Infrastructuring migrant urban citizenship: homeless EU migrants and service providers’ facilitation of care and rights in pandemic Copenhagen

Abstract This article examines how local service providers that homeless EU migrants in Copenhagen rely on restructured their work in the city during the pandemic, and what the impacts were for migrants’ access to resources and rights. Due to their everyday mediation of migrants’ care, resource access and rights, the providers are conceptualized here as a key element of the infrastructure of migrants’ urban citizenship. Theoretically this approach highlights not only the conditional, but always contingent, and thus, we argue, the infrastructured nature of citizenship. This article draws on interviews with providers and key municipal actors to identify three main spatial changes and their impacts: a shift away from communal urban spaces of care, an enhanced outreach and mobility of provision, and increased flexibility and novelty in shelter provision in the city. While all three provided opportunities for some extension of migrants’ urban citizenship, even if limited and fragmented, they did so to a different extent: The first two achieved such extension mostly through a provision of pandemic-time care, delivered primarily in parallel to (rather than through) an inclusion through the general welfare system. The last shift, on the other hand, furnished an opportunity to secure migrants’ rights in the city in the long run, since it provided a pathway to homeless migrants’ registration, and thus more secure status. These findings highlight the differential contributions of civil society actors’ specific approaches to their infrastructural work to the everyday making of migrant urban citizenship.