Solidarity City

Solidarity city is a cross-border network of spaces and practices that revolve around a common political goal: supporting and helping migrants.

The presence of Solidarity City is necessary. Solidarity City offers arriving migrants the opportunity to integrate quickly into society, it is a sign of support for migrants and asylum seekers to create a future and openness. Migrants need food, space to stay, and useful information, but governments, police, and institutions deny refugees access, and migrants are thus deprived of space for infrastructure and access to mobile information. 

Solidarity city is both visible and invisible. It is visible to the outside world in specific contexts, providing food, clothing and shelter and other humanitarian efforts to migrants, and organizing identification procedures, language mediation, and health, social and legal assistance. However, It is invisible under specific objects, such as the police, who from time to time build physical barriers, such as walls and fences, around borders to hide the currents from public view. They are simultaneously temporal and spatial, and as time evolves they move to another space, or close and cease to function. 

We group all organizations in Solidarity City into four categories: grassroots, governmental, media and humanitarian. We show how ephemeral and experimental organizations operate in local spatio-temporal nodes. Some of these organizations are clustered together and interconnected, while others are scattered across the map of Unity City. We will discuss why some of these organizations come together, how they communicate, connect, and help each other, and why some are independent. We will define these four main sectors and explain why each of these organizations belongs to its own sector.

Solidarity city is constantly looking for new and diverse ways to support mobile populations and dismantle borders. The work of the organizations has been and still is, mobile and versatile, inviting people to come and start new projects.

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Definitions

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Grassroots

Created for a particular crisis， they allow migrants to speak directly about their experiences and the effect of policies and programs.Grassroots are often free to engage in confrontational direct action activities. It does not have an endowment or a large operating budget, grassroots are able to leverage community resources, including donations, but also in the form of labor, knowledge, and social capital to achieve their social change objectives.

Governmental

Organisations whose authority and agency derives from the  affiliation with either the Italian or French State.

Media

It includes websites, blogs or other outlets that provide information on the needs of migrants and to call for more attention and donations for migrants. 

Humanitarian

Organisations whose action are guided by the principles of ethics and impartiality, independence and neutrality, and is a non-profit, self-governing, membership-based organisations. add religion distinction.

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Solidarity City of Ventimiglia