More Than Work and Housing: Why Public Spaces Are Crucial for Integration
Op-ed by Tulya Su Güven
Migrating to a new country, in a sense, means building a life from scratch. A new language, new people, new routines, new ways of navigating your day-to-day life. Initially, some structure occupies your days and gives you a sense of routine, be it work, school or a language course. Still, once you step out of that classroom or the office, you might find yourself asking: Where do I go after work? Who do I laze around with on a Saturday afternoon? Where do I feel at home in this new place? The feeling of belonging steps in here, though it is an increasingly fleeting and fuzzy concept. For most of us, it forms naturally in our lives as we grow up. Family, classmates, neighbors, and childhood friends surround us, and the connections are formed and preserved within an around places; maybe a cheap bar where we spent mindless hours, or a park bench on which we shared our innermost thoughts with a close friend. These places and the people, together, weave a net of belonging that makes you feel at home, wherever that may be for you. But migration reshapes that net.
This is the socio-spatial dimension of life: the way our relationships are embedded in the environments that hold them. The path to feel belonging often begins here, in these small, ordinary moments; in new connections; in the feeling of being known; and in places where you can simply exist without having to justify or explain your existence... Yet this dimension is rarely acknowledged when we talk about integration. It might be in a park where parents exchange a few words and bites of food as their children play, or in the waiting room of a community center offering support to newcomers. Perhaps that acquaintance of a co-worker you once met at an afterwork hang-out becomes a new close friend, and maybe the mosque or church that you walked in when you knew no one else, or the student bar where you linger after class is where, for the first time, you feel at home.
The significance of these spaces becomes clearer when we consider how they are transforming. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his influential book The Great Good Place, introduced the idea of “third places” — cafés, hair salons, parks, libraries — open and accessible spaces woven into the everyday fabric of local community life. Already in late-twentieth-century America, he warned that these places were at risk of disappearing, edged out by an increasingly consumerist and individualist mindset. Today, those pressures have only intensified: digital interactions replace in-person encounters, lean workplaces leave little room for informal chats, and public spaces grow more commercialized.
These shifts affect everyone, but the consequences are particularly acute for newcomers; when access to such spaces becomes more difficult for all, it becomes doubly difficult for those who just arrived. Among their many roles, third places also serve as ports of entry for newcomers: spaces where one can slip into local life, gradually form connections, exchange experiences, and gather the small but vital pieces of information that make a new beginning possible.
In my own research with newcomer migrants in Belgium, I examine how these spaces shape experiences of settlement, create social ties, cultivate a sense of belonging, and connect the people to the socio-spatial life of their new localities. If these localities truly want to welcome newcomers, we need to think not only about housing and labor market opportunities but also about the socio-spatial architecture of everyday life. Do our neighborhoods allow encounters across ethnic, cultural and socio-economic differences? Are there enough public, affordable spaces where people can simply be without having to buy something or feel they need to fit in culturally or linguistically? Where and how do we build the connections that make us feel at home, and to what extent do the spaces around us allow this?
Belonging is a slow process that is spatial as much as social. It manifests itself through routine, proximity, and small gestures, and both deep and fleeting encounters that eventually ground you. And for newcomers, this might begin in the least expected places.
Tulya Su Güven
FWO PhD Fellow
BRISPO & BIRMM | Vrije Universiteit Brussel