Incremental urban citizenship-making: Migrant serving organizations in Tel Aviv during COVID-19 and the politics of change in times of crisis

In this article, we explore urban citizenship-making processes for a status-less group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the case of migrant-serving organizations that aid African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv, we argue that urban actors found opportunities during the crisis to support migrants' urban citizenship, by providing access to rights and services that positioned them more than ever as deserving urban subjects. However, as these were enacted gradually, patchworked together, and with little public or political debate, we contextualize them as a phase in an incremental process of migrant urban citizenship-making, which has unfolded over the last two decades. We draw on interviews with Tel Aviv-based actors who worked to address pressing needs of the asylum seeking community during the pandemic, among them migrant-serving NGO workers, community activists, and city officials. We analyze the important advances made through incremental actions, while pointing to some of the challenges. We argue that the incremental process may have improved asylum seekers' access to urban rights and services during the pandemic, but it also failed to institutionalize change and confront systemic exclusions that reinforce their marginalization, thereby missing a window of opportunity for fundamental (urban) citizenship transformation that opened during the crisis.