COURSE
CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY
University of Basel, Urban Studies, MA Critical Urbanisms, Fall 2023
QUOTING SPACE
SPACES FOR NON-CITIZENS
SPECTRUM OF CITIZENSHIP
WHAT DOES A LACK OF DOCUMENTS MEAN, SPATIALLY?
Visualizing and mapping the lived experiences of people with varying legal statuses can provide a deeper understanding of the spatial, social, and emotional dynamics that shape the urban fabric. This project, presented as an interactive map, connects us to the individuals through interviews and highlights the similarities and differences between their experiences based on their legal or undocumented status in Switzerland. Our aim was to make visible the disparities between three individuals below through in-depth participatory mapping.
Person X: An undocumented male, 45, from the Saharan region. He was previously granted an N-permit in Switzerland, but it was revoked, leaving him without legal documents (Sans-Papiers) for at least three years.
Person Y: A legally documented female, 35, and a Swiss national from the southern region of the country. She has been studying and working in Basel for the past two years.
Person Z: A male, 28, with a B permit (temporary residency). He is an international student from Eurasia who has been in Switzerland for the past seven months.
Initially, the project focused on Person X, analyzing his specific circumstances as someone with an undocumented status. This allowed us to examine spatial disparities, utilization of urban spaces, and unequal patterns of movement. The analysis highlighted limitations in accessing certain areas, differences in frequented locations, and the entitlements of inclusion or exclusion tied to his legal status. Narratives and detailed stories from the interviews connected to Person X became foundational. However, participatory mapping gains depth and representativeness through comparison, necessitating the inclusion of others with different legal standings.
In this sense, Person X was our focal point, serving as a lens through which we explored disparities. We then expanded the analysis to include comparisons with individuals who have either permanent or temporary documentation, such as Person Y and Person Z.
Participatory mapping
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Following Person X, we decided to interview two additional individuals, Persons Y and Z, to assess and compare their experiences concerning daily spatial restrictions, personal limitations, and emotional challenges. The resulting maps highlight distinct spatial patterns among Persons X, Y, and Z, illustrating the varying degrees of freedom or constraints each person faces in their movement.
After analyzing the data from these interviews and conducting participatory mapping, we created three draft maps showing how these individuals navigate the city, based on real and relative factors. We analyzed their movements through the lens of daily activities, such as social interactions, work, and education. This approach gave us a clear understanding of how differing legal statuses create unique experiences of borders, freedom, and citizenship. We then overlaid these outcomes in the final work, which includes simplified maps for Persons X, Y, and Z, along with one overlapping map to highlight their intersections and differences.
This project model aims to juxtapose different experiences of borders, freedom, and spatial narratives, exploring what legal or illegal status means for individuals holding distinct citizenship or non-citizenship positions. The participatory mapping process made these intersections even more visible through the lens of citizenship. For one individual, borders and restrictions are omnipresent; for another, freedom and mobility are limitless; and for the third, freedom is conditional, dependent on temporal factors. These maps reflect the meaning of intersections between various areas in the city, illustrating the diverse experiences of all three individuals.
During the interviews with these three individuals, we had the opportunity to compare the fragmentation of home, social life, work, education, and mobility patterns, primarily focusing on Klein and Gross Basel. To measure the differences in their experiences of the city, we first considered someone without permission, then someone with unlimited permission, and finally, someone with time-limited permission, based on the fact that their student permit will expire at a certain time. These statuses define how they access the city, navigate it, and experience it in terms of freedom, unfreedom, and conditionally relative freedom.
Throughout the work, we used layers to inform our mapping, considering factors such as spatial restrictions, citizenship, privileges, safety and security, sense of belonging, sense of community, family and friends, recreational time, freedom of movement, perceptions of borders and borderlessness, finances and economics, labor, work, education, and rights and emotions related to the city. Everyday life, shaped by these factors, connects all these scales according to each individual’s reality. At the same time, we traced the spaces of navigation, avoidance, and the timing of movements—both day and night—as well as places they could or could not go, or where they were either welcomed or not. These were sub-layers in the process.
On one hand, the maps explore how living anonymously and unnoticed every day affects a person's sense of belonging. On the other hand, they reveal the kinds of activities in their daily lives that strengthen these senses. Clara Wittich, in her master’s thesis, describes these individuals as those who have never had residence status (e.g., visa-free entry, expired tourist visa, unauthorized family reunification) and those who had residence status but lost it (Wittich, 2023:13). In this context, the maps illustrate varying degrees of entitlement, inclusion, or exclusion in public spaces, which shape each person’s sense of belonging. At the same time, they highlight the obstacles individuals face in accessing services, employment opportunities, engaging in community life, making friends, and seeking support.
Antonsich explains that the term “belonging” is vaguely defined. He argues that belonging should be understood both as a personal, intimate feeling of being “at home” in a place (place-belonging) and as a discursive resource that constructs forms of socio-spatial inclusion and/or exclusion (politics of belonging), which can assert, justify, or resist. In this context, the maps themselves become a form of belonging, exploring the full scope of the term “belonging” or “spaces of belonging.” They also examine to what extent people with undocumented status, Sans-Papiers, in Switzerland—who lack legal security and are often separated from their families—value their sense of belonging.
At this point, the study revolves around transnational-regional relations, family, and borders, focusing particularly on how undocumented individuals experience these dynamics.
The entire process revealed the complexities of legal versus illegal status in shaping spatial navigation patterns on both individual and public scales, based on conversations about movement, access, and privileges tied to these statuses in a comparative format. Analyzing these intersections highlighted how legal or illegal statuses influence everyday experiences, offering insights into the entitlements shaped by movement across different legal statuses in Basel. People with different statuses gave us a clearer perspective on the spatial experiences of Sans-Papiers individuals, shedding light on their lack of rights to the city. This reflection made us consider the friction between people and their relation to places, as the spectrum of citizenship for a non-citizen is reduced by the punitive nature of the law to the lowest level of spatial freedom. For us, this mapped the lives of Sans-Papiers individuals, investigating how much "freedom" they truly have in accessing the city.
In conclusion, we explored the impact of spatial restrictions on an individual without valid documents, comparing his daily experiences with those of two others: one with full freedom as a Swiss citizen and the other with conditional freedom as a temporary resident permit holder in Basel. This comparative approach helped us better understand the challenges faced by individuals without valid documentation in accessing spaces, achieving social integration, and fostering a sense of belonging while navigating the city.
Through participatory mapping, we visualized these experiences in a way rich with data, derived from qualitative questions designed to encourage conversation during the interviews. These maps encapsulate the lived experiences of different individuals and investigate entitlement, movement, and the overlapping intersections of diverse legal statuses within Basel’s urban life.
Readings by Mark Salter, exploring the nuances of legal statuses and entitlements within urban spaces, and Etienne Balibar, addressing the polysemic nature of borders—interpreted differently by different people—provided critical theoretical inspiration. These perspectives informed our focus on what a border is and how people experience and live in relation to it, forming the theoretical foundation of this project.
Person X
Person Y
Person Z
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