Eurocities Social Affairs forum panel. From l-r: Lefteris Papagiannakis, vice-mayor of Athens; Belinda Pyke, director for migration and mobility, European Commission; Kees Diepeveen, deputy mayor of Utrecht; Ritva Viljanen, deputy mayor of Helsinki; Thomas Fabian, deputy mayor of Leipzig.
The migrant camp at Calais has been dismantled. In its place, local authorities are planning to install a theme park. The French government seems to have looked at the camp and asked itself: ‘what can be done about these people? - rapidly finding the answer ‘make them go away’.
The 1500 unaccompanied children stranded without care or basic shelter stand in grim testimony to the fact that, if one wants to respond to the crisis with some basic degree of humanity, that’s probably not the right question to be asking. Luckily, some city municipalities and local governments are beginning to ask not ‘what do we do about the migrants?’ but the more concrete question ‘where will they live?’
