Abstract
This chapter introduces the empirical context and analytical framework within which the volume is inscribed. We discuss how urbanisation processes are differentiated among smaller and larger urban centres and how they take up different forms in different world regions. We also note that migration is part and parcel of urbanisation processes and may be experienced as a challenge or as an opportunity. The chapter and the book are part of the broader southern turn in Urban Studies that invites us to pay more attention to developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as in drawing comparative perspectives with Europe and North America. The chapter explains how the book is organised and offers an overview of its contents. In the concluding section we also discuss the main analytical findings that bring together this volume and make a contribution to the extant literature on the role of migration in (re)making cities.
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1.1 Introduction
Migration is at the heart of urban growth, both as a lever of development and as a set of challenges for cities. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities (UN, 2018), with migration driving significant demographic, socio-economic, and cultural transformations. Over the decades ahead, we will see large urban centres continue to rise, particularly in Asia and Africa, while some small and mid-sized cities in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific may have to battle population decline. Increasingly, cities will welcome migration’s contribution to diversity and cultural vibrancy while at the same time struggle to provide services for rising migrant populations or to offer sanctuary for refugees.
Scholarly contributions to the links between migration and the city have often been compartmentalised. Some studies have emphasised the challenges that migration brings to cities (Caponio et al., 2018; Yeh & Chen, 2020); issues of irregular migration and asylum (Spencer & Triandafyllidou, 2020; Darling & Bauder, 2021); or, for instance, migrant entrepreneurship in the urban context (Liu, 2021; Rath & Swagerman, 2016; Räuchle & Schmiz, 2019). Others have focused on experiences of young migrants and issues related to the sense of belonging to the city (Fathi & Ní Laoire, 2021; Tzaninis, 2020) as well as migrants’ impact on city-making (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018). And yet others have focused on how migration is closely intertwined with urban development ultimately shaping the overall national socio-economic and political context particularly in settler colonial states like Australia (Levin et al., 2018) or Canada (Bonifacio & Drolet, 2017). These approaches have been seen as distinct and separate from work that looked into cultural diversity management and how cities use cultural diversity to brand themselves as attractive destinations for the creative class (Florida, 2002) or simply for international students and aspiring artists (Molho et al., 2020).
This book comes at the heels of an emerging scholarship that focuses on how cities respond to migration by emphasising the concept of conviviality as a strategy for valorising diversity, addressing tensions, and downplaying power imbalances (Berg & Nowicka, 2019). The book is complementary to recent work on how urban governance develops from the ground up, whether reactively or proactively, with a range of new civil society and private sector stakeholders to manage migration and migrant integration (Hillmann & Sammer, 2023). This collection of chapters though is different as it goes beyond the usual case studies of European and North American cities engaging largely with cities in different world regions including the global South.
The book is structured in four parts. The first looks at cities as hubs of cultural creativity, exploring the many dimensions of cultural diversity and identity as they are negotiated in the urban context. The second focuses on what lies outside the large urban centres of today, notably suburbs, while the third part engages with migration and diversity in small and mid-sized cities, many of which have adopted strategies to welcome growing numbers of migrants. Last but not least, the fourth part looks at the challenges and opportunities that asylum-seeking and irregular migration flows bring to cities.
This book reflects on cities as hubs of creativity but also as places of tension where different types of minorities and migrants meet and mingle. We look at top-down urban policies that aim to build on diversity or provide shelter, and to grassroots mobilisations advocating for solidarity and inclusion; we consider how cities negotiate the different levels of governance (local, national, and transnational) in managing transit migrants or refugee populations; and we examine the role of diasporas in urbanisation. We seek to curate insights from different world regions to better understand the relationship between migration and the city in the twenty-first century.
This book brings together case studies from around the world, including China, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Africa, North America, and Europe. The methodological approaches adopted in the different chapters are mainly qualitative but the disciplinary perspectives differ, ranging from Urban Studies and Sociology to Social Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Political Science. In the sections that follow, we review the related scholarly approaches and discuss how contributions to this volume offer new analytical and empirical insights into the set of research questions addressed in each part of the book.
1.2 Emerging and Established Global Cities: Instrumentalising Post-Migration Diversity
In the world’s major metropoles, urban diversity is formed by the interweaving of the history of a particular context and the diverse practices taking place at various geographical levels. This can take form via exchanges at a local scale – for example, in a neighbourhood – among transnational networks of migrants; or it may involve global economic and cultural networks propelled by large multinational companies, state authorities, and globalised elites.
