Urban refugee children's integration through a spatial lens: Everyday emotional geographies in two cities

Kagan, M.O. (2026). Urban refugee children's integration through a spatial lens: Everyday emotional geographies in two cities. Political Geography 131 e103643. 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103643.

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Abstract

With over 60% of refugees living in urban areas, understanding refugee children's urban citizenship and integration is critical yet remains underexplored. This article frames analyses of refugee children's urban integration by treating it as a fundamentally spatial problem, rather than primarily a legal or policy one. Situated within political geography, it argues that the urban neighborhood—through its infrastructures, institutions, and everyday encounters—operates as a key site where governance is enacted and where citizenship and (non)citizenship are practically negotiated. By foregrounding spatial relations, it makes visible dimensions of legal liminality that are often flattened in policy-centric accounts. Ambiguous legal status is experienced through access to schools, mobility constraints, and contested claims to public space, producing distinct everyday emotional geographies of belonging, fear, or uncertainty. Methodologically, the article proposes a mixed, child-centred spatial approach and provides two different examples of how it was used to understand urban refugee integration. In Kampala, teachers' perceptions and geospatial analyses of school and residential patterns show how location and school-level opportunity structures mediate educational access amid uncertainty. In Tel Aviv, residents' perceptions, children's accounts, and municipal and traffic data show how everyday encounters in contested spaces shape safety, recognition, and exclusion. Read in juxtaposition, the cases generate broader conceptual insights into how spatial politics, refugee policy, and urban inequality co-produce refugee children's integration, underscoring spatial analysis as essential for understanding children's urban non-citizenship.

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