous theatre, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor’. There’s certainly a romantic optimism here, but as isolation brings longing, the words feel ever sincerer. A recent Financial Times article contained an amusing vignette on an empty London:

The bankers have disappeared and new tribes with different uniforms have taken over: builders in black trousers and dusty boots; security guards in high-vis jackets pacing outside empty lobbies; and trim young men and women in lycra running or cycling through the empty streets.

The reality, of course, is that these people were always there; it’s just that not everyone notices them. The task beyond the pandemic will be extending this right to the city to all: remaking the structures of everyday life so that they empower all citizens, and harnessing digital urbanisation rather than existing at its mercy. Extending our current social contract — which shows we are prepared to live differently to protect the vulnerable — will be a powerful first step.

▻https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4648-rethinking-the-city-urban-experience-and-the-covid-19-pandemic

In Dense Cities Like Boston, Coronavirus Epidemics Last Longer, Northeastern Study Finds

An analysis by Northeastern University researchers and colleagues finds that in crowded cities — like Boston — coronavirus epidemics not only grow bigger, they also tend to last longer.

The paper, based on data from Italy and China, looks at how quickly an epidemic peaks depending on how crowded a location is.

“In urban areas, we tend to see long, broad epidemics — for example, Boston,” says lead co-author Samuel Scarpino from the Network Science Institute at Northeastern. “And in comparatively more suburban or rural areas we tend to see sharp, quick, burst-y epidemics.”

Scarpino says it’s key for Massachusetts to have uniform rules across the state, because movement from one area to another — say, from a town where restaurants are closed to one where they’re open — can help spread the virus. Here are some edited excerpts of our conversation, beginning with how he sums up the research just out in the journal Nature Medicine:

Scarpino: What we report in the paper is that the structure of communities affects both the height and the duration of COVID-19 epidemics.

Carey Goldberg: So more dense areas will have not just more cases, but a more prolonged course?

Right. In urban areas, we’re likely to have larger outbreaks — in terms of total number, even in terms of percentage of the population — and they will be much longer, lasting weeks and weeks or months, as we’ve seen in Boston, New York City, London and many places around the world.

However, in rural areas, or areas that have population structures that are much more tightly knit — as opposed to a looser collection of households in neighborhoods, as we have spread out across Boston — you get sharp, intense outbreaks. They can be overwhelming in terms of the resources available for caring for patients, and quite dramatic in terms of their effects on the population.

Think about the outbreak in rural Maine that was sparked by a super-spreading event at a wedding, and how it quickly swept through the population.

Why do these insights about community structure and its effect on transmission matter?

In many rural areas that are at risk of these intense outbreaks, there’s much lower health care coverage and often, especially in the United States, a lot more complacency around mask-wearing and physical distancing. These areas are largely protected because they’re isolated. However, if cases show up — as we’ve seen in places like rural Maine — the outbreaks can be quite severe and rapid.

Also, in the more dense areas, you’re going to have cases that move around throughout the population, throughout the different neighborhoods of the city. You’re going to have outbreaks go quiet in some areas, and then become louder in other areas.

And this process can be very, very prolonged, and can make the types of intervention measures that you need to deploy either quite severe or quite complicated, because they have to be very specifically tailored to what’s happening at the really local level within the larger cities.

So what does this mean for policy?

Well, in related work we show that having policies that are different across a city can lead people to move out of their neighborhoods, to go to parks or to go to restaurants with different dining restrictions, or to go to venues with different limits on capacity. And that interacts with the structure of the city to spread the outbreak much more rapidly, kind of accelerating the pace and tempo of cases.

So that really suggests that because the outbreak is going to be so long-lasting, you really either need to focus on driving it completely out or you need to have policies that will protect all of the places with lower rates of cases while intervening in a targeted way in the places with much higher rates of cases.

So what you don’t want to do is put in tougher measures in hot-spots, because then you’re just going to drive people out to other places where they’re going to spread it even more.

Exactly. In the state of Massachusetts, where we have the governor relaxing measures in a fairly extreme fashion in some areas and not in other areas, you are likely to have a situation where you’re just moving the infection around and putting other communities at risk.

So having a more intermediate level of control that’s more uniformly distributed across space is much better epidemiologically.

But that’s not what the state is doing.

The state in many ways is really doing almost the opposite of what our paper suggests in terms of the ways in which you need to focus on controlling COVID-19, and also related work that shows this sort of patchwork of different policies really creates quite a bit of risk.

It seems incredibly important to have hyper-local information, because in the structure you describe, the spread happens at the level of households or neighborhoods, and then you have just a bit of crossover to other places, and that’s how it just keeps going.

That is the implication of our work and many other studies that show that COVID-19, from an epidemiological perspective, is an amalgamation of local transmission that’s happening in households, in restaurants, in occasional longer-distance transmission that moves it into new areas. So you need to have really hyper-localized information around where the cases are occurring and to find out where the cases are coming from.

And that, unfortunately, is one of the things that we’re still not getting clear guidance on from the state: Where are the cases coming from? So that we can understand how we need to intervene.

Without that data, we really aren’t armed with the right kinds of information to both stop the spread and to try and implement measures that will maximally control COVID-19 while having the least possible effects on our economic health, mental health and societal health.

▻https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/10/06/coronavirus-lasts-longer-cities-boston

►https://seenthis.net/messages/837763

A mettre en lien avec cela :
En 2018, on pouvait fabriquer 200 millions de masques par an en France
►https://seenthis.net/messages/836075

Voir compile des effets délétères indirects de la pandémie :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/832147

#solidarité (manque de)

La Cour des comptes de l’UE critique les disparités en matière de gestion des migrations en Grèce et en Italie

Le 13 novembre 2019, la Cour des comptes de l’Union européenne (UE) publiait son rapport d’audit « Asile, relocalisation et retour des migrants : il est temps de renforcer la lutte contre les disparités entre les objectifs et les résultats ». Ce #rapport examine le soutien financier et opérationnel de l’UE en faveur de la Grèce et de l’Italie. Il évalue dans quelles mesures les objectifs ont été atteints et si les procédures d’asile et de retour étaient efficaces et rapides. Le rapport couvre la période 2015-2018. La Cour des comptes s’est intéressée à l’#accueil des requérants d’asile, à la procédure d’asile, au système #EURODAC et au fonctionnement du système #Dublin, aux #relocalisations des requérants d’asile vers d’autres pays de l’UE et enfin à l’efficacité des renvois vers les pays d’origine. Le rapport est truffé de recommandations qui vont inévitablement influencer les décisions des autorités suisses.

Diminuer la pression sur la Grèce et l’Italie

Selon les auditeurs, les mesures de l’UE visant à diminuer la pression migratoire sur la Grèce et l’Italie doivent être améliorées et intensifiées. Ils déplorent la lenteur excessive des procédures d’asile. En Italie, les demandes d’asile déposées en 2015 ont pris en moyenne quatre ans pour parvenir au stade du recours final, tandis que les demandeurs d’asile arrivant sur les îles grecques fin 2018 se voyaient attribuer une date limite pour les entretiens jusqu’en 2023.

Parallèlement à l’accélération des procédures d’asile, les auditeurs recommandent d’améliorer les logements sur les #îles grecques, en particulier pour les nombreux requérants mineurs non accompagnés qui logent dans des conditions abominables. A ce sujet la Cour des comptes précisent ce qui suit :

“À #Samos, nous avons visité la section du centre (#hotspot) réservée aux mineurs, qui consiste en sept conteneurs, abritant chacun une salle de bain et deux salles de séjour. Certains conteneurs n’avaient ni portes, ni fenêtres et n’étaient équipés ni de lits ni d’appareils de conditionnement de l’air. Chaque conteneur pouvait officiellement accueillir huit à dix mineurs, mais en hébergeait environ 16 non accompagnés, dont certains étaient même obligés de dormir par terre. Seuls des garçons séjournaient dans la section pour mineurs. Soixante-dix-huit mineurs non accompagnés étaient hébergés sous tente ou dans des maisons abandonnées situées à l’extérieur du point d’accès et devenues des annexes officieuses de celui-ci. Neuf filles non accompagnées dormaient au sol dans un conteneur de 10 m2 situé à côté du bureau de police, sans toilette ni douche.“

Au moment de la publication du rapport, le maire de l’île de Samos Georgios Stantzos mentionnait l’audit et mettait en garde les autorités grecques contre les conséquences des conditions de vie « primitives » imposées aux réfugiés sur l’île.

