Diasporic urbanism : concepts, agencies & 'mapping otherwise (original) (raw)
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Diasporic Cosmopolitanism: Migrants, Sociabilities, and City-Making
The phrase 'diasporic cosmopolitanism' juxtaposes the seemingly opposite sensibilities of communalism and openness. This specific modification of the term cosmopolitanism reflects a broader propensity among scholars of every day migrant life to link the term cosmopolitanism with a modifier that implies its opposite---vernacular, rooted, ghetto and diasporic . These seemingly contradictory terms query hegemonic assumptions about how cosmopolitanism is lived, whose cosmopolitanism is being noted and who is in fact open to the world (Werbner 2008; Glick Schiller et al 2011). By selecting the term diasporic cosmopolitanism from the various apparently contradictory modifiers on offer, this paper challenges the dominant notions of the cosmopolitan found in discussions of cosmopolitan urbanism, as well as the ready equation of cosmopolitanism with mobility and rootlessness in the new mobilities literature. Scholars contributing to both these approaches to cosmopolitanism tend to define the term as the capacity to appreciate or be open to difference.
2006
This complexity of the contemporary city requires new ways of understanding beyond the traditional techniques of architecture. The mapping of invisible phenomena such as zones of control or the flow of capital and people reveals the hidden processes that constitute the urban. For example, the collective research project, 'Solid Sea,' by multiplicity looks at the Mediterranean as a collection of routes, borders, boundaries and 'regulated bands of water.' 4 The mapping of this area through a series of case studies is producing an ongoing contemporary atlas of the region. I see my own work situated at the intersection of this kind of urban practice and certain forms of artistic practice that use the city as the subject and site. The emphasis placed on the politics of representation in artistic practice allows for new ways of articulating the city whilst including 'other' narratives, such as the 5 Ursula Biemann, Geobodies ([cited 2005]);
Text & Talk, 2016
From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality which emerge during a series of narrative interviews conducted with a small group of Ghanaian migrants who, unsheltered, lived on a bench in a public transport area on the outskirts of a Catalan urban town. By understanding narratives as situated interactional events with which both the researcher and the researched negotiate, shape and co-construct storyworlds, I focus on the social meanings of the stories of geographic (and socioeconomic) dis/emplacement whereby migrants strategically present their spatial orientations in town, which include largely unknown social networking sites. I complement their narrated in-group “safe mooring” spaces and their out-group zones of “mismeeting” with guided co-ethnographic visits to these selected locations. I claim that the imbrication of stories of dis/location with collaborative multi-site ethnography contributes to the study of the migrants’ alter...
Migration, Transnationalism and Diasporic Identities
Springer eBooks, 2020
Transnational practices capture the diverse geographical, cultural and political networks that migrants forge across borders. We argue that diasporic transnationalism (Georgiou 2006) allows us to consider what we call the circuits of migration, to capture migrants' multi-local networks and practices. The research presented in this book engages with transnationality by exploring multiple narratives, networks and practices emerging from the experience of migration into London via primary, secondary and tertiary routes. We seek to contribute to the increased debate on how multiple and mixed forms of migration and mobility become more common and demand an interdisciplinary approach (King and Skeldon 2010; Castles 2007; Portes 1997; Retis 2014). The scale and diversity of transnational practices amongst migrant populations in London has led to what Vertovec (2007) has called 'superdiverse' cities. Thus, for us it is also important to understand the multiple dimensions that contribute to increasingly changing and malleable identities and a sense of belongingness to places. This is compounded by an ever more complex circuit of migration that ties people to multiple localities and feelings of belongingness. We extend the concept of transnationalism beyond the two-layered (country of origin and host country) perspective that has dominated transnationalism studies, to incorporate multiple migratory circuits. This will lead us to explore the experiences
Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration
In Migrants and City-Making Ayse Çaglar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their work in comparative ethnographies of three cities struggling to regain their former standing—Mardin, Turkey; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Halle/Saale, Germany—Çaglar and Glick Schiller challenge common assumptions that migrants exist on society’s periphery, threaten social cohesion, and require integration. Instead Çaglar and Glick Schiller explore their multifaceted role as city-makers, including their relationships to municipal officials, urban developers, political leaders, business owners, community organizers, and social justice movements. In each city Çaglar and Glick Schiller met with migrants from around the world; attended cultural events, meetings, and religious services; and patronized migrant-owned businesses, allowing them to gain insights into the ways in which migrants build social relationships with non-migrants and participate in urban restoration and development. In exploring the changing historical contingencies within which migrants live and work, Çaglar and Glick Schiller highlight how city-making invariably involves engaging with the far-reaching forces that dispossess people of their land, jobs, resources, neighborhoods, and hope.
