A Visit of the Notkestraße 2 Refugee Housing Facility in Altona, Hamburg
The city of Hamburg is currently home to 50,000 refugees, 30,000 of which are housed in public shelters. Providing accommodation for the newly arrived in the shortest possible timeframe presented the city with a significant challenge. Today, Hamburg counts no less than 150 distinct locations dedicated to housing refugees. On 2 February 2017, La Fabrique de la Cité’s working group on refugees and European cities visited one such housing center, located at Notkestraße 2 in Hamburg’s Altona district.
Building temporary housing and a sense of community
Construction began in November 2015 for this large, modular complex subsequently inaugurated on 19 July 2016. With a total cost of 25 million euros, or approximately €35,000 per resident, the result is a group of nine buildings of several floors, each divided into four apartments outfitted with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and one kitchen. A social facility building hosts a team of eight social workers, who, along with three technicians, make up the staff of the center. Each social worker is specialized in a given field, whether schooling and education, integration and access to language, psychological assistance, or access to the labor market.
The complex is currently home to 648 inhabitants, most of them from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Eritrea. The center has opted to purposely mix refugees of different nationalities, discouraging large clusters of refugees with the same nationality, except when residents make special demands or in cases where special enmities between ethnic or religious communities militate against this choice. This thoughtfulness runs through the entire organization of the center: families are placed in ground-floor apartments so that they can look over their children as they play on the facility’s two playgrounds, a room is specifically reserved for LGBT women, and inhabitants may exchange rooms as they wish as long as security rules are complied with, an attitude representative of the center’s policy: to provide a defined set of guidelines and leave residents otherwise free to do as they please. Accordingly, each new resident receives instructions upon their arrival.
To promote engagement in the operation of the houses and a sense of community, the staff organizes house meetings dedicated to safety measures and potential problems encountered by the residents. “Some houses had a lot of people coming, in some others there was a representative of the family or the floor. This had a very positive effect, the environment is being watched over, they have learned they have to protect it, to keep it clean. It is a culture of good practices that they are exchanging about and adapting to”, says Athanasia Ziagaki, team leader at the Notkestrasse 2 refugee accommodation center.
Coordinating a response at the district level
The success of this facility, one of the best available refugee accommodation centers the city offers, is partly explained by its location, close to a kindergarten and education facilities as well as other necessary social infrastructure, with few neighbors. But the district itself undeniably had a part to play in this success: Altona has a long tradition of welcoming individuals banished from their hometown or homeland.
Imogen Buchholz, social welfare, youth, and health representative for the District Authority of Altona, notes that the district’s history, an independent town until 1937, was marked by strong competition against the larger city of Hamburg. To secure an advantage over this wealthier competitor, Altona granted its citizens rights that Hamburg’s inhabitants did not enjoy at the time, including a right to religious freedom. A sizeable Jewish community consequently settled in Altona, bringing new skills and technologies to the town as well as breathing new economic and cultural life into it. This history paved the way for the district to become a successful example of local integration of newly arrived populations. More recently, “In Germany, many people of the elder generation lived the experience of being a refugee at the end of World War II, there are many others who fled from the East of the territory to the Western areas of Germany, when the Russian army crossed the Eastern border. Those people know how you feel if you’ve lost your home, your job, your security and much more,” says Imogen Buchholz, who credits this historical heritage for Altona’s willingness to welcome, support, and integrate the refugees arrived since 2015.
In 2015 and 2016, the acceleration of the influx of refugees into the city moved the Hamburg administration to start providing formal support to the small groups of volunteers already actively helping refugees. Among the actions implemented by the Altona administration: transferring information, identifying needs and resources, building and fostering networks, and training volunteers on topics as varied as trauma, teaching German, or procedures for foreign citizens to access subsidized apartments. The district also worked to create opportunities for inhabitants and refugees to connect through sponsored neighborhood parties and festivals, concerts by refugee bands or orchestras during official events, … Additionally, the district planned and adjusted local and social infrastructure based on the needs of the incoming refugees, in cooperation with public institutions and local politicians. “Now our focus lies on building long-lasting structures for those refugees who stay longer or even forever in Hamburg. In cooperation with our partners, we analyze the present social infrastructure, adjust it and complete it if it is necessary”, says Imogen Buchholz. To that end, the administration mapped all the institutions offering services to refugees, whether through education, culture, sports, or healthcare.
Throughout this process, Altona always strived to ensure that its residents were consulted and onboard with the district’s plans. To ensure successful integration of the new residents into their neighborhood, the local administration thus made sure to inform neighbors whenever new refugee accommodation was in the works, through meetings where plans and images of the upcoming building were shown. Members of the local administration invited representatives of religious communities, schools, and sports associations to join these meetings, providing participants with the opportunity to express their concerns and exchange advice and good practices. The district authority invited interested participants to additional roundtable meetings, where they could continue to discuss the actions they were considering. This process spurred the creation of numerous supporter groups. “A very important thing is to appreciate the work those people do, to thank them and point out that the community will never succeed in the integration of refugees if the citizens don’t participate in these efforts”, remarks Imogen Buchholz.
Concurrently, the administration set out to learn more about the needs and resources of refugees, the languages spoken and education systems in their main countries of origin, and the health issues and trauma displayed by some survivors of war situations. Experts were brought in to help translate languages like Tigrinya, the language spoken in Eritrea, and to understand cultural specificities associated with the countries of origin of the newly arrived.
This array of actions, from involving local citizens to better understanding the needs of refugees and engaging with volunteers, provided the administration with the tools required to facilitate the integration of refugees. But this is long-term work, and Imogen Buchholz emphasizes the need for continued cooperation and sharing of information between all of the local public entities that handle the welcoming, housing, and integration of refugees in the long haul: “It is absolutely necessary to be a team player on this field. The members of my staff for social welfare, youth and health exchange their knowledge, for example, with those who are responsible for town planning”, says Buchholz.
La Fabrique de la Cité is a think tank on urban transitions and innovations. Find out more about our work here.
This article is part of La Fabrique de la Cité’s current research project, “From Asylum-Seeking to City-Making: Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in European Cities.”