Trop de mouvements secondaires dans l’UE

Concernant l’enregistrement des empreintes digitales dans le système EURODAC, la situation s’est beaucoup améliorée dans les centres hotspots en Italie et en Grèce. Cependant, entre 2015 et 2018, la Cour a remarqué un volume élevé de mouvements secondaires dans l’UE ce qui a rendu l’application du mécanisme de Dublin difficile. Les données EUROSTAT traduisent aussi de faibles taux de transferts Dublin qui s’expliquent selon les auditeurs, par la fuite ou la disparition des personnes concernées, des raisons humanitaires, des décisions de justice en suspens et des cas de regroupement familial (1).
Les réinstallations très insatisfaisantes

Les États membres de l’UE se sont juridiquement engagés à réinstaller 98 256 migrants, sur un objectif initial fixé à 160 000. Or seuls 34 705 ont été effectivement réinstallés (21 999 depuis la Grèce et 12 706 depuis l’Italie). Selon les auditeurs, la performance insuffisante de ces programmes s’explique surtout par le faible nombre de requérants potentiellement éligibles enregistrés en vue d’une relocalisation, surtout parce que les autorités grecques et italiennes ont eu de la peine à ‘identifier les candidats. Une fois les migrants enregistrés en vue d’une relocalisation, la solidarité à leur égard a mieux fonctionné. Les auditeurs ont cependant relevé un certain nombre de faiblesses opérationnelles dans le processus de relocalisation (2).

Augmentation des renvois vers les pays d’origines

Pour la Cour des comptes, le fossé entre le nombre de décisions négatives et le nombre de renvois exécutés depuis la Grèce, l’Italie ou le reste de l’UE, est trop important. Le taux de renvois des ressortissants de pays tiers ayant reçu l’ordre de quitter l’UE était d’environ 40 % en 2018 et de 20 % en Grèce et en Italie. En s’inspirant de certains centres de renvois destinés aux personnes qui acceptent volontairement de rentrer vers leurs pays d’origine, la Cour des comptes recommande différentes mesures qui permettront de faciliter les renvois dont l’ouverture de nouveaux centres de détention et l’offre plus systématique de programmes de réintégration dans les pays d’origine.

Conclusion

Le rapport de la Cour des comptes de l’UE est une mine d’information pour comprendre le fonctionnement des centres hotspots en Grèce et en Italie. Globalement, sa lecture donne le sentiment que l’UE se dirige à grands pas vers une prolifération de centre hotspots, un raccourcissement des procédures d’asile et une armada de mesures facilitant l’exécution des renvois vers les pays d’origine.

▻https://blogs.letemps.ch/jasmine-caye/2019/11/19/la-cour-des-comptes-de-lue-critique-les-disparites-en-matiere-de-gesti
#mineurs_non_accompagnés #MNA #hotspots #empreintes_digitales #mouvements_secondaires

Migrants relocation: EU states fail on sharing refugees

https://voxeurop.eu/files/images/article/european_refusal_to_maritime_emigration_alfredo_martirena.jpeg?1574867601#.jpg

A mandatory 2015 scheme to dispatch people seeking international protection from Greece and Italy across the European Union did not deliver promised results, say EU auditors.

Although member states took in some 35,000 people from both countries, the EU auditors say at least 445,000 Eritreans, Iraqis and Syrians may have been potentially eligible in Greece alone.

The lead author of the report, Leo Brincat, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday (13 November) that another 36,000 could have also been possibly relocated from Italy.

“But when it boils down to the total migrants relocated, you will find 21,999 in the case of Greece and 12,706 in the case of Italy,” he said.

The EU auditors say the migrants relocated at the time represented only around four percent of all the asylum seekers in Italy and around 22 percent in Greece.

Despite being repeatedly billed as a success by the European Commission, the two-year scheme had also caused massive rifts with some member states – leading to EU court battles in Luxembourg.

When it was first launched among interior ministers in late 2015, the mandatory nature of the proposal was forced through by a vote, overturning objections from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

Only last month, the advocate-general at the EU court in Luxembourg had declared the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland likely broke EU law for refusing to take in refugees from the 2015 scheme. While the Czech Republic took 12 people, both Hungary and Poland refused to host anyone at all.

Similar battles have for years played out behind closed doors as legislators grapple with deadlocked internal EU asylum reforms.

The concepts of sharing out asylum seekers, also known as relocation, are at the core of that deadlock.

Politics aside, Brincat’s report honed in on the so-called “temporary emergency relocation scheme” whereby EU states had agreed to take in some 160,000 people from Greece and Italy over a period spanning from September 2015 to September 2017.

Large numbers of people at the time were coming up through the Western Balkans into Hungary and onto Germany, while others were crossing from Turkey onto the Greek islands.

After the EU cut a deal with Turkey early 2016, the set legal target of 160,000 had been reduced to just over 98,000.

When the scheme finally ended in September 2017, only around 35,000 people had been relocated to member states along with Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

“In our view, relocation was really a demonstration of European solidarity and with almost a 100 percent of eligible candidates in Greece and in Italy having been successfully relocated,” a European Commission spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
Bottlenecks and other problems

The EU auditors present a different view. They point out Greek and Italian authorities lacked the staff to properly identify people who could have been relocated, resulting in low registrations.

They also say EU states only took in people from Greece who arrived before the deal was cut with Turkey in March 2016.

Another issue was member states had vastly different asylum-recognition rates. For instance, asylum-recognition rates for Afghanis varied from six percent to 98 percent, depending on the member state. Iraqis had similarly variable rates.

Some migrants also simply didn’t trust relocation concept. Others likely baulked at the idea being sent to a country where they had no cultural, language or family ties.

Almost all of the 332 people sent to Lithuania, for example, packed up and left.

EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker had even poked fun of it in late 2016. He had said asylum seekers from Greece and Italy were hard pressed to relocate to his home country of Luxembourg.

“We found 53 after explaining to them that it was close to Germany. They are no longer there [Luxembourg],” he said.

▻https://voxeurop.eu/en/2019/migration-5124053

’Someone has to do it’: Australians sponsor refugees into Canada

https://i.imgur.com/s5XkoI3.png

Toronto: Hundreds of asylum seekers rejected by Australia and stranded in Nauru and Papua New Guinea could be resettled in Canada under a unique program that allows individuals to privately sponsor refugees.

Australian expats in Canada, alarmed at the deteriorating mental health of many asylum seekers in offshore detention, have formed a network to raise funds and lodge applications to bring refugees to their adopted homeland.

They are focused almost exclusively on the 330 estimated asylum seekers who are ineligible for the US resettlement program and have no prospect of being accepted by another third country.

Amirhossein Sahragard, a 27-year-old Iranian refugee who tried to reach Australia by boat, arrived at Toronto airport on Thursday night (Friday AEDT) after almost seven years on Manus Island.

He is believed to be just the second refugee from Australia’s offshore detention system to be resettled in Canada under its private sponsorship scheme.

“Before this, I had no future,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age after his arrival.

“When I found out I was coming to Canada my body went into shock. I couldn’t believe it.”

Another Iranian refugee who was detained on Manus Island will arrive in Toronto next week.

Canada’s private sponsorship scheme, which has operated since the late 1970s, allows groups of five people to apply to bring refugees of their choosing to Canada.

Sponsors must raise about $18,000 for each refugee and help them find housing, employment and counselling services.

“There is no other way for these people to get out,” said Juliet Donald, an Australian clinical psychologist who lives in Toronto.

She has applied to privately sponsor a gay refugee who fled Iran after being blackmailed by associates of an ex-lover. She is also fundraising to sponsor a refugee family of four on Nauru.

“In a strange way it turns out I can do more from Canada than I could in Australia,” she said.

“I feel this huge relief that there is something I can do to help.”

Donald, originally from Sydney, is a member of the Canadian branch of Ads-Up (Australian Diaspora Steps Up), a group of Australian expats and Canadian locals helping to resettle refugees.

Ben Winsor, who co-founded Ads-Up in the US last year, said the group decided to expand to Canada after the surprise May election result.

“We were really rattled by a spate of suicide attempts and we felt we had to take a harder look at what we could do for people who were getting turned away by the Trump administration,” Winsor said.

"Taxpayers are wasting billions of dollars, Australia’s name is being dragged through the mud, and people’s lives are being stolen from them year after year.

“We need to end it, and this is a way that we can do that.”

The group has 17 applications underway to privately resettle refugees, and expects that number to rapidly expand.

It is estimated that around 600 asylum seekers remain on Nauru and PNG, and another 135 have been transferred to Australia for medical treatment.

“The only limit really is the amount of money and volunteers,” Ads-Up member Laura Beth Bugg, a university professor who moved from Sydney to Toronto, said.

“In theory we could resettle everybody.”

Bugg co-sponsored Amirhossein Sahragard’s refugee application and greeted him at the airport on Thursday with a winter coat.

She said Canadians were generally shocked to learn about Manus Island and Nauru.

“It is not the image they had of Australia,” she said.

A parallel project in western Canada, run by two local non-profit organisations, is aiming to resettle up to 200 refugees from Nauru and PNG.

Laurie Cooper, from the Canada Caring Society, said the project had raised approximately $330,000 and was about to submit its first batch of 17 applications. It can take between 18 and 24 months for applications to be processed.

The US has accepted around 630 refugees from Nauru and PNG, but has also rejected hundreds of applicants under its “extreme vetting” process. Iranian and Syrian refugees have especially low acceptance rates.

Refugees must pass security, criminal and medical checks before being accepted into Canada, but the process is less onerous than in the US.

Donald said that privately sponsoring a refugee carries immense responsibilities, but that someone had to do it.

