Sanctuary City Darmstadt

Sanctuary City Darmstadt investigates how a post-migrant city can shape safety, refuge, and participation in the face of increasingly restrictive state migration and social policies.

Central questions include: What does safety mean in a diverse society? What should one be safe from – and for what purpose? Which notions of safety are inclusive? What turns urban spaces into places of refuge, longing, and community? And what role do biographical and bodily knowledge, objects, architecture, and social relations play?

The project focuses on residents of Darmstadt’s Martinsviertel who often remain invisible in the public sphere: precarious, racialized, and migrantized individuals. Together with community organizers, professionals from social work, academia, theatre pedagogy, film mediation, architecture, and design, structures for a “city for all” are being developed.

Concrete goals include empowerment, skills development, networking, and participation by combining theory and practice, alongside public events for diverse audiences.

Prof. Dr. Onur Suzan Nobrega – Project initiator, Professor of Migration, Transculturality, and Internationalization, Faculty of Social Work, Hochschule Darmstadt, and theatre curator

Prof. Dr. Frank Lang – Professor of Representation, Design, and Conception, Faculty of Architecture

HoffArt e.V.