ABSTRACT
Maximilian Park in Brussels was the site of a makeshift refugee camp in 2015, when the institutional reception system was insufficient to provide shelter for arriving asylum seekers. Local volunteers stepped in, forming the ‘Citizens’ Platform’ and organizing the space. This spatial proximity, visibility, and approachability of otherwise systemically marginalized persons led to a specific configuration and ‘throwntogetherness’ of social actors with diverse motives to take part in the camp: students, retired persons, registered asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and refugees. I argue that this act of (self)care temporarily disrupted the paternalistic help-discourse, often observed in voluntary work with refugees, and the hierarchical dialectic of the ‘good, generous citizens’ as caregivers and ‘victimized passive immigrants’ as care receivers. The camp became a space of humanitarian care, but also a space of encounter and communal activities, where normative categories of citizenship and care blurred allowing for an alternative refugee reception.