“I’d rather be a little scared and do it, than to walk away,” she said. “This is something I can do that makes me proud to be Australian.”

▻https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/someone-has-to-do-it-australians-sponsor-refugees-into-canada-20191102-p536r

#Cameroun #accaparemment_de_terres #industrie_agro-alimentaire #patrimoine_culturel #déplacés_internes #IDPs #relocalisation #forêt

A mettre en lien avec cela, les statistiques globales des #relocalisations :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/605713

Des articles plus théoriques sur les villes-refuge :

How Cities Can Shape a Fairer, More Humane Immigration Policy
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message737077

Avec la « ville-refuge », ce serait un nouveau concept de Ville qui pourrait émerger, un autre droit d’asile, une autre hospitalité qui transformerait le droit international
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message751607

#Jacques_Derrida und die Idee der Zufluchtsstädte
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message751608

The Cities Refugees Saved
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message757468

#Chowra_Makaremi : « Les #villes sont des nœuds sur les trajectoires des migrants »
►https://seenthis.net/messages/674762

More than a welcome : the power of cities
►https://seenthis.net/messages/478438

Numéro spécial sur villes et hospitalité de la revue #Plein_Droit :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759148

Entre accueil et rejet : ce que les villes font aux migrants. Ce que les villes font aux migrants
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759152

Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759157

Ce qu’ils font est juste : ils mettent la solidarité et l’hospitalité à l’honneur
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759158

#Villes-refuge, villes rebelles et néo-municipalisme
►https://seenthis.net/messages/656848

Des dizaines de villes inventent une politique d’accueil des migrants
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/656848#message705607

If mayors ruled migration : Promises and gaps
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/783876

Villes refuges | Exclusions d’État versus inclusions urbaines
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/798557

Data shows sanctuary cities keep communities safer
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/824538
#crimes #criminalité

webinar : Solidarity Cities of Europe - How can we work together on progressive migration policy ?

https://i.imgur.com/xBpvBB4.png

Au Proche-Orient, #Beirut (#Liban) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759154

Alors qu’au même temps le ministre des affaires extérieures libanais veut s’inspirer du #modèle_hongrois (sic) :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/770467

#Censure d’un #film qui devait sortir sur le système #SPRAR en Italie :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/766813

Des #initiatives_citoyennes :

#sursaut_citoyen, en #France :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/771840

#A4 : #Association_d’accueil_en_agriculture_et_en_artisanat_ville-campagne
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/983462
#agriculture #artisanat #campagne #rural

#églises-refuge

“Mettiamo a disposizione le nostre strutture e quelle delle chiese sorelle d’Europa per accogliere i migranti della Sea Watch”. Il pastore Luca Negro, presidente della Federazione delle chiese evangeliche Italia ha teso la mano e offerto una soluzione per sbloccare l’empasse sulla nave che da giorni stanzia a un passo dalle acque territoriali italiane, una quarantina di migranti a bordo.

►https://seenthis.net/messages/782050

La Chiesa italiana accoglie 58 profughi della Ocean Viking (a sue spese)
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/803712

#Eglise #églises

#Geneva_Declaration_on_Human_Rights_at_Sea :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/773238

#Genève l’a signée : ►https://seenthis.net/messages/782876

#Déclaration_de_Genève_sur_les_droits_de_l’Homme_en_mer

Dossier « Migrants : comment les territoires ont pris le relais de l’Etat » de la Gazette des communes :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/782971

Villes-refuge pour #artistes
#International_Cities_of_Refuge_Network (#ICORN) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/798031
#écrivains #art

Des revendications de citoyen·nes de différentes villes autour de la notion de « #citoyenneté_locale », « #citoyenneté_urbaine »... dans l’idée de se dire que : devrait être considéré citoyen celui et celle qui résident dans une ville, égal son statut légal.

Quelques exemples ci-dessous.

"Wir alle sind #Bern"
►https://seenthis.net/messages/801885
#Suisse

Züri_city_card
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/801885#message801887
Ville de Zurich : Soins médicaux pour personnes sans assurance maladie
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/981751
#Zurich

#Genève : Vers une #carte_d’identification_universelle en Ville ?
►https://seenthis.net/messages/904221

#La_Chaux-de-Fonds :
Une carte d’identité communale
►https://seenthis.net/messages/896514

En lien avec la #crise_sanitaire (#coronavirus, #covid-19)

►https://seenthis.net/messages/847078
–-> #régularisation

Un contre-exemple, l’association #ma_commune_sans_migrants :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/864697

#USA #Etats-Unis

Sanctuary Cities: All You Need In An Infographic

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L340xH700/uz31PY4png-11a4b-e31a4.png

Map: Sanctuary Cities, Counties, and States

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH590/2ZkxgBepng-ffe73-33c5f.png

#Atlanta:
https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message724208

#New-York_City #NYC:
https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message751011
New Sanctuary Coalition of #NYC:
https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message756227

Chicago announces $5M fund for people excluded from federal coronavirus relief act
https://seenthis.net/messages/860103
#Chicago #coronavirus #covid-19

#Petaluma City Council unanimously adopts ‘It Won’t Happen Here’ resolution
https://seenthis.net/messages/874258

#universités-refuge :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/731110

–---

Des amphis occupés en #France pour y abriter des migrants (et des projets avec elleux) :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/718619
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/653193
#occupation
#Patio_solidaire à #Grenoble, mais aussi #Lyon, #Paris_8

–---

#Italie
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/877069

–—

#Every_Campus_A_Refuge, en lien avec les programmes de #réinstallation aux #USA #Etats-Unis
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/746116

–—

Universities of sanctuary
▻https://universities.cityofsanctuary.org

–—

#University_corridors and the role of academia in opening safe and legal pathways for refugees to Europe
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/863585

–---

Article scientifique
Enabling Pathways for Students from Refugee and Asylum-Seeker Backgrounds in Higher Education : Aspirations About Progression to Postgraduate Studies
▻https://academic.oup.com/rsq/article-abstract/39/2/244/5864824?redirectedFrom=fulltext

–—

Education : la Grèce octroie l’asile à un étudiant Guinéen admis à Sciences Po Paris
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/868331

–—

#Sorbonne nouvelle annonce son diplôme #DU_Passerelle
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/873618

–—

#université_de_Genève #Scholars_at_risk, un réseau d’institutions universitaires qui défend la #liberté_académique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1046966
#UNIGE

#université

En #Europe :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/878327

#Espagne #Italie #Pologne #Bosnie #France #Belgique #UK #Angleterre #Allemagne #Serbie #Suisse #Pays-Bas

#Ports-refuge
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/878648

33 European cities sign ’alliance of safe harbours’ declaration
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/921792

Associations et appels :

#ANVITA, #association_nationale_des_villes_et_territoires_accueillants :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message726383
►https://seenthis.net/messages/759638

City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (#C-MISE) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/727455#message727456

#ICORN :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message751609
#International_Cities_of_Refuge_Network

#Eine_Stadt_für_Alle
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/705769#message756231

#Guide de l’hospitalité du collectif #Le_Perou :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message714073

#Convention_sur_l'accueil de #Grande-Synthe
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759150
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759151

Projet #APROP de Barcelone :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759153

En lien avec le mouvement #Right_to_the_city :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/675436#message759155

L’alleanza dei sindaci del Mediterraneo
►https://seenthis.net/messages/759141

#Cities_of_Migration
▻http://citiesofmigration.ca

“#From_the_Sea_to_the_Cities !”
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/788948
#From_Sea_to_Cities
–-> et la version française : "l’appel de 28 collectivités pour ’l’inconditionnalité du sauvetage en mer’" :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/897821

#Appel_de_Vézelay pour l’#accueil des migrants
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/798026

#Mayors_Migration_Council (#MMC)
▻https://www.mayorsmigrationcouncil.org

Marrakech mayors declaration : Cities working together for migrants and refugees
▻https://www.mayorsmigrationcouncil.org/pdf/marrakech_mayors_declaration-2019_02_19.pdf

#CitiesMustAct (qui fait partie de la #campagne #EuropeMustAct)
►https://seenthis.net/messages/847078
#relocalisation #Grèce

#From_Sea_to_city
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/862343

Libérez l’« Ocean Viking » et les autres navires humanitaires
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/875603

#Mediterranean_City-to-City_Migration_Project
#City-to-City (#MC2CM)
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/885661
#Méditerranée

Processo Open Arms, la città di Barcellona si costituisce parte civile contro Salvini
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/898791

#justice #procès #Barcelone

Humanitarian support - cities of #Rijeka & #Zagreb
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/981315
#Croatie #route_des_Balkans #Balkans

Quelques questions, car ce n’est pas du tout clair pour moi les termes de ce fantomatique accord :

On peut lire :

« Le ministre italien avait alors expliqué qu’il avait reçu des assurances de la part de l’Allemagne que pour chaque migrant renvoyé en Italie les autorités allemandes accepteraient un demandeur d’asile en Italie. »

« L’accord a été négocié et suit les mêmes principes que celui avec la Grèce »« , a dit M. Seehofer au Welt am Sonntag. »Nous renvoyons des réfugiés en Italie mais nous acceptons un même nombre de personnes sauvées en mer« .

