Sanctuary in the hostile city? Supporting illegalized migrants in Rotterdam’s shifting infrastructural field

How does urban sanctuary take shape in politically hostile cities? Amid a global reactionary wave, municipalities are pushing back by supporting residents with precarious migration status. Yet the literature’s focus on high-profile progressive cities leaves the more fragile, ambivalent, and arguably more ordinary cases understudied. This paper extends existing scholarship by examining Rotterdam, where fleeting sanctuary policies have emerged despite far-right hegemony. Combining insights on migration infrastructures with field theory, we develop an infrastructural field perspective that conceptualizes sanctuary as the outcome of shifting power relations among state and non-state actors across multiple scales, where logics of refuge and enforcement coexist. Our findings identify three successive configurations of Rotterdam’s infrastructural field – voluntary alignment, forced alignment, and disalignment – through which sanctuary evolved from a locally negotiated humanitarian compromise into an increasingly fragile and contested practice under mounting national and local enforcement pressures. Rather than conceptualizing sanctuary as a stable municipal policy, we argue that it is continually produced, institutionalized, and eroded through shifting configurations of the infrastructural field. The paper concludes that Rotterdam’s experience may prefigure the erosion of sanctuary even in cities with sturdier solidarity infrastructures, urging us to rethink avenues of resistance amid growing hostility.