Urban diversity is also often associated with, and even instrumentalised by, urban policies and politics aiming to attract more economic capital and qualified migrants and professionals. The result of this dynamic is materialised at the urban level by the emergence of new local-cosmopolitan realities, of which the ‘cultural districts’ and processes of gentrification are well-known examples throughout the world.
However, the other side of this globalisation of the ‘symbolic economy’ of culture at the urban level (Hannerz, 1992; Zukin, 1987) is that of socio-spatial inequalities often to be found in the inner city neighbourhoods adjacent to the cosmopolitan cultural districts. Cultural diversity eventually is closely intertwined with socio-economic inequality (Oosterlynck et al., 2019). The latter raises therefore the issue of access to and the sharing of resources, the affirmation of ‘rights to the city’, and even the growing phenomena of dispossession of the most vulnerable city-dwellers, migrants and non-migrants included.
This book is also informed by the recent ‘southern’ turn in Urban Studies or repeated calls for a ‘more global urban studies’ (Lawhon & Truelove, 2020). There is a growing body of research on Global South cities that explores an array of issues ranging from informality and the impact of rapid demographic change upon the built environment to local policies and campaigns for greater social and economic justice. A number of studies also focus on labour and lifestyle migration or various types of mobilities in the Global South cities that transform through economic development plans and urbanism such as in Seoul, South Korea, or Iskandar, Malaysia (Shin & Kim, 2016; Koh, 2021). While a post-colonial approach would question the use of concepts developed to help explain the urban phenomena of the north (López-Morales, 2015), in the countries of the Global South, we need to consider similarities and differences among cities and the ways in which they manage migration and migration-related diversity. Contributions to this volume seek to highlight how local, regional, national and transnational levels are interconnected and can best be understood as processes of what historian Cyrus Schayegh (2017) defines as ‘trans-spatialisation’.
While there have been numerous studies that have investigated the rise of cultural industries, especially in Asian cities, the questions of cultural pluralism and urban cultural policies and politics have tended to receive less sustained attention. Societies in the Americas and Europe are already urbanised by more than 75%, but the great urbanisation challenge is taking place in Africa and Asia, which are expected to go from, respectively, 40% and 48% of urban population to 56% and 64% of urban population (UN, 2014). In this context, cities are faced with the challenges of providing services such as healthcare, housing, education, and culture.
Through empirical studies carried out in cities spanning Asia, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Europe, contributors to the first part of the volume cast light on the complexity of cultural and ethnic diversity in cities. They highlight how urban life forges constant cultural innovations out of multiple traditions and how it actually can generate contradictory trends. Metropoles with large immigrant populations veer towards a certain homogenisation of the urban space, adopting common models of consumption (including those of consuming the city itself) as well as developing similar types of social and spatial segregation (Hannerz, 1992). Research on cities allows us to adopt finer and smaller geographical scales of analysis, such as a street or even the urban interstices, and provides information on the variety of modes of appropriation by migrant city dwellers, their capacities to build a sense of belonging to the city at a very local scale and sometimes bypassing the national community to which they may not have access (Assaf, 2020).
In an ever-more mobile and interconnected world, all cities are hubs of migration and diversity. They are diverse in their populations but also play a crucial role as points of reference and identity loci in a globally interconnected world. Indeed, migrant and minority integration happens at the local level even if it is regulated at the national level. Cities consequently play an important part in the (re)shaping of national identity and in the negotiation between the local, the everyday, and the transnational (Caglar & Glick Schiller, 2018). They are often the place where the national is actualised and negotiated.
Migration as a very complex process defines the urban and makes the city in more or less visible ways (Sharma, 2021). In contrast to the common assumption that migrants exist on society’s periphery, in some cases they immensely help cities to regain their former standing as migrants contribute social relationships, urban restoration, and economic development (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018). On the other hand, migration-related diversity also creates tensions and conflicts that need to be negotiated among different stakeholders including local government, civil society, private actors and migrants themselves. Indeed, migrants may negotiate these conflicts through contestation, collective mobilisation, or silence (Sharma, 2021).
