Little Aleppo: The neighbourhood experiences of Syrian refugees in Adana, Turkey, ‘poor to poor, peer to peer’

Abstract

The current refugee regimes (national/international and EUropean) present significant limitations in the ways they deal with refugee flows. However, both refugees and the host societies are able to develop their own agencies and strategies against such confines. This article pieces together the place-making and reterritorialisation efforts of Syrian refugees, the impact of their arrival on and interaction with the local population in the neighbourhoods of Adana in Turkey that has hosted the largest number of Syrian refugees and have become known as ‘Little Aleppo’. The analysis of Syrians’ experiences that emerge in their new settlements sheds new light on the ways in which urban refugees are able to increase their own agency and choose the solution(s) most appropriate to their own particular circumstances by establishing ‘poor-to-poor, peer-to-peer’ contacts, rather than depending on the few choices offered to them through refugee regimes. The locals, in return, are motivated by the newcomers’ presence to reassess their own socio-economic positions and choices in the land of nation states, even though encounters with the refugees may at times elicit negative feelings.