Whereas the recent Refugee Studies with geographical approach often focus on the state-refugees nexus and living conditions in refugee camps or accommodation centres, we propose an analysis of the refugees' residential insecurity and institutional constraints, questioning how they generate and influence individual strategies of urban integration and resettlement. Hence, our approach is to compare the politically established, multi-scaled "spatial management" of refugees with the refugees' individual actions and decisions within their spaces of arrival. For this, we compare Marseilles' and Berlin's accommodation systems and urban specificities that come within two different national and local settings in terms of politics and migration patterns. The core question we address is to understand if and how these two barely comparable political and administrative systems can still lead to similar refugee resettlement patterns within urban spaces. The studies are based on the authors' intensive ethnographic fieldwork in both cities that helped carry out in-depth case studies on Syrian nationals.