Drawing on Doreen Massey’s arguments about the politics of “throwntogetherness” we return here to the city of Hamburg, out of which she drew a series of lessons about the global politics of place (Massey 2005). These lessons, we argue, are all the more salient today amidst intensifying refugee reception crises worldwide. Citizens of cities such as Hamburg are being challenged to reflect anew on the material meaning of global city citizenship as they variously reject and accommodate those thrown together by border-crossing forms of violence. And refugees themselves are actively resisting exclusionary encodings of citizenship. In these kinds of context, we want to suggest that Massey’s attention to the time-space complexity of urban throwntogetherness offers a useful way of conceptualizing the resulting opportunities for the remaking of global city citizenship.

The contested character of citizenship in Hamburg has recently been re-articulated with special attention to the global composition of local throwntogetherness by a refugee protest and solidarity group called Lampedusa in Hamburg. Comprised largely of sub-Saharan African workers turned into refugees by the war in Libya, the group was thrown together in seeking asylum on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Many of them subsequently found their way to Hamburg after the Italian authorities offered money for the journey, along with a one-year humanitarian permit for the European Union (EU) Schengen area. Owing to the EU’s Dublin regulations, however, the refugees were not considered legal asylum claimants or workers outside of Italy. This negation of rights has formed the basis for their subsequent claims and protests. As we demonstrate in what follows, Lampedusa in Hamburg raises critical questions about global city citizenship – questions that we believe highlight Massey’s concern with how such cities pose – both physically and politically– “the question of our living together” (Massey 2005: 151).

Massey’s arguments about “throwntogetherness” – a neologism that deliberately combines words in a way that is meant to metaphorize the local jumbling together of global human geographies – begins with a series of reflections on the migration politics of a poster (see Photo 16.1).