Abstract
The closely related processes of migration and diversification call for greater scrutiny of how contemporary arrival cities incorporate increasingly diverse groups of newcomers through practices and processes of differential inclusion. This special issue highlights arrival cities in the Asia-Pacific region, attending to how they are being transformed by the wide-ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant-driven diversification. Rather than begin with how coexistence in the context of diversification ought to be, the collection of papers included here builds inter-references through contexts that are, ultimately, non-universal. In so doing, this special issue responds to recent calls by social scientists to extend our frames of reference beyond the dominant centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America in understanding the links between migration and urban diversity. The papers included here focus on arrival cities and urban places in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand as an exercise in open-ended imagination, advancing the conversation on urban diversification in the age of global migration. We organise these forms of urban change and migration-driven differentiation along four key themes of temporalities, spatialities, intermediaries and norms that emerged from the collection of papers. Using these four conceptual themes, modes of differential inclusion function as tools of discipline and governance at one level, and are mobilised to subvert and negotiate power relations at another. As refracted through these four axes of analysis, differential inclusion draws our attention to the multiscalar and multi-actor politics of diversification.
Introduction
Migration matters are spatial and temporal matters. They are also political and emotional matters. Under increasingly precarious global conditions, migration is not only increasing but also diversifying in its impact on the urban. Although there remains much to be learnt from European and North American contexts, existing conceptualisations of urban diversity also remain inadequate for capturing the distinctive diversity of Asia-Pacific cities that serve as key destinations for a wide spectrum of migrants of different socio-economic classes and national origins. The bulk of recent work on urban diversity, however, remains centred on Western European contexts such as the United Kingdom (Amin, 2012; Hall, 2018; Neal et al., 2015; Valentine, 2008; Wessendorf, 2013; Wilson, 2013) and ‘white’ settler societies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Harris, 2018; Hiebert, 2002; Spoonley, 2015). Yet, as Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong remind us, there is not only potential but indeed, urgency, in ‘worlding’ urban theory such that the non-West contributes conceptually rather than just empirically (Robinson, 2006; Roy and Ong, 2011). ‘Worlding’ is a helpful way to provincialise urban theory by allowing us to analyse urban practices by diverse actors, things and ideas that do not fall neatly into the categories of gender, class and race.
In this light, this special issue highlights arrival cities in the Asia-Pacific region, attending to how they are shaped by the wide-ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant-driven diversification (Lai et al., 2013; Saunders, 2010). By broadening our range of sites for empirical and theoretical enquiry, the articles in this special issue multiply our range of analytical tools and conceptual contours in ways that free ethnicity from the centrality of the white–other framing that is often taken for granted in the west. In so doing, we can uncover novel and important socio-spatial formations as they play out, rather than prescribe an ‘ought-ness’ to living in the city where arrivals are characterised by migrant-driven diversification. Rather than begin with how coexistence in the context of diversification ought to be, we turn attention to building inter-references through contexts that are, ultimately, non-universal. As urban studies pays greater attention to truly transnational engagement, non-European, non-American case studies are not simply regional examples but form the basis of theorisation for cities across the world (Yue and Leung, 2017). Western cities need not, and cannot, be the model for all cities as they differentially experience increased flows of migrants as a transformative force.
This special issue, therefore, aims to broaden our conceptual frames of reference to include cities outside of these dominant centres of the production of knowledge. The papers included here focus on arrival cities and urban places in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand as an exercise in open-ended imagination. These are promising sites through which we can multiply our perspectives and advance the conversation on urban diversification in the age of global migration. By widening the geographical focus and paying heed to the situatedness of knowledge (Haraway, 1988), the articles contribute more than adding case studies to migration and urban research. Rather, they highlight the complexity of difference-making and the expansive geographical reach of migration pathways and processes in shaping urban dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region.
Differential inclusion as analytical lens
This collection of articles hence aims to respond to recent calls by social scientists to extend our frames of reference beyond the dominant centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America in understanding the links between migration and urban diversity. Our theoretical point of departure in this special issue takes off from the observation that inclusion and exclusion are not binary opposites but rather, unfold along a spectrum in an intertwining fashion. In giving weight to the urban context as a microcosm of differential inclusion processes, we follow Isin’s (2002: 26) view that the city is not only ‘a container where differences encounter each other’ but a complex and dynamic ‘difference machine’ that ‘generates differences and assembles identities’.
From this perspective, migrant-led urban diversification is not simply the product of the increase in transnational migrants from an ever-widening range of backgrounds moving into cities as low-waged labour migrants, high-status expatriates, student migrants and marriage migrants, although this is undoubtedly important (Yeoh, 2013). Rather, these closely related processes of migration and diversification call for greater scrutiny of how contemporary arrival cities incorporate increasingly diverse groups of newcomers. In response, this special issue draws on the notion of differential inclusion as an analytical lens in order to alert us to three salient features of the multi-stranded relationship between migration and diversity in cities across the Asia-Pacific region.