The chapter by Jeremie Molho on ‘Urban Policy Modelling and Diversity Governance in Doha and Singapore’ points precisely to these complex dynamics. Molho argues that the transnational circulation of policy ideas has been increasingly advanced as a significant factor in the fabric of local diversity policies. On the one hand, the circulation of managerial concepts such as diversity management has contributed to the rise of neoliberal urban diversity models; on the other, city networks, international organisations, and transnational civic movements are pushing forward progressive urban diversity agendas. His study points to the role of such processes of policy modelling in shaping urban diversity governance. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in Doha and Singapore since 2018 and on the analysis of these cities’ policy documents. It shows how transnationally circulating references and norms contribute to shaping local diversity governance frameworks and how both cities strive to position themselves as diversity governance models. The author argues that their modelling strategies rely on the spatial and organisational compartmentalisation of distinct diversity frames. This allows to minimise policy tensions, alleviate external critiques, and craft local experiments that can be projected as models on the world stage.
Loren Landau’s contribution – entitled ‘Governing Diversity Beyond City and State: Epistemic and Ethical Challenges of African Urbanisation’ – casts further light to these tensions. Levying ‘bespoke’ data collected in 2020 across three African cities and an existing corpus of work on African mobility and urban governance, the chapter forwards three primary points. First, while recognising the potential importance of state actors in diversity management, it warns us that the normative biases associated with state sovereignty lead to analytically over-privileging the state. Urban spaces often present amalgams of regulatory systems working at different spatial scales and moral registers, argues Landau, and invites us to pay more attention to those. Second, capturing the actors involved in managing mobility and diversity within cities is critical, but cities’ socialities are not spatially bound. The diversity of spatial and temporal orientations at work in cities means people are part of moral and material economies that shape their relationship to space, institutions, and each other. With this in mind, the chapter offers a third challenge to the normative presumption of inclusion, highlighting not only its elusiveness but the potential hazards it poses for urban residents’ life projects. The author argues for an approach to urban policymaking that conceptualises the urban not as a singular, bounded space, but as a series of constellations and corridors: sites linked to each other within and beyond the city through multiple institutional, economic, and moral economies. Such an approach not only reveals the horizonal intersections of multiple policy spaces, but gives cause to reconsider the almost universal call for localised inclusion, visibility, and representation.
Bringing these insights together Amin Moghadam, in his chapter on ‘Urban Diversity and Spatial Justice: A Critical Overview’, seeks to demonstrate the complexity of urban diversity as a locus of negotiation and tension between diverse social and political players. In the cities of both the Global South and the Global North, whether under authoritarian regimes or liberal democracies, the undeniable fact of diversity is now an integral feature of political discourse and action, argues Moghadam. However, the political use – instrumentalisation, even – of urban diversity is often selective, partial, and sometimes discriminatory: experiences seen by inhabitants as being cosmopolitan and diverse are not always those recognised and valued by urban governance. The tension between a political vision of diversity and diversity as experienced from below, on a day-to-day basis, can contribute to processes aimed at making certain social groups visible or invisible at the urban level, i.e., those who deserve to be recognised and represented by the political authorities and those who remain excluded from the political representation of diversity.
1.3 Migration Outside the Urban Core: Small and Mid-Sized Cities
Migration is typically understood as an urban phenomenon affecting larger cities. In countries with highly managed immigration systems, efforts have increasingly been made by different levels of government to encourage migration to smaller centres. Often smaller cities view international migration as one way to grow the local population and economy, and a range of stakeholders – including local organisations, employers, and community members – mobilise to welcome migrants to their communities. Despite this, many smaller cities continue to struggle to provide the services, housing options, and employment opportunities that migrants need. There is clearly a need to better understand the experiences of smaller communities as destinations for migrants building on recent studies on migrant economies developing not only in large urban centres but also in mid-sized cities (Rauchle & Schmiz, 2019; Glick Schiller & Caglar, 2009; Hatziprokopiou et al., 2016).
In this part, the volume brings together studies from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Europe, integrating them into a rich comparative framework. In her chapter ‘Multi-level Migration and Multiculturalism Governance Meets Migrant and Refugee Agency in Regional Australian Towns’, Martina Boese takes stock of the many federal, state, and local policies in Australia that have encouraged migration to, and settlement in, regional towns and cities over the past decades. She also points to the accompanying local multicultural and intercultural policies developed to better accommodate these increasingly diverse populations. And yet, argues Boese, despite several policy programmes and related research, many research and policy questions remain unanswered. Boese is particularly concerned with the increasingly instrumentalised economic narrative supporting such migrations that tends to overlook the migrants’ experiences with settlement in small and mid-sized cities outside the gateway metropoles. She also points to the different experiences of refugees and migrants, and the problems involved in transforming current regional refugee settlement into population policies. Last but not least, taking stock of her own recent research on multi-local settlement, Boese notes that ‘successful settlement’ can involve internal secondary mobility in line with the life course perspective and changing needs of migrants or refugees and their families.
Furthering our insights into the experiences of second-tier cities, Yolande Pottie-Sherman compares the realities of urban Atlantic Canada with cities in the US Rust Belt. In line with Martina Boese’s critical observations, Yolande Pottie-Sherman also notes that there is an increasing interest not only in Australia but also in Canada and the US to use immigration to offset demographic and economic challenges associated with aging or shrinking populations, slow growth, and economic decline. The cases of Atlantic Canada and the US Rust Belt are compared in this chapter with a view to examining two different approaches to immigration and uneven development. In Canada, notes Pottie-Sherman, place-based immigration programmes explicitly encourage immigration to Atlantic Canada while immigrant integration is supported through ‘top-down’ federally-funded settlement, multiculturalism, and citizenship programmes. Conversely, in the US efforts to use immigration to address spatial inequality are happening outside of formal policy channels from the ‘bottom up’, driven by networks of local business associations and non-profit organisations that increasingly promote immigration as a tool of economic revitalisation in the Rust Belt. Drawing on several years of fieldwork in both regions involving participant observation at immigration summits and conventions, stakeholder interviews, and media and document analysis, this chapter considers the implications of these diverging approaches, noting how realities on the ground are in constant evolution. The chapter points to the need to reconsider immigration as a tool for addressing uneven regional development.
Similarly to Australia, Canada, and the US (as well as other OECD countries), New Zealand has joined the race of attracting immigrants to its small and mid-sized towns in the effort of boosting their demographic and socioeconomic growth. In their chapter ‘New Zealand’s Small-Town Disruptions and the Role of Immigrant Mobilities’, Ashraful Alam, Etienne Nel, and Sammy Bergen critically investigate the experiences of the Southland and Otago regions in New Zealand. The authors note that such small towns and their populations perceived their urban enviornments as stable and largely monocultural. They were thus ill-prepared to accept new cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. While immigrants were seen as desirable in contributing to socioeconomic and demographic growth, realities on the ground were challenging. Drawing on empirical research in New Zealand’s Southland and Otago regions, the chapter discusses immigrant settlement patterns and their local impacts as disruptors to the previous realities and points to the tensions created. The chapter reflects on the notion of resilience for such small and mid-sized cities in considering how they can couple immigration with their socioeconomic and demographic development.
Bringing these insights together, Melissa Kelly reflects on whether second- and third-tier cities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US offer a welcoming environment to new immigrants. Kelly also notes the instrumental narrative of immigration as a solution to problems of depopulation and economic decline as well as the manifold efforts to make these, previously homogenous, small and mid-sized cities more welcoming to new arrivals. She notes that such welcoming initiatives should not be understood only as policies as they also encompass narratives and discourses as well as practices on the ground initiated by civil society, local governments, or even employers. Unfortunately, as Kelly points out, such initiatives have often had limited success as migrants initially settled there subsequently moved on to larger urban centres. The author points to the systemic issues and inequalities that hamper such policies and practices, to the often ‘conditional’ character of the welcome narratives, and to the overall challenges that small and mid-sized cities face that are simply reproduced when it comes to immigrants and their families.
1.4 Suburbanisation and Migration
The third part of the volume offers a closer look to the intersection between global migrations and suburban transformation. Suburbanisation as a global phenomenon has presented multifaceted patterns of change in various contexts. Migrant settlements in suburban spaces add more complexities to suburbia by bringing diverse demographics, (inter)cultural practices, new built forms, and new meanings of space and community. These migrant spaces challenge the conventional organisation of ‘suburbia’. Governments, practitioners, and academics must often reconcile the competing needs of diversity and urban growth played out in changing land uses and physical forms (e.g. neighbourhood character and heritage preservation), competing claims for space and rights to the city (e.g. who has access to resources), and considerations of equity and social inclusion (e.g. who belongs to and in the community?). In this part of the book we look at the links between everyday suburban life, urban governance, and economic growth.
