Decolonial migrant claims to the metropole: views from two Mediterranean cities

In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the northern Mediterranean shores that are now thought of as European? This chapter looks at Barcelona and Salonika as Europeanised but not necessarily European cities. In examining their historically diverse urban centres, contact points of migration patterns and more recently sites of migrant settlement, we try to provide insight into different approaches to migrant claims to and contestations of both the cityscapes and their embedded memories. Eurocentric readings and makings of these cities have flattened out or erased their not-so-European urban and social fabric. Situated in decolonial de-linking and divesting from the ways in which these cities are moulded and modelled in Eurocentric epistemologies and imaginaries, this chapter looks at migrant and queer of colour politics and historicity that circumvent the pressure and strengthening of ethnic, racial, national, and post-national European mythologies by identifying with the city and its neighbourhoods while producing multicentred and intersectional narratives and spaces of belonging, becoming that de-Europeanise urban space.