First, instead of beginning with the conventional focus on exclusion and expulsion, this special issue attends to the constitution of ‘diversity’ by examining how various migrant groups are differently included. The concept of differential inclusion has travelled widely to theorise various strategic organisation and permutations of citizenship. While it has taken on different names, the concept has long provided a means for describing and analysing how inclusion in a sphere or realm can be subject to varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination and segmentation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Its strength lies in demonstrating how its deployment through both state and everyday practices situates and flexibilises the experience of belonging through the calculated processes of inclusion. This special issue extends the concept of differential inclusion towards understanding urban diversification. In so doing, we highlight the fragility, relationality and contingency – indeed, the messiness – of diversity in practice and through discourse. Here, the contours of inclusion within diversifying urban settings become more nuanced. The papers within this issue speak to how coexistence with diversity is not only shaped by state-led migration and labour policies but is latent within different aspects of everyday life.
Second, migration-led (super)diversification in Asia-Pacific cities is transforming not just how difference is generated and experienced, but how it is managed (Amin, 2012; Nayak, 2017; Vertovec, 2007). That is to say, the diversification of peoples in the city is also paralleled by the diversification of migrant management and, consequently, how various migrants themselves challenge and/or reinscribe the dominant modes of inclusion and exclusion in the city. On the one hand, the expansion of cities is increasingly premised upon the expansion of migrant management. Various modes of migrant management include and exclude in different ways, generating different migrant subjectivities (Ye, 2017, 2019). It can be argued that the productive power of migrant management at the scales of policy and the everyday plays a significant role in reproducing migrant-led diversification (Nail, 2015). On the other hand, the amplification and increasing complexity of migrant management serves to elicit differential strategies from migrants themselves, whether in the form of acquiescence to the curtailment of rights to the city or nonconformist encroachment of public spaces (Muniandy, 2015). These processes of inclusion and exclusion that are integral to migrant-led diversification also unfold unevenly across the cityscape, inhering in specific sites and locales with different outcomes. Places such as the lawn (Watson, 2009), public transport (Wilson, 2011), weekend enclaves (Goh, 2014), retail spaces (Yeoh and Huang, 1998) and markets (Terruhn and Ye, 2022) are spaces where both newcomers and longer term residents co-exist with difference of various configurations. Examining these everyday spaces of urban life, social science scholarship is now raising new questions about the study of social difference. On the one hand, these are spaces of exclusion, discrimination and prejudice and on the other, they can also be – whether simultaneously or in temporally disjointed fashion – spaces of mixing, integration and living with difference. Our understanding of migration-led diversification of cities is hence predicated on unpacking the messy connections embedded within processes of arrival-city making across different scales.
Third, this special issue shifts the focus away from race and ethnicity as primary axes of difference-making. Instead, the papers address difference-making through the race-tinged lens of class, gender, citizenship, legal status and other axes that come into play in migrants’ border-crossing and place-making processes. The special issue hence responds to Glick-Schiller and Çağlar’s (2013) repeated call to think ‘beyond the ethnic lens’, that is, to overcome a methodological nationalism that very often equates migration – and diversity – with ethnicity. In expanding our analytical lens beyond ethnicity, we recognise that difference and diversity are dynamic and intersectional. While race and ethnicity remain important categories of differentiation and integral to the idea of diversity in the case studies included here, difference is not reducible to ethnicity. To focus our gaze on ethnicity, we risk remaining bound to its mobilisation and essentialism. As Glick-Schiller and Çağlar (2013: 495) argue, ‘by rejecting the ethnic lens, scholars can explore the ways in which all people, including people of migrant background, deploy multiple frames of action and forms of belonging’. In this sense, we wish to add, rather than subtract. The special issue proposed is meant to continue to provoke us to multiply not only our reference sites but also to foreground forms of change and differentiation in diverse settings that are beyond ethnicity.
As described below, we organise these forms of urban change and migration-driven differentiation along four key themes of temporalities, spatialities, intermediaries and norms that emerged from the collection of papers. Rather than concentrating primarily on the micro-scale of everyday urban encounters (Wilson, 2017), these four themes bring the micro and macro scales together in shedding light on the constitution of diversification through differential inclusion in the arrival city. Using the conceptual themes, we approach differential inclusion both through everyday ground-up processes and also at the scale of management. That is, temporalities, spatialities, intermediaries and social norms function as tools of discipline and governance at one level, and are mobilised to subvert and negotiate power relations at another. Differential inclusion is refracted through these four axes of analysis, thus demonstrating the multiscalar and multi-actor politics of diversification. 1
Temporalities
Just like space, time is socially produced and not pre-existing (Tefera, 2021). Migrants in arrival cities today are increasingly incorporated through temporary visas. While higher income migrants with professional qualifications and marketable skills often have access to permanent residency, this is not the case for those who are deemed low-skilled (Yeoh, 2021). Temporality continues to be mobilised as a tool of migrant management to differentially include various streams of new arrivals. This is well demonstrated in Collins and Friesen’s (2022) paper where they show how temporal rhythms matter in the way Christchurch incorporates new labour migrants as part of the city’s efforts to rebuild after the earthquake. Through managing time, migrant incorporation becomes a highly selective process moored to New Zealand’s increasingly stratified migration management that affords few opportunities for migrants to settle long-term. Time is thus used as an axis of differential inclusion through which diverse migrant groups are selected differently and hierarchically according to their perceived value as labour. Here, varied temporalities are enforced through policy regulations and in tandem with the country’s changing socio-economic landscape. As Dauvergne and Marsden (2014) suggest, managing labour migration as ‘temporary’ normalises temporariness as natural and inevitable, while relying on economic analyses that somehow assume that labour markets exist independently of the state, or that people can be reduced to units of labour.
At another level, temporality is also a product of how migrants rhythmically inhabit the city in ways that constitute its diversity. Leung and Waters (2022) paper shows the salience of temporality as a part of the everyday dynamics of differential inclusion. As school children journey between Shenzhen and Hong Kong for education, their experience of traversing this controlled border is not only shaped by the regulation of space but through time and tempo as well. The temporal experience of commuting, waiting, and passing through customs with other people crossing borders becomes part of the ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) of the spatio-temporal patterning of school children’s mobilities. In a different context, Yeoh and Lam’s (2022) paper also locates the temporal as an integral part of the processes of enclosure and enclavisation that reinforce the non-integration of low-waged transient migrants in Singapore. In their analysis, enclosure and enclavisation represent, respectively, top-down and ground-up spatio-temporal processes that hold disciplinary and discretionary powers in regulating the ‘rhythms of labour and life’ (Yeoh and Lam, 2022). These everyday routines and ordered patterns traced by migrants are important constitutive dimensions of differential inclusion in the diversifying city.
Spatialities
Examining migrant incorporation in the arrival city through a spatial lens alerts us to the relational element of space that transcends the binary of inclusion and exclusion. Several papers in this special issue elaborate on the significance of the spatial in different ways. In a context where the city’s urban fabric is shaped by state policies of non-integration for low-waged transient migrant workers, Goh and Lee’s (2022) contribution on Singapore treats the relationality of space as latent to understanding differential inclusion and urban diversification. Using the examples of state-provided recreational spaces as sites of ‘accidental diversities’, they demonstrate where contact zones have developed to highlight the unexpected socio-spatial relationalities that can emerge through migration-driven diversification. Also focused on Singapore, Yeoh and Lam’s (2022) paper further highlights the place-based, locally-contingent processes of differential inclusion among two groups of migrant workers in the city-state – female domestic workers who live in employers’ homes and male construction and manual workers housed in workers’ dormitories. Gendered patterns of spatial containment result as a response to state-driven enclosure in dormitories (in the case of male workers) and confinement to home-spaces (in the case of female workers) on the one hand, and the formation of ‘weekend enclaves’ as co-national social spaces of support and comfort on the other.
The markedly transient Asian migration patterns and blurring of the inclusion/exclusion binary underlying the above papers are also reinforced in papers that focus not only on material space but also the digital. Based on a longitudinal study with migrant professionals in Singapore, Bork-Hüffer’s (2022) entry addresses diversification and its concomitant spatial relationality by analysing how online and offline spaces facilitate class-based friendships. Koh’s (2022) contribution demonstrates the subversion of power on the off-shore campus of Xiamen University Malaysia where it is the ‘immigrant Mainland Chinese majority’ who sets the terms of inclusion/exclusion in the physical and virtual spaces of the university. Differential inclusion on the de/reterritorialised campus is also tied to wider geopolitical relations between Malaysia and China. Continuing the concept of space not just as relational but also multiscalar, Ortega’s (2022) paper explains how diversity is produced through island spatialities in the Philippines by focusing on the differential inclusion of the Filipina body. He examines how strategic inclusion and exclusion based on gender and sexuality facilitate urban transformation and transnational mobilities that, ultimately, account for diversification in the Philippine islands. Ortega’s (2022) contribution, therefore, reminds us of the multiscalar dimension of differential inclusion.
Intermediaries
Differential inclusion in diversifying cities is also constituted and contoured by institutions, networks and cultural formations other than the more often cited state apparatuses. Institutions and networks can become intermediary spaces that mediate inclusion and exclusion, creating forms of differential inclusion (Leung and Waters, 2022; Robertson et al., 2022). This is a significant point as differentiating practices and processes also ‘exist in socio-cultural action and discourses [and] as institutions [and intermediaries] which have political, economic, cultural and symbolic meanings’ (Paasi, 1998: 72, emphasis added). While acknