Thessaloniki is a port city located in Southern Europe located at the crossroads between South–North and East–West. With a population of about 1.12 million people in the Thessaloniki Metropolitan Area, it is the second city in Greece. The city forms an important transit hub for migrants on the move on the Western Balkan route from Turkey to the Balkans and Central and Northern Europe.

In 2017, an estimated 1.2 million immigrants were living in Greece of which 100,000 to 200,000 lacked state authorization. In 2020, Eurostat reported that 47,295 persons were found to be present without authorization in Greece and 38.540 Non-EU citizens were ordered to leave the territory. Thessaloniki hosted about 16,000 of the country’s 115,600 refugees in 2019. In 2016, about 1,000 migrants arrived in Thessaloniki every week and about 25,000 migrants on the move lived in seven camps.

Over the last years, EU member states implement restrictive measures to end irregular migration towards the EU by closing of the so-called ‘Balkan-route’ through Greece and by the EU-Turkey common statement in 2016. Due to these restrictive bordering measures, refugees stranded in Greek territory. Approximately 10,000 people were transferred to the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki. Although most of the migrants are housed in state-run accommodation camps located on the outskirts of the city, informal solidarity initiatives and self-organizations are also arising in the city center.

In light of the above, we consider Thessaloniki to be an important transit city for migrants on the move in Southern Europe. The URBIMM project seeks to better grasp how the field of local policies and service provision towards undocumented migrants is structured and how this affects the mobility trajectories of migrants on the move in and beyond Thessaloniki.