Diasporic Spaces for the Unhomely: Identities Reinvented and Replaced
Postcolonialism and cultural studies, and, to some extent, postmodernism, intersect at a number of different sites, on a number of different planes. And both face at least three immediate and serious challenges. According to Lawrence Grossberg, 2 first, both must confront the globalisation of culture, not merely in terms of the proliferation and mobility of texts and audiences but, rather, as the movement of culture outside the spaces of any (specific) language. The new global economy of culture entails a deterritorialisation of culture and its subsequent reterritorialisation, and challenges culture's equation with location or place. Second, both cultural and postcolonial studies seem to have reached the limit –and hence must confront the limitations-of theorising political struggles organised around notions, however complex, of identity and difference. Politics of identity are synecdochal, taking the part (the individual) to be representative of the whole (the social group defined by a common identity). Third, both discourses are faced with the need to think through the consequences and the strategic possibilities of articulation as both a descriptive and political practice; that is, the making, unmaking and remaking of non-necessary relations and hence of contexts. 3 As Grossberg comments, All these problems have emerged as cultural and post-colonial studies have attempted to confront the apparently new conditions of globalisation imbricating all the peoples, commodities and cultures of the world. In these conditions, the traditional binary models of political struggle –simple models of coloniser/ colonised, of oppressor/oppressed – seem inapplicable to a spatial economy of power which cannot be reduced to simple geographical dichotomies – First/ Third, Centre/Margin, Metropolitan/peripheral, Local/Global-nor, at least, in the first instance, to questions of personal identity. This points to a possible misdirection of cultural studies, for even if we grant that much of contemporary politics is organised around identity, it does not follow that our task is to theorise within the category of identity. Instead, locating it within the broader context of this new spatial economy, we need to ask why identity is the privileged site of struggle. This emergent spatial economy, a particular form of internationalisation
Diaspora, Praxis to Modern-Day Globalized Contexts
Advances in science, technology & innovation, 2022
A different cultural and urban milieu can hold the promise of lucrativeness but also deploy instability and strike aspiring migrants with the grieving fear of potential inability to fit in, yielding to the host-city’s exclusionary matrix of assimilating policies. The world has become an increasingly diversified verse, rendering diaspora no longer a phenomenon of transient nature, but an evident and perpetual conduit of the globalized domain. Today, roughly 13 million refugees live in cities, thereby allowing an influx of cultures to intertwine and formulate hybridity, alleviating political and geographical borders. Notions of what constitutes a country and its culture are re-established, unmooring the analysis of architecture and culture from the dormant morass of hegemonic and fixed spatial practices. If one were to think of and adopt the speculation that culture is an unwavering entity endowed upon inhabitants of a city, then one would overlook the majestic physics that accompany a ‘virtual culture’: an ever-changing, ever-morphing set of beliefs, behaviours, and spatial practices that adhere to communal stasis. Cities studied through the paper’s discourse wrestle either to include diasporic communities and incorporate their cultural practices into their milieu, or clench their sphincter, excluding all alien-to-their-own practices. The paper beseeches an understanding of the isomorphism between culture and architecture, thereby enacting a better understanding of the underlying dynamic that exists between the two. Circumscribing architecture and culture to a certain geographic location rather than observing and appreciating their performative nature and hybridity is a dangerous vindication at worst and shallow stereotyping at best. The paper, thus, argues the importance of cultural fluidity and examines diasporic communities’ unassailable impact on the environments they cohabit, testing the recipient cities’ reaction while assessing and recommending against culture-specific design strategies, arriving at an employment of cultural responsiveness in the syntax of the built environment.