--> Mais qui sont ces « migrants renvoyés en Italie », si ce n’est des dublinés ? Et qui sont ces « réfugiés renvoyés en Italie » ? Si c’est des réfugiés, donc des personnes avec un statut reconnu, ils ne peuvent pas être renvoyés en Italie, j’imagine...
--> Et les « personnes sauvées en mer » ? Il s’agit d’un nombre de personne déterminé, qui n’ont pas déjà été catégorisés en « migrants » ou « demandeurs d’asile » ?

Et puis :

« L’Allemagne et l’Italie travaillent à un #accord aux termes duquel des migrants résidant en Allemagne pourraient être renvoyés en Italie, pays où ils ont déposé une demande d’asile. L’accord n’a pas été signé pour le moment. »

--> ce n’est pas déjà Dublin, ça ? C’est quoi si ce n’est pas Dublin ?

#accord_UE-Turquie (bis)

ping @i_s_

v. aussi le fil de discussion sur twitter de Matteo Villa :

Sui voli #charter dalla Germania all’Italia non bisogna fare confusione, né cedere alla disinformazione.
(1) Si tratta di “dublinati”, persone che hanno fatto primo ingresso in ?? dall’Italia, non migranti fermati alla frontiera tedesca e rispediti in Italia in modi spicci. Finché non cambiamo Dublino, gli accordi sono questi.
2) Non è certo qualcosa di eccezionale. Tra 2014 e 2017, la Germania ha fatto più di 50.000 richieste di trasferimento verso l’Italia applicando le regole Dublino.
(3) Non è neanche mistero che il sistema Dublino non funzioni. Sulle oltre 50.000 richieste da parte tedesca dal 2014, l’Italia ha effettuato solo circa 12.000 trasferimenti. Meno di 1 su 4 alla fine torna in ??.
(4) una volta effettuato il trasferimento verso l’Italia, il richiedente asilo non è detenuto. Può quindi tentare di spostarsi di nuovo verso il Paese che lo ha riportato indietro.
(5) Utilizzare voli charter rispetto a voli di linea è uno strappo diplomatico? Dipende. Tecnicamente, senza il consenso dell’Italia l’aereo non potrebbe neppure partire.
(6) Vogliamo fare tutto questo casino per 40/100 persone? Davvero?

▻https://twitter.com/emmevilla/status/1048951274677460993

Migranti, la Germania riporta 40 profughi a Roma con volo charter

L’arrivo del primo #charter dalla Germania, con a bordo 40 migranti cosiddetti «secondari» respinti dal governo tedesco, è previsto all’aeroporto di Fiumicino giovedì prossimo, l’11 ottobre. Nonostante le smentite ufficiali del Viminale, un’intesa è stata dunque raggiunta. Adesso che la notizia è pubblica, però, bisognerà vedere cosa succederà nelle prossime ore. «Non farò favori elettorali alla Merkel», aveva detto il mese scorso Matteo Salvini all’ultimo vertice europeo sull’immigrazione.

Così, anche se formalmente il ministero dell’Interno non può opporsi, potrebbe essere la polizia di frontiera italiana, per motivi legati al piano di volo, a non autorizzare l’atterraggio o lo sbarco dei passeggeri. È la prima volta, infatti, che la Germania si serve di un charter per riportare in Italia i «dublinanti», cioè quei migranti che sbarcano e chiedono asilo da noi, ma poi se ne vanno da uomini liberi nel resto d’Europa. In base al Trattato di Dublino, però, quando vengono rintracciati possono essere rimandati indietro, perché le norme dell’accordo prevedono appunto che sia il Paese di primo approdo a valutarne la domanda d’asilo e quindi a farsi carico dello straniero fino all’esito della procedura.

Finora, però, il rientro dei «dublinanti» in Italia si svolgeva con viaggi di singoli migranti su aerei di linea. Dalla Francia, per esempio, ne arrivano così una ventina ogni mese. E dalla Germania, fino a oggi, una media di 25: tutti selezionati dopo una lunga istruttoria, quindi accompagnati a bordo dalla polizia tedesca fino all’atterraggio in Italia, qui infine presi in consegna dalle nostre forze dell’ordine e portati in un centro d’accoglienza.

Ma il governo tedesco ora ha deciso di accelerare le operazioni: l’Ufficio federale per l’immigrazione e i rifugiati ha già inviato decine di lettere ai migranti arrivati in Germania passando per l’Italia, avvisandoli che saranno riportati presto nel primo Paese d’ingresso in Europa.

Un giro di vite deciso a prescindere dal patto sui migranti fra Italia e Germania da tempo in discussione e che il nostro ministro dell’Interno, Matteo Salvini, continua ad escludere di aver mai firmato. Da Berlino, però, lo danno già per stipulato e a condizioni precise: la Germania può rimandare in Italia i migranti che attraversano il confine, garantendo in cambio la sua disponibilità a rivedere i termini dei ricollocamenti. Nei giorni scorsi, però, lo stesso Salvini era stato chiaro, parlando di «accordo a saldo zero»: in cambio cioè del ritorno in Italia dei «dublinanti» il nostro Paese invierà a Berlino un analogo numero di profughi da accogliere. «Firmerò l’accordo quando sarà chiaro che non ci sarà un solo immigrato in più a nostro carico», aveva detto. E dal Viminale, infatti, continuano a dire che la firma del ministro non c’è.

Ma ora l’intesa apparentemente trovata sul charter in arrivo l’11 ottobre infittisce il giallo. E l’opposizione attacca: «Biglietti già fatti — ha twittato il deputato del Pd Filippo Sensi — nei prossimi giorni la Germania riporterà in Italia molti profughi, quanti? Matteo Salvini aveva tuonato che l’accordo con il suo amico Seehofer non c’era. Chi mente?». E Alessia Morani, Pd, commenta su Fb: «L’amico tedesco di Salvini, il sovranista Seehofer, vuole rimandare in Italia i profughi coi voli charter. Queste sono le conseguenze dell’accordo di giugno del premier Conte e della politica isolazionista di Salvini: si apparenta con chi alza i muri contro di noi, invece che fare accordi per la redistribuzione dei richiedenti asilo in Europa. La ricetta sovranista sta complicando la gestione dei migranti. Stanno creando il caos e questa incapacità la pagheranno gli italiani».

▻https://roma.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/18_ottobre_06/primo-volo-charter-profughi-dublino-merkel-salvini-6c4cd2a8-c9a4-11e8-

Quelques explications de plus dans cet article :

È la prima volta, infatti, che la Germania si serve di un charter per riportare in Italia i «dublinanti» (...) Finora, però, il rientro dei «dublinanti» in Italia si svolgeva con viaggi di singoli migranti su aerei di linea.

–-> donc, ce qui est nouveau c’est le fait que l’Allemagne renvoie les « dublinés » via charter, alors qu’avant ces renvois étaient effectués sur des vols de ligne.

Le fameux accord, qui ressemble à celui entre la Turquie et l’UE, devrait prévoir ceci :

la Germania può rimandare in Italia i migranti che attraversano il confine, garantendo in cambio la sua disponibilità a rivedere i termini dei ricollocamenti.

–-> l’Allemagne peut renvoyer en Italie les migrants qui traversent la frontière, en garantissant, en échange, sa disponibilité à revoir les termes des #relocalisation

Salvini sur ce point :

Salvini era stato chiaro, parlando di «accordo a saldo zero»: in cambio cioè del ritorno in Italia dei «dublinanti» il nostro Paese invierà a Berlino un analogo numero di profughi da accogliere

–-> Salvini demande un « accord avec un solde zéro » : en échange du retour des dublinés en Italie, l’Italie enverra à Berlin un nombre analogue de réfugiés à accueillir.

Le journal rapporte les mots de Salvini qui dit ne pas avoir signé d’accord avec l’Allemagne :

dal Viminale, infatti, continuano a dire che la firma del ministro non c’è.

... mais vu qu’il y a un charter qui devrait arriver à Rome le 11 octobre... et donc on se demande si cet accord a été signé...
Du coup, c’est la polémique : qui ment ? Seehofer ou Salvini ?

–------------------

Nouveau terme, @sinehebdo :

40 migranti cosiddetti «secondari»

–-> « #migrants_secondaires », ça doit faire référence aux #mouvements_secondaires... que l’UE cherche par tout les moyens de combattre, mais qui, en réalité, avec ses politiques, les créent... les associations et quelques chercheurs/ses utilisent plutôt le terme #Migrerrants (#migrerrance)
#terminologie #vocabulaire #mots

Berlin dément avoir le projet de renvoyer des migrants en Italie

Les autorités allemandes ont démenti dimanche avoir le projet de renvoyer en Italie des migrants résidant en Allemagne comme le rapportait un quotidien italien, information qui avait provoqué un regain de tension entre Berlin et Rome.

Le quotidien La Repubblica rapportait samedi que l’office allemand pour les réfugiés avait adressé « des dizaines de lettres » à des migrants les informant d’un possible transfert vers l’Italie via des vols charters. Le premier vol est prévu mardi prochain.

Cette information a provoqué une vive réaction de la part du ministre italien de l’Intérieur Matteo Salvini qui a menacé de fermer tous les aéroports de son pays aux avions de ligne non autorisés transportant des migrants en provenance d’Allemagne.

« Aucun vol de transfert n’est prévu vers l’Italie dans les prochains jours », a déclaré un porte-parole du ministère allemand de l’Intérieur dans un courrier électronique.

L’Allemagne et l’Italie travaillent à un accord aux termes duquel des migrants résidant en Allemagne pourraient être renvoyés en Italie, pays où ils ont déposé une demande d’asile. L’accord n’a pas été signé pour le moment.

« Si des gens pensent, à Berlin ou à Bruxelles, qu’ils vont pouvoir balancer des dizaines de migrants en Italie par des vols charters non autorisés, ils doivent savoir qu’il n’y a pas et n’y aura pas d’aéroports disponibles », a dit Salvini dans un communiqué.

« Nous fermerons les aéroports comme nous avons fermé les ports », a-t-il dit.

Le ministre allemand de l’Intérieur Horst Seehofer affirmait en septembre qu’un accord avait été trouvé avec l’Italie et qu’il devait être signé prochainement. Salvini avait démenti le lendemain, exigeant de nouvelles concessions de la part de l’Allemagne.

Le ministre italien avait alors expliqué qu’il avait reçu des assurances de la part de l’Allemagne que pour chaque migrant renvoyé en Italie les autorités allemandes accepteraient un demandeur d’asile en Italie.

Matteo Salvini exigeait deux autres concessions - une révision du traité de Dublin sur la gestion des demandes d’asile dans le pays d’arrivée et la fin de la mission navale européenne #Sophia qui porte secours aux migrants en Méditerranée.

Seehofer a appelé la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel et le président du Conseil italien Giuseppe Conte à intervenir pour sortir de l’#impasse.

« L’accord a été négocié et suit les mêmes principes que celui avec la Grèce », a dit Seehofer au Welt am Sonntag. « Nous renvoyons des réfugiés en Italie mais nous acceptons un même nombre de personnes sauvées en mer ».

« Mais Salvini dit maintenant : je ne signerai que si l’Allemagne soutient la position de l’Italie sur le droit d’asile dans l’Union européenne », poursuit Seehofer.

Rome demande une réforme du traité de Dublin afin que soit organisée une répartition des nouveaux arrivants dans l’ensemble de l’UE et non plus l’obligation de rester dans le pays où ils sont arrivés en Europe

▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/071018/berlin-dement-avoir-le-projet-de-renvoyer-des-migrants-en-italie
#opération_Sophia

Ajoutés à la liste...

Plusieurs articles abordent la question du #vocabulaire. Faut-il les appeler #migrants #réfugiés #sans-papiers #demandeurs_d_asile #exilés ? Compilation ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/414225

Des « #centres_contrôlés » pour migrants : le grand flou des annonces européennes

Des « centres contrôlés » devraient bientôt être créés en Europe pour recevoir les migrants secourus en Méditerranée. C’est la mesure la plus concrète annoncée vendredi 29 juin par les dirigeants européens. Mais de quoi s’agit-il ? Comment les exilés seront-ils traités ? Les ONG s’inquiètent.

Au nombre de virgules et d’incises, on devine que cette phrase a été triturée, négociée toute la nuit. À l’arrivée, elle prévoit la création de « centres contrôlés » sur le sol de l’Union européenne où fixer les migrants secourus en Méditerranée, dès leur débarquement, histoire de traiter leurs demandes d’asile et de renvoyer les déboutés plus rapidement, avant qu’ils ne s’éparpillent dans les différents États membres. Mise sur la table par Emmanuel Macron et le premier ministre espagnol après l’errance forcée de l’Aquarius, cette conclusion du conseil européen des 28 et 29 juin est brandie comme une victoire par Paris.

Pourtant, « la France (…) n’ouvrira pas de centres de ce type », a indiqué Emmanuel Macron dès vendredi. Mais qui alors ? À quoi ressembleront ces lieux de confinement ? Comment les exilés seront-ils traités ? Y a-t-il une chance que ces « centres contrôlés » constituent un progrès quelconque par rapport aux hotspots que l’UE a bricolés en Grèce et en Italie dès 2015, au bilan désastreux ? Explications de texte.

Trier les exilés

L’affaire de l’Aquarius avait déclenché un triste concours Lépine entre pays de l’UE pour savoir que faire des migrants repêchés dans les eaux sous responsabilité européenne (les zones de secours maritime de l’Italie, de Malte, etc.), où l’intervention des garde-côtes libyens n’est plus une option légale. Des pays comme la Hongrie proposaient d’externaliser l’accueil et même l’enfermement de ces survivants en dehors de l’UE, dans des camps en Albanie, au Kosovo, voire de les refouler sur les rives sud de la Méditerranée – quitte à balancer le droit international par-dessus bord. Paris se félicite d’avoir fait un sort à ces tristes idées, avec ses « centres contrôlés » à l’intérieur de l’Union.

« Le contexte de ce sommet, c’était un risque d’externalisation massive et sauvage », insiste le patron de l’Ofpra (l’office français chargé d’accorder ou non le statut de réfugié), Pascal Brice. Le pire est évité. La Commission européenne a désormais pour mission de dessiner, dans les prochains mois, les contours matériels et juridiques de ces centres, extrêmement flous à ce stade.

Du côté de l’Élysée, on ne cache pas sa source d’inspiration : les hotspots que l’UE a déjà créés à la fin 2015, en pleine crise des réfugiés, et qui fonctionnent toujours sur les îles grecques en face de la Turquie (cinq gros) et en Italie (cinq plus petits, plus ou moins actifs). Les nouveaux « centres contrôlés » devront remplir des missions similaires : l’accueil des rescapés, l’instruction des dossiers pour distinguer entre migrants éligibles au statut de réfugié (du fait de persécutions dans leur pays) et migrants dits « économiques ».

Comme dans les hotspots, les premiers auront vocation, une fois repérés, à bénéficier d’une « #relocalisation » (c’est le jargon) aux quatre coins de l’UE. Mais cette fois, seuls les États volontaires sont censés participer à la répartition : aucune obligation ne figure dans le texte, ni dispositif incitatif d’ailleurs. Le texte se contente de dire : « Le principe de #solidarité s’appliquerait. » Un principe sans contrainte, ni gendarme, ni sanction, porte un autre nom : un vœu pieux.

Le système de « relocalisations » depuis la Grèce et l’Italie mis en place entre 2015 et 2017, censé contribuer à vider les hotspots au fur et à mesure, a lamentablement échoué alors même qu’il était contraignant à l’époque, avec un système de quotas de réfugiés par pays. À l’arrivée, à peine 35 % des engagements ont été respectés, certains États comme la Hongrie et la Pologne affichant un taux de 0 % (la France à peine 25 %).

C’est de toute façon le sort des migrants dits « économiques » (bien plus nombreux parmi les rescapés de la Méditerranée en 2018) qui occupe la majorité des dirigeants européens aujourd’hui : ceux-là « feront l’objet d’un retour » le plus souvent possible, indiquent les conclusions du sommet (sachant qu’un rapatriement suppose toujours un laissez-passer du pays d’origine). Pour opérer ces expulsions (« idéalement » depuis les centres, si l’on comprend bien), le soutien de l’UE au pays qui les héberge sera « total ». Qui va donc se lancer et ouvrir les premiers « centres contrôlés » ?

Le pari du volontariat

Là encore, l’UE mise tout sur des candidatures libres. En réalité, la liste potentielle tient dans un mouchoir de poche : la Grèce, l’Espagne, l’Italie voire Malte. Car la création de ces « centres contrôlés » a été négociée dans l’esprit du fameux « règlement de Dublin », qui régit depuis des années le système d’asile européen et veut que la responsabilité du traitement des demandes incombe au premier pays où les migrants posent le pied, plus précisément où leurs empreintes sont enregistrées.

Les pays de « seconde ligne » comme la Hongrie ou la Pologne, bien loin des zones de débarquement, se réfugient donc derrière ce principe pour rejeter toute création de centres sur leur sol – bien que ce principe autorise moult dérogations. Idem pour la France. Seuls les pays dits de « première entrée » sont donc susceptibles d’aller au charbon.

En marge du conseil européen, la Grèce et l’Espagne auraient déjà fait savoir qu’elles pourraient toper. Pas Malte. Quant à l’Italie, dont le chef du gouvernement a négocié le dispositif avec Emmanuel Macron dans les coulisses du sommet, elle affiche désormais ses réticences et fait monter les enchères : « Des pays ont dit leur disponibilité, pas l’Italie », a déclaré Giuseppe Conte après coup.

L’entrain transalpin dépendra évidemment des moyens (logistiques, financiers, etc.) que les institutions européennes vont mettre à disposition des pays volontaires et du degré de solidarité dont ses voisins daigneront faire preuve pour se répartir les réfugiés. La France en prendra, a promis Emmanuel Macron. Le président français estime avoir donné des gages ces derniers jours et même initié le mouvement dans l’affaire de l’Aquarius, puis dans l’épisode du Lifeline (ce navire qui a débarqué 233 migrants à Malte le 26 juin après un refus de l’Italie et une semaine d’attente en mer).

De fait, de façon exceptionnelle, des officiers de l’Ofpra ont déjà entendu de nombreux rescapés de l’Aquarius éligibles à l’asile, et d’autres sont à Malte depuis mercredi. Si la France était toute seule en Espagne (pour le navire de SOS Méditerranée), sept autres États membres de l’UE ont promis d’accueillir des passagers du Lifeline. « Nous avons su trouver des mécanismes de solidarité » sur cette « opération ad hoc », s’est félicité vendredi Emmanuel Macron, qui veut croire que les futurs « centres contrôlés » pourraient bénéficier du même élan, hors période de crise politique et d’emballement médiatique, sans contrainte, en toute spontanéité.

Interrogé par Mediapart depuis Malte, le patron de l’Ofpra français estime d’ailleurs qu’il faudrait offrir une protection non plus seulement aux réfugiés remplissant les critères habituels (risques de persécution dans leurs pays d’origine) mais également, de façon inédite, à des personnes « en situation de détresse humanitaire liée aux violences subies sur leur parcours migratoire », « en particulier en Libye », victimes de « traite humaine » par exemple. Rien de tel ne figure dans les conclusions du sommet ni dans le projet de loi « asile et immigration » de Gérard Collomb, en débat au Parlement français.

Une privation de liberté

À quel point les hotspots seconde génération seront-ils cadenassés, clôturés, barbelés ? Dans leurs conclusions du 29 juin, les dirigeants européens ne parlent officiellement ni de « retenue » ni de « rétention », encore moins de « détention ». Envisagée au départ, l’expression « centres fermés » a même été écartée, obligeant Nathalie Loiseau, la ministre française des affaires européennes, à une sacrée gymnastique sémantique : « Il ne s’agira pas de centres fermés mais de centres d’où les migrants ne pourront pas sortir », a-t-elle déclaré vendredi devant la presse.

De fait, on voit mal comment l’UE pourrait poursuivre ses objectifs, surtout de rapatriements, sans une phase de confinement voire d’enfermement. Encore faut-il savoir dans quelles conditions, s’il faut compter en jours ou en semaines. Voire en mois.

Dans les hotspots des îles italiennes, aujourd’hui, la rétention dépasse rarement deux jours et les étrangers ont parfois le droit de sortir en journée. Au fond, cette étape sert surtout à l’enregistrement des empreintes (pouvant donner lieu à des violences policières), puis les migrants sont envoyés sur la péninsule dans l’attente d’une réponse à leur demande d’asile, laissés libres de circuler, de tenter aussi le passage en France ou vers l’Allemagne – ce qui dérange peu l’Italie, c’est un euphémisme.

Vendredi, Giuseppe Conte a d’ailleurs refusé tout net d’inscrire l’expression « centres fermés » dans les conclusions du sommet. « Un changement symbolique », veut relativiser une source française.

https://static.mediapart.fr/etmagine/default/files/2018/06/29/capture-d-e-cran-2018-06-29-a-20-13-54.jpg?width=447&height=290&width_format=pixel&height_format=pixel#.jpg

Sur les #plateformes_de_désembarquement :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/703288

Managing migration : Commission expands on disembarkation and controlled centre concepts

Following the call by EU leaders at the June European Council, the Commission is today expanding on the concept of controlled centres as well as short-term measures that could be taken to improve the processing of migrants being disembarked in the EU, and giving a first outline of the possible way forward for the establishment of regional disembarkation arrangements with third countries. Regional disembarkation arrangements should be seen as working in concert with the development of controlled centres in the EU: together, both concepts should help ensure a truly shared regional responsibility in responding to complex migration challenges.

Commissioner Avramopoulos said: “Now more than ever we need common, European solutions on migration. We are ready to support Member States and third countries in better cooperating on disembarkation of those rescued at sea. But for this to work immediately on the ground, we need to be united – not just now, but also in the long run. We need to work towards sustainable solutions.”

’Controlled Centres’ in the EU

To improve the orderly and effective processing of those disembarked in the European Union, EU leaders have called for the establishment of ’controlled centres’ in the EU. The primary aim would be to improve the process of distinguishing between individuals in need of international protection, and irregular migrants with no right to remain in the EU, while speeding up returns.

The centres would be managed by the host Member State with full support from the EU and EU Agencies and could have a temporary or ad-hoc nature depending on the location. The main features of such centres are:

full operational support with disembarkation teams of European border guards, asylum experts, security screeners and return officers, and all costs covered by the EU budget;
rapid, secure and effective processing that reduces the risk of secondary movements and accelerates the process to determine the status of the person concerned;
full financial support to volunteering Member States to cover infrastructure and operational costs; as well as financial support to Member States accepting transfers of those disembarked (€6,000 per person).

To test the concept, a pilot phase applying a flexible approach could be launched as soon as possible.

The Commission will also provide a central contact point to coordinate among Member States taking part in solidarity efforts – as an interim measure until a fully-fledged system can be established in the context of the ongoing Common European Asylum System reforms.

See the factsheet on controlled centres in the EU here.

Regional Disembarkation Arrangements

In addition to the establishment of controlled centres, EU leaders have called on the Commission to explore the concept of regional disembarkation arrangements in close cooperation with #IOM and UNHCR and in partnership with third countries.

The objective of regional disembarkation arrangements is to provide quick and safe disembarkation on both sides of the Mediterranean of rescued people in line with international law, including the principle of non-refoulement, and a responsible post-disembarkation process.

The main features of regional disembarkation arrangements are:

Clear rules for all: To reduce deaths at sea and ensure orderly and predictable disembarkation, all coastal states in the Mediterranean should be encouraged to establish search and rescue zones and Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCCs);
Developed by the UNHCR and IOM who will help ensure those disembarked can receive protection if they are in need of it, including through resettlement schemes; or will be returned to their countries of origin if they are not, including through the assisted voluntary return and reintegration programmes run by the IOM;
Partnerships on an equal footing: work with interested third countries will be brought forward on the basis of existing partnerships and offered support tailored to their specific political, security and socio-economic situation;
No pull factors: resettlement possibilities will not be available to all disembarked persons in need of international protection and points of reception should be established as far away as possible from points of irregular departure;
No detention, no camps: Regional disembarkation arrangements mean providing a set of established procedures and rules to ensure safe and orderly disembarkation and post-disembarkation processing in full respect of international law and human rights;
EU Financial and logistical support: The EU is ready to provide financial and operational support for disembarkation and post-disembarkation activities as well as for border management with equipment, training and other forms of support.

See the factsheet on regional disembarkation arrangements here.

Next Steps

Ambassadors meetings tomorrow, 25 July, are expected to discuss the concept of controlled centres in the EU and the possibility of rapidly using an interim framework for disembarkations of those rescued at sea in the EU.

The work on regional disembarkation arrangements will also be touched upon at tomorrow’s meeting and is expected to be taken forward at a meeting with the IOM and UNHCR in Geneva 30 July 2018. Only once a common EU approach is agreed will outreach be made to interested third countries.

Background

The European Council in its conclusions of 28-29 June invited the Council and the Commission to swiftly explore the concept of “regional disembarkation platforms, in close cooperation with relevant third countries, as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)”.

The European Council also called for the development of ’controlled centres’ on EU territory – a new approach based on shared efforts for the processing of persons who, following their rescue at sea, are disembarked within the EU.

europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4629_en.htm

Avec ce commentaire reçu via la mailing-list de Migreurop :

Finis les hotspots ; place aux « centres contrôlés dans l’UE » !
6 000 euros la valeur d’un migrant débarqué et transféré dans un État membre ;
Des accords de « débarquement » avec les pays tiers (moyennant finances) …

… La Commission européenne fait preuve d’une imagination débordante

#disembarkation_platform #OIM #HCR

Et voici la traduction en français, si jamais: ▻http://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/routes-de-l-exil_l-affaire-de-l-aquarius-ne-changera-pas-les-politiques-migratoires/44202198

Viaggi Disperati: nel rapporto dell’UNHCR una panoramica del cambiamento nei flussi misti verso l’Europa

Nonostante sia diminuito il numero di rifugiati e migranti che lo scorso anno sono entrati in Europa, i pericoli che molti affrontano durante il viaggio sono in alcuni casi aumentati, secondo un nuovo rapporto pubblicato dall’Alto Commissariato delle Nazioni Unite per i Rifugiati (UNHCR), che illustra il cambiamento dei modelli dei flussi.

Il rapporto Viaggi Disperati rileva come gli arrivi via mare in ​​Italia, provenienti principalmente dalla Libia, siano drasticamente diminuiti dal luglio 2017. Questa tendenza è continuata nei primi tre mesi del 2018, con un calo del 74% rispetto allo scorso anno.

Il viaggio verso l’Italia si è dimostrato sempre più pericoloso: nei primi tre mesi del 2018 il tasso di mortalità tra coloro che partono dalla Libia è salito a 1 decesso ogni 14 persone, rispetto a 1 decesso ogni 29 persone nello stesso periodo del 2017.

Negli ultimi mesi si è inoltre registrato un deterioramento molto preoccupante della salute dei nuovi arrivati ​​dalla Libia: un numero crescente di persone infatti sbarca in precarie condizioni di salute, mostrando segni di estrema debolezza e magrezza.

Mentre il numero complessivo di traversate del Mediterraneo è rimasto molto al di sotto dei livelli del 2016, il rapporto dell’UNHCR rileva anche un aumento degli arrivi in ​​Spagna e in Grecia nell’ultima parte del 2017.

Lo scorso anno, la Spagna ha registrato un aumento del 101% rispetto al 2016, con 28.000 nuovi arrivi. I primi mesi del 2018 mostrano una tendenza simile, con un incremento degli arrivi del 13% rispetto allo scorso anno. A detenere il primato dei flussi migratori sono marocchini e algerini, ma i siriani rimangono il gruppo più numeroso che attraversa le frontiere terrestri della Spagna.

In Grecia, il numero totale di arrivi via mare è diminuito rispetto al 2016; tuttavia si è registrato un aumento del 33% tra maggio e dicembre di quest’anno con 24.600 arrivi rispetto ai 18.300 nello stesso periodo del 2016. La maggior parte proveniva da Siria, Iraq e Afghanistan, compreso un elevato numero di famiglie con bambini. I richiedenti asilo sbarcati in Grecia hanno affrontato lunghi periodi di permanenza sulle isole greche in condizioni drammatiche e di sovraffollamento.

A causa delle maggiori restrizioni imposte in Ungheria, molti rifugiati e migranti ricorrono a rotte alternative per spostarsi all’interno dell’Europa. Ad esempio, alcuni entrano in Romania dalla Serbia, mentre altri partono dalla Grecia e attraversano l’Albania, il Montenegro e la Bosnia-Erzegovina per arrivare in Croazia.

“Per rifugiati e migranti viaggiare verso l’Europa e al suo interno continua a essere molto pericoloso,” ha riferito Pascale Moreau, Direttrice dell’Ufficio per l’Europa dell’UNHCR. Si stima che oltre 3.100 persone abbiano perso la vita in mare l’anno scorso lungo le rotte verso l’Europa, rispetto alle 5.100 del 2016. Altre 501 persone sono morte o risultano disperse dall’inizio del 2018.

Oltre ai decessi in mare, nel 2017 ci sono state almeno altre 75 persone lungo le rotte terrestri che hanno perso la vita alle frontiere esterne dell’Europa o durante il viaggio in Europa, insieme a continue e preoccupanti segnalazioni di respingimenti.

“L’accesso al territorio e a procedure di asilo rapide, eque ed efficienti per chi cerca protezione internazionale sono fondamentali. Gestire le frontiere e garantire protezione ai rifugiati in conformità agli obblighi internazionali degli Stati non si escludono a vicenda né sono incompatibili,” ha dichiarato Moreau.

Il rapporto dell’UNHCR sottolinea anche gli abusi e le estorsioni subite da rifugiati e migranti per mano di trafficanti, contrabbandieri o gruppi armati lungo varie rotte verso l’Europa.

Le donne, soprattutto quelle che viaggiano da sole, e i minori non accompagnati rimangono particolarmente esposti al rischio di violenza sessuale e di genere lungo le rotte verso l’Europa e in alcune località all’interno dell’Europa.

Nel 2017, oltre 17.000 minori non accompagnati sono entrati in Europa. La maggior parte è arrivata via mare in Italia, dove il 13% di tutti gli arrivi è costituito da bambini che viaggiano da soli, una tendenza simile al 2016.

Il rapporto dell’UNHCR mostra tuttavia alcuni progressi positivi nel numero di persone reinsediate in Europa lo scorso anno, con un aumento del 54% dal 2016. La maggior parte di questi 26.400 rifugiati erano di nazionalità siriana (84%) e sono stati reinsediati dalla Turchia, dal Libano e dalla Giordania. Tra i Paesi europei, il Regno Unito, la Svezia e la Germania hanno accolto il maggior numero di rifugiati attraverso il programma del reinsediamento.

Un altro sviluppo positivo si è registrato alla fine dello scorso anno, quando l’UNHCR ha iniziato a favorire l’evacuazione dei rifugiati vulnerabili dalla Libia al Niger e dalla Libia verso l’Italia.

“Le operazioni di evacuazione dalla Libia e le maggiori opportunità di reinsediamento che abbiamo visto l’anno scorso sono ottime notizie. Restano ancora seri ostacoli che limitano l’accesso a percorsi sicuri e legali, incluso il ricongiungimento familiare, per le persone bisognose di protezione internazionale e chiediamo pertanto più solidarietà,” ha dichiarato Pascale Moreau.

Il rapporto fornisce infine raccomandazioni supplementari in merito alla necessità di rafforzare la solidarietà tra gli Stati in Europa e con i Paesi di primo asilo e di transito, per migliorare la qualità dell’accoglienza, specialmente nel caso di minori non accompagnati e separati e persone sopravvissute a violenza sessuale e di genere, e per garantire una migliore protezione dei bambini.

▻https://www.unhcr.it/news/viaggi-disperati-nel-rapporto-dellunhcr-panoramica-del-cambiamento-nei-flussi-
#mixed_migration #santé #femmes #réinstallation

Sur la #mortalité en #Méditerranée:

nei primi tre mesi del 2018 il tasso di mortalità tra coloro che partono dalla Libia è salito a 1 decesso ogni 14 persone, rispetto a 1 decesso ogni 29 persone nello stesso periodo del 2017.

Si stima che oltre 3.100 persone abbiano perso la vita in mare l’anno scorso lungo le rotte verso l’Europa, rispetto alle 5.100 del 2016. Altre 501 persone sono morte o risultano disperse dall’inizio del 2018.

#mourir_aux_frontières #morts #décès

Sur les #MNA, #mineurs_non_accompagnés:

Nel 2017, oltre 17.000 minori non accompagnati sono entrati in Europa. La maggior parte è arrivata via mare in Italia, dove il 13% di tutti gli arrivi è costituito da bambini che viaggiano da soli, una tendenza simile al 2016.

Annual Report on Migration and Asylum #2017

https://i.imgur.com/E98p5QL.png https://i.imgur.com/nSE7YXA.png https://i.imgur.com/He1taWo.png https://i.imgur.com/nSr4Fwm.png https://i.imgur.com/n2g3J1N.png https://i.imgur.com/wBOm8AR.png https://i.imgur.com/Y2vyvq2.png https://i.imgur.com/uofFjS9.png https://i.imgur.com/r5t5uaT.png https://i.imgur.com/cA6z4tM.png https://i.imgur.com/nKpnWb2.png https://i.imgur.com/rozEyhL.png https://i.imgur.com/WFdGmi0.png https://i.imgur.com/7knhyEY.png

▻https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/00_arm2017_synthesis_report_final_en.pdf
#arrivées #MNA #mineurs_non_accompagnés #retours #renvois #expulsions #intégration #regroupement_familial #visas #relocalisation #réinstallation #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #frontières_extérieures #remittances #développement #brain_drain #diasporas #taux_de_reconnaissance

Hotspots and Relocation Schemes: the right therapy for the Common European Asylum System?

The arrivals observed throughout 2015 have been concentrated in both Greece – accounting for more than 800,000 in 2015 alone – and Italy. These two “frontline” states, have been faced with the formidable logistical challenge of organising the first reception and identification of migrants. A full implementation of Dublin and EURODAC would have made the challenges even more difficult. Frontline states would have been responsible for fingerprinting all arriving persons, receiving their claims, and in most cases – given that Dublin assigns responsibility primarily to the state of first entry – processing them as well as organizing long-term reception or return.

Many of these responsibilities have remained virtual. A large number of those who arrived on Greek shores in particular have moved on to other Member States via the “Balkan route” without filing a claim or even being identified there. Failed identification in the first state of entry raised security concerns and rendered the Dublin system practically inapplicable vis-à-vis the frontline states – nothing new in respect of Greece, already “excised” from the Dublin system by the European Court of Human Rights in 2011. Destination and transit states reacted with a flurry of unilateral responses ranging from the temporary reintroduction of checks at internal borders, to the erection of barbed wire fences, to the announcement of national ‘caps’ on the number of persons who would be admitted to claim asylum.

▻http://eumigrationlawblog.eu/hotspots-and-relocation-schemes-the-right-therapy-for-the-common-
#hotspots #relocalisation

The Reform of Dublin III regulation

Another salient criterion is irregular entry (Art . 13 DRIII). Its effective operation would shift responsibility to States located at the Southern and Eastern borders of the Union – to an unmanageable extent in Greece in 2015 . This has not happened owing to the extreme i nefficiency of the Dublin system ( see below). Also, as acknowledged by the Commission , the fear of incurring overwhelming responsibilit ies has motivated border States not to register arriving persons – before, and more visibly during the “crisis” of 2015 – undermining the effective operation of the criterion.

A ce paragraphe est ajoutée une note :

See in particular April 2016 Communication (footnote 2 ), p. 4. See also European Commission (2007). Dublin II Evaluation (footnote 11 ), p. 9. The Commission has launched infringement proceedings against i.a. Italy and Greece for their alleged failure to systematically fingerprint irregular arrivals: see European Commission (2015). Managing the refugee crisis: State of play of the im plementation of the priority actions under the European Agenda on Migration, COM (2015) 510, 14 October 2015, p. 11 and Annex 6. Available from: ►http://www.refworld.org/docid/563201fc4.html .

►http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/571360/IPOL_STU(2016)571360_EN.pdf

Managing the Refugee Crisis: State of Play of the Implementation of the Priority Actions under the European Agenda on Migration (14.10.2015)

Effectively managing the pressure of migratory flows on some parts of the shared external Schengen border accompanied by steps to prevent secondary movements and the immediate return to the country of relocation of relocated persons found in another Member State. The other essential component is action to secure swift return, voluntary or forced, of people not in need of international protection and who do not therefore qualify for relocation. The p riority actions set out by the Commission focused heavily on the operational working of the se measures .requires both responsibility and solidarity on the part of all Member States. The rapid roll - out of the ’hotspot’ approach is providing support to the most affected Member States to ensure the proper reception, identification and processing of arrivals. In parallel, the measures proposed by the Commission and adopted by the Council to relocate 160,000 people in clear need of international protection . This will allow for a significant, if partial, reduction of the pressure on the most affected Member States. It is of crucial importance that the se parallel measures will now be fully implemented, with the fingerprinting of all migrants, the prompt selection and relocation of asylum applicants and adequate reception capacities,

►http://www.refworld.org/docid/563201fc4.html

Et voilà le résultat avec la mise sur pied des hotspots :

COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL on the State of Play of Implementation of the Priority Actions under the European Agenda on Migration (10.02.1016)

With strong, dedicated EU support, Greece and Italy started to set up – and in some cases completed – hotspots 3 to ensure screening, identifi cation and fingerprinting of third country nationals arriving irregularly at the external EU border. Registration is a crucial first step in the control and management of the flows. The hotspots are designed to ensure integrated teams of border agents operate in dedicated facilities, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Everyone arriving in the external borders should be registered, fingerprinted and have their documents checked against national and international security databases. Third country nationa ls arriving irregularly should then be channelled into one of three processes: the national asylum syst em, the European relocation system or the return system. The proportion of migrants whose fingerpri nts are included in th e Eurodac database has risen in Greece from 8% in September 2015 to 78 % in January 2016, and in Italy from 36% to 87% over the same period 4 . These figures are expected to improve further as the hotspots become more fully operational.

The rules on registration, identification, fi ngerprinting and security screening of arrivals need to be applied effectively and systematically.

Par rapport à la Grèce :

Reception capacities should be increased, supporting both humanita rian needs and better management of inflows – with EU funding already in place to help to achie ve swiftly the 50,000 target agreed at the Western Balkans Leaders’ Meeting. Standardised procedures for all stages of the process should be applied and full deployment of Eurodac fingerprinting machines completed. There must also be no gaps in EU support: the agencies should be present on all islands.

Et par rapport à l’Italie :

The Commission is ready to organise an innovative mobile hotspot team (with agents from Frontex and EASO) in Eastern Sicily to support the identification, fingerprinting and provision of information to migrants who cannot be disembarked in the designated hotspot ports, to help plug gaps in the fingerprinting and registration of migrants beyond the hotspots.

Both Greece and Italy have faced the problem of a refusal by migrants to be fingerprinted. National legislation will have to be amended as a matter of priority an d all operational steps taken to ensure that all migrants are finge rprinted – including as a last resort through a proportionate use of coercion – and all secondary movements of unidentif ied and unregistered migrants are avoided. Progress has been made, but this should be accelerated to ensure full 100% coverage of identification and registration of all entries by the March Eur opean Council.

To help manage the refugee crisis effectively, leaders at the February European Council should commit to: • The urgent completion of the set-up of hotspots in Greece and Italy to ensure the registration of and support to migrants and refugees in line with the principle that no one should arrive in the EU without having been properly registered and fingerprinted, with dedicated EU support to secure increased reception capacity and fully functioning asylum and return procedures;

▻https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016-85-EN-F1-1.PDF

Connais-tu les travaux du projet de recherche « Processing Citizenship », et notamment les contributions de Annalisa Pelliza ?

▻https://processingcitizenship.eu/team/annalisa-pelizza

▻https://easst.net/article/processing-citizenship-digital-registration-of-migrants-as-co-production-of-i

In this first stage of investigation, we are also interested in the chain of artefacts deployed at Hotspots that translate previous identities into new European-readable ones. This line of investigation is key in light of recent developments in the European migration landscape. The goal of the so called “Hotspot approach”, introduced in 2015, is to operationally support frontline Member States (i.e., Greece and Italy) in “swiftly identify[ing], register[ing] and fingerprint[ing] incoming migrants” (Commission, 2015a: 1). Hotspots are thus the first step in the procedure of sorting migrants into three alternative paths: “relocation” or “resettlement” to another Member State (for those identified as in clear need of international protection), or “return” to the country of legal residence (for those who are not deemed in need of protection). They can be conceived as “routers” that create “early entrenchments” (Star and Lampland, 2009) in sorting individuals, liminal situations in which past identities are assessed and translated into proto-decisions.

▻http://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/how_government_databases_create_european_readable_identities_for_migrants

On July 20 2015 – one month before the growing number of migrants crossing the Balkans pushed some countries to declare a state of emergency – the European database containing fingerprints of asylum seekers, called Eurodac, was rendered interoperable with national police authorities’ databases Europe-wide. From that moment, Member States’ police forces could query European data sources not only to grant citizenship rights, but also to preserve order in their national territory. An almost unnoticed technical switch in the Eurodac system marked a major shift in personal data exchange policy Europe-wide.

Ah, non, #merci @ktche !
Encore une bonne chercheuse d’origine italienne.
Comme des chercheuses que j’ai découvert il n’y a pas très longtemps : #Martina_Tazzioli et #Fiorenza_Picozza.

Question posée le 9 avril 2018 via la mailing-list Migreurop :

Dans le cadre de nos séances d’informations juridique pour les migrants en transit au hub Humanitaire de Bruxelles, nous entendons régulièrement que l’Italie ne mettrais pas systématiquement les empreintes prises dans le système commun mais nous ne trouvons rien de fiable sur ce sujet. Quelqu’un du réseau peut nous éclaircir sur cette pratique, svp ?

Voici la réponse reçue via la même mailing-list (auteure de la réponse "Tata) :

Il n’existe pas de réponse claire à cette question cruciale. Mais j’ai quelques éléments d’infos qui peuvent un peu éclairer. En l’espace de 6 mois, entre avant et après la mise en place des hotspots, le taux officiel d’identification est passé de 8 à 100%. Donc officiellement la réponse est non. Cette rumeur est donc devenue beaucoup moins vraie après la mise en place des hotspots.

Ceci dit :

– il y a des gens qui arrivent en petit bateau, ailleurs, ne se font pas intercepter et ne donnent pas leurs empreintes
– il y a des gens qui réussissent d’une maniere ou d’une autre à ne pas les donner, ou elles ne sont pas lisibles
– il y a des erreurs de la part de la police et des empreintes pas très nettes
– Les personnes sont enregistrées en cat. 2 et s’ils acceptent de rester en italie, une deuxieme fois en cat. 1. S’ils ne sont qu’en catégorie 2 (une seule prise d’empreintes), alors il arrive que les prefectures du moins en france n’en tiennent pas compte. Il arrive aussi qu’il y ait eu un laps de temps de plus d’un an entre ce pré-enregistrement et la demande d’asile dans un autre pays. Dans ce cas là, un article du reg dublin dit que si preuve de présence de 5 mois, alors plus de procédure dublin. Mais il n’est pas très clair s’il arrive que les personnes passent en cat normale de demandeur d’asile grâce à ça. Bcp d’amis dont c’est le cas se sont retrouvés sans soucis en ce qui concerne dublin.

Conclusion (toujours la même) : c’est une question de chance ! (mais celle-ci s’est drastiquement réduite avec les hotspots).

Implementing the Common European Asylum System: Commission escalates 8 infringement proceedings

The Commission is today urging Greece, Croatia and Italy to correctly implement the Eurodac Regulation (Regulation (EU) No 603/2013), which provides for effective fingerprinting of asylum seekers and transmission of data to the Eurodac central system within 72 hours. Effective implementation of the Eurodac Regulation is essential for the functioning of the Dublin system and EU relocation schemes. The European Commission sent administrative letters to Greece, Croatia and Italy in October. Two months later, concerns have not been effectively addressed. The European Commission has therefore decided today to send Letters of Formal Notice to Greece, Croatia and Italy (the first step of an infringement procedure).

▻http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-6276_EN.htm