This section includes a closer look into ‘Settlement and Rental Housing Experiences Among Recent Immigrants in the Suburbs of Vancouver: Burnaby, Richmond, and Surrey’, authored by Carlos Teixeira and Anabel L. Salinas. The chapter explores the settlement and housing experiences of recent immigrants in three culturally diverse and fast-growing Vancouver suburbs as well as the interactions between suburbanisation processes and migrants’ housing strategies. Teixeira and Salinas note that securing good-quality, affordable housing is key to the successful resettlement and integration of immigrants in the suburbs of Vancouver. Drawing on data from questionnaire surveys administered to 137 immigrants renting in the suburbs of Vancouver, the study points to the tensions involved at both the material and social levels. Given the escalating housing costs in the rental and homeownership markets and low vacancy rates, most participants had difficulties finding housing. Participants coped by sharing housing with relatives or friends to save money or by renting a basement. They also reported financial stress, with most living in unaffordable rental housing. The low vacancy rates in Vancouver’s suburbs have created a ‘landlord’s market’ and about one-third of participants reported perceived discrimination based on income, large family size, immigrant status, and general mistrust of their cultural, religious, racial, or ethnic backgrounds. The chapter concludes by offering some important policy reflections on the tensions between ambitions of multiculturalism and growth in suburban areas and the difficulties experienced by immigrants in settling in those peripheral areas of large urban centres.
Looking at migrants’ experiences in suburban areas, Jie Shen’s chapter, ‘Stuck in the Suburbs? Socio-spatial Exclusion of Migrants in Shanghai’, points to the importance of migrants’ residential location in their social integration process. Shen notes that in China large numbers of migrants join an increasing urban population in the country’s major cities in search of better work and living conditions. However they often end up settling in the disadvantaged urban periphery. By examining the place effects of suburban residence on the incorporation of migrants into cities, the study shows how location is intertwined with all aspects of settlement. Drawing on a survey undertaken in Shanghai, the author finds that, after controlling for the effects of individual characteristics, migrants living in the suburbs not only earn less than their counterparts in the central city but are also less likely to construct inter-group and diverse social ties to aid future prospects. To make matters worse, they have little chance of moving to the central locations where there are more resources and instead are likely to be trapped in the suburbs. In both Teixeira and Salinas’s and Shen’s chapters the evidence shows that suburban settlement can be particularly challenging for new immigrants, leading to their exclusion rather than inclusion in the urban fabric.
Cathy Yang Liu and Rory Renzy examine the interaction between suburbanisation and migrant entrepreneurship in the US. The authors note that the pattern of migrant and minority spreading to previously ‘all-White’ suburbs has been documented in recent research. Their study focuses specifically on immigrant-owned businesses and their substantial growth over the years that has made them important actors serving unmet markets, hiring workers, and generating local economic development. The chapter uses national business datasets to examine the spatial patterns of migrant entrepreneurship and the performance of employer firms as indicated by the number of firms, employees, sales and receipts, and total annual payrolls for cities and suburbs over time across a broad array of Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Atlanta serves as a case study site for more detailed analysis on the dynamics of suburban ethnic economy. The chapter points to the important dynamism of suburban ethnic businesses and makes suggestions for supporting such businesses as well as preserving ethnic identity in suburban areas of large cities.
Concluding this part, the chapter by Zhixi Zhuang, ‘Suburban Migration: Interrogating the Intersections of Global Migration and Suburban Transformation’, looks at the importance of suburbanisation as a global phenomenon that emerges in multifaceted patterns of evolution and transformation in the different national and regional contexts. Zhuang argues that migrant settlements in suburban spaces add more complexities to suburbia by bringing diverse demographics, (inter)cultural practices, new built forms, and new meanings of space and community. These migrant spaces challenge conventional suburban socio-spatial organisations of land, infrastructure, and resources as well as suburban governance, planning, and design. The manifestations of migrant suburbs where diversity and urban growth are juxtaposed inevitably present profound implications for governments, practitioners, and academics in a myriad of ways, such as changing land uses and physical forms (e.g. neighbourhood characters, heritage preservation), competing claims for space and rights to the city (e.g. who has the access), and increasing awareness of equity and social inclusion (e.g. who belongs to and in the community). Zhuang points to the importance of considering the production of space as an analytical framework as well as a policy perspective. She applies the theory of the production of space to cast light upon the narratives of everyday suburban life, diversity management, growth and development, policy and governance, and socio-spatial (in)equity and (in)justice across different suburban contexts in different world regions.
1.5 Bordering Migration in Cities
The final part of this volume builds on the previous chapters, analysing the manifold challenges and opportunities involved in immigration towards urban contexts but shifts the focus on a different population cohort. Instead of focusing on economic migrants who arrive legally and oftentimes in a highly regulated way to small or large urban centres, chapters in this section look at asylum seekers and (irregular) migrants who arrive in large numbers at border cities. Rather than adopting a migration or asylum governance approach, contributions focus on border cities as urban spaces of transit and in transition.
Such cities are usually small or mid-sized urban centres that end up becoming important transit hubs and temporary settlement spaces for refugees, asylum seekers, and ‘irregular’ migrants seeking opportunities to migrate onwards. Due to the protracted nature of migration journeys and associated risks, these transit migrant populations often stay in these cities longer than initially envisioned, making these cities transit-turned-host spaces. As a result, these cities are also confronted with the arrival of a diversity of service providers acting in reception and integration fields ranging from international humanitarian NGO workers, state officers, international organisation employees, journalists, researchers, and smugglers. Short- or long-term stays of these actors lead to physical, economic, and socio-cultural transformations in urban neighbourhoods and border towns. These can make some pivotal fields at the local level – housing/sheltering, employment, or education – contested fields regarding the entanglement of diverse stakeholders involved and dynamics changed over time (Werner et al., 2018). In addition, prevailing restrictive border policies may subject these cities to top-down physical changes such as construction of border walls, accommodation centers, and camps or the deployment of extra security measures, or even the creation of cemeteries for abandoned corpses of migrants. Moreover, the local governance structures are influenced by all these developments. Municipal actors like mayors may need to engage in more interactions with the national scale (e.g. ministries or directories) or transnational scale via city networks or humanitarian actors, leading to institutional changes or empowerment (Betts et al., 2021) and may take advantage of new opportunity structures to develop their leadership (Sabchev, 2021).
This part of the volume draws on studies from the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. Starting with a study on the city of Glasgow, UK, in his chapter entitled ‘The Urbanisation of Asylum’, Jonathan Darling explores the growing prominence of urban contexts, urban authorities, and urban politics in shaping debates on asylum and refuge that have traditionally been orientated around the nation-state. Glasgow is at the heart of the UK’s response to refugee displacement and thus offers a unique case study – quasi a natural laboratory. Based on long-term qualitative research on Glasgow, this chapter examines three trends in contemporary urban configurations of asylum. First, how asylum seekers and refugees have been positioned within urban economies of value extraction. Second, how cities have been sites of considerable experimentation over the containment of asylum seekers and refugees, with flexible infrastructures of accommodation being one key development. Third, the frictions of government and solidarity that urban asylum foregrounds. These are frictions between local and national governments, on the one hand, and between community initiatives to support refugees as neighbours and the patterns of bordering practiced by state and non-state actors, on the other. Bringing these three findings together, the author highlights the growing importance of cities in shaping how we understand asylum and its political possibilities.
Following on the heels of Darling’s chapter, Estella Carpi discusses ‘urban-itarian’ ecologies in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan after displacement from Syria. During the last decade, argues Carpi, displacement from conflict-ridden Syria has converged with an increasing emphasis on the ‘urban-humanitarian’ nexus. Humanitarian actors have focused on urban livelihoods as refugees mainly move to cities in search of employment. The formerly predominantly camp-based mode of assistance has by now turned into support for urban refugees, internally displaced people, and local urban dwellers in the region. It is within this framework that the politics of international humanitarianism have emerged, generating urban-humanitarian (notably ‘urban-itarian’) ecologies in cities and towns in the countries neighbouring Syria.
Drawing on different case-studies since 2016 in six sites in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan – all primary destinations for refugees from Syria – the study shows how ‘urbanising’ humanitarianism, when insufficiently responsive to local specificities, has resulted in poorly attuned humanitarian programming. The author offers a long set of fieldwork observations in multiple urban sites, highlighting how both refugees and local urban dwellers develop complex livelihood strategies, building their worlds across the urban and the rural. The working concept of ‘urban-itarian’ does not intend to mark those spaces as exclusively or predominantly urban; but, rather, as an interface where humanitarian and urban actors and negotiations end up marginalising or assimilating the rural and the peri-urban, regardless of environmental complexities.
The next chapter in this section, ‘Sheltering Extraction: the Politics of Knowledges Transitions in the Context of Shelter Organisations in Mexico and the Netherlands’, focuses on Mexico and the Netherlands. Cesar E. Merlín-Escorza investigates two non-profit, non-governmental shelter organisations (Casa para Todes and Iedereen Welkom) in two border cities in Mexico and the Netherlands. Both organisations are based on volunteering schemes and aim to assist people often addressed through different and interchangeable labels such as ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, and ‘asylum seekers’. The chapter situates both shelters as spaces characterised by the transit and transition of people, their knowledges, and experiences. It discusses the implications regarding the naturalisation of the shelter as a space for doing fieldwork and the processes through which the knowledges and experiences of people being sheltered are differentiated and transformed for academic purposes.
This chapter offers (auto)ethnographic insights originated at both places to reflect on the notion of ‘extraction’ involved in both sheltering and migration research. In so doing, how people’s knowledges and experiences are amplified and channelled through the production of academic knowledge and how volunteering, as an entry point for ethnographic research, serves this purpose are problematised. Reflections point to the imbrication of sheltering practices with the ‘Northern’ migration apparatus of academic knowledge production in which the shelter as a space for doing migration research is given by longstanding colonially-shaped relations. A final suggestion is given to researchers interested in studying sheltering practices to design their research in a way in which social transformation is served by doing research.
The contributions in this part of the volume are brought together by Zeynep Sahin Mencutek in ‘Temporality and Permanency in the Study of Border Cities and Migration’. This chapter synthesises the analytical reflections from the three previous ones and links them with broader scholarly research on forced displacement, asylum, and cities. Sahin Mencutek argues that the intersection of governance approaches with urban and humanitarian studies provides rich insights into, and novel concepts about, displacement and asylum. She argues that the arrival of diverse actors related to asylum leads to physical, economic, and socio-cultural transformations in urban neighbourhoods and border towns, sometimes temporal, other times permanent. The chapter then identifies four main dynamics at play in the urbanisation of asylum: extraction, frictions, temporality, and spatial changes. It concludes with questions to consider in developing a more elaborated research agenda on politics of urban and asylum from a relational perspective.
1.6 Urban Diversity and Complex Migration Patterns: Analytical Reflections
Contributions to this volume and the chapters of Moghadam, Kelly, and Sahin Mencutek point to several new developments with regard to urbanisation processes and the ways in which migration contributes to the development of large and smaller urban centres and shapes their social, economic, cultural and political realities.
The first set of chapters summarised and further elaborated by Amin Moghadam (Chap. 4, in this volume) invite us to reflect on the relationship between urban diversity, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. We observed two types of relationships between urban governance and the migration/diversity nexus. First of all, diversity has clearly become a matter to be regulated by urban governments rather than an issue that pertains to the national policy realm only. Large cities and particularly cities that aspire to be cultural and economic regional powers develop a range of policies to regulate as well as promote migration-related diversity. In fact, Moghadam (ibid.) speaks of the governmentality of diversity to point to the many ways in which diversity is governed from the top down. Through the work of Molho (Chap. 3, in this volume) we note that cities instrumentalise migration and post-migration diversity in compartmentalised and often antithetic ways. The diversity of highly skilled migrants, artist expats or businesspersons, or international students is supported and promoted. Cities put in place both hard infrastructure (buildings, transport systems, public spaces) and soft infrastructure (cultural programmes, political discourses, and vernacular narratives) to promote diversity. They embrace this type of cultural diversity as a part of the identity of the city as a cosmopolitan capital.
At the same time, diversity arising from lower-skilled migration and labour-intensive sectors of the labour market is highly controlled and regulated through different types of hard and soft infrastructures (Molho, Chap. 3 and Moghadam, Chap. 4, in this volume). Here the buildings are not museums or galleries; they are dormitories for low-skilled workers, kept out of sight, in separate city areas. That diversity is not celebrated or embraced. It is rather highly controlled and suppressed. Related public and policy discourses are silent on this diversity which is pushed to the margins of the urban – both the planning margins, as these neighbourhoods are located at the periphery of the city, and the symbolic margin, as such diversity is seen as foreign and transient, not belonging to the city.
However, contributions to this first part of the volume also point out that there is a bottom-up vernacularisation of diversity within the city that arises through the everyday work and life of migrants as well as through artistic practice that may involve those lesser skilled foreign workers confined in the dormitories. Such urban diversity flourishes at the urban scale, within the city or between cities through city networks that operate independently from the national level and the national policies (see also Landau, Chap. 2, in this volume).
Contributions to this volume suggest that we should not ask whether urban migration-related diversity is transnational or cosmopolitan but rather we should adopt a multiscalar perspective looking at the translocal connections and the transnational cultural capital that migrants generate at multiple levels, whether vernacular or of ‘high culture’ (see also Meinhof & Triandafyllidou, 2006).
The second part of this volume focuses on the challenges and opportunities that migration and related ethnic and cultural diversity bring for small and mid-sized cities. The narrative here is one of a welcome, but it disguises a dominant instrumental concern: welcoming diversity is a necessity because migration is crucial for the demographic, social, and economic survival of many of these small and mid-sized urban centres. The question of infrastructure arises here with more potency as these cities and towns do not have the economic robustness to produce large scale physical infrastructure or the social vitality to produce social networks and cultural spaces of welcome.
Reviewing several welcoming initiatives – notably local policies and practices – Kelly (Chap. 8, in this volume) and several of the contributors (notably Alam et al., Chap. 7; Boese, Chap. 5; Pottie-Sherman, Chap. 6, in this volume) point to the importance of recognising the internal diversity of the welcoming community as well as the diversity of the ‘immigrants’ who are welcomed. They also point to the power relations involved in the welcome as any welcoming initiatives are unavoidably structured by economic inequalities and social and cultural barriers often ignored or pushed under the carpet when welcoming initiatives are designed and implemented.
Both large urban centres and small and mid-sized cities are seen to share an instrumental approach to migration and diversity as they need it for different purposes. Among the former, to increase their economic and symbolic power; among the latter, for mere demographic and socio-economic survival. However, in the latter the welcome is less conditional and more long-term as immigrants and their families are invited to stay, while in the large urban centres the instrumental and highly unequal character of the welcome may be more transient, subject to changes in politics and policies.
Contributions in the third part of the book show that suburban areas have not invited migration or sought to welcome it, but rather migration and the resulting cultural and ethnic diversification have just ‘happened’. As migrants sought more affordable housing or new business opportunities, suburban areas around large cities have developed their own diversity landscapes, without, at least initially, any particular urban design or plan. Urban planning and local government have rather emerged reactively, in response to the migrant and minority populations settling in the suburbs. While often these suburbs are seen to lack services and infrastructure (particularly housing) and to provide limited networks for new migrants (see also Shen, Chap. 10; Teixeira & Lopez, Chap. 11, in this volume), in others they become cultural and economic centres in their own right (see Liu & Renzy, Chap. 9, in this volume). Interestingly, migration and diversity here are not instrumentalised – nor hyper-governed, as Moghadam (Chap. 4, in this volume) argues with regard to large urban centres. They are rather emerging autonomously and revendicating their own urban spaces of middling diversity. Such (often secondary) migration and diversity bring a whole set of urban planning challenges for local governments (see also Zhuang, Chap. 12, in this volume) but also signal new forms of urbanisation that challenge our distinctions between urban core and suburban periphery.
Turning to the role of forced migration and asylum-seeking in urbanisation processes, in the last section of the book, we observe that here too, such movements are characterised by the absence of proactive policies – they rather just happen, and then policies and practices emerge to put order into the urban ‘mess’. Related hard infrastructures – entire new neighbourhoods, shelters, or markets – (see Carpi, Chap. 14; Merlin-Escorza, Chap. 15, in this volume) and soft infrastructures such as policies and practices providing first responder support to asylum seekers and displaced persons (Darling, Chap. 13; Carpi, Chap. 14, in this volume) here simply emerge to respond to a ‘crisis’. All four chapters included in this final part of the volume point to tensions in the process as national governments may seek to impose order while local authorities and non-governmental organisations may prioritise support, seeking to ignore the tensions between national (or also international) policy priorities and local needs and solutions.
While radically different in many ways, suburban cultural diversity emerging out of the suburban sprawl of settled middle class migrants, and the abrupt cultural diversity that emerges from displacement and asylum-seeking, share one point in common: their resilience and significant socio-economic vitality.
This book confirms the close interrelationship between migration and urbanisation processes and the importance of diversity as both an asset and a liability or challenge for cities, large and small. Contributions to this volume demonstrate that we should not see migration as a single phenomenon conducive to the growth of urban centres. We need to understand the different types of migration and the differential impact that they can have, from the ground up or from the top down, to urbanisation. Transience, fragmentation, and contradictions are integral elements of the migration-urbanisation relationship.
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Triandafyllidou, A., Moghadam, A., Kelly, M., Şahin-Mencütek, Z. (2024). Migration and Cities: An Introduction. In: Triandafyllidou, A., Moghadam, A., Kelly, M., Şahin-Mencütek, Z. (eds) Migration and Cities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55680-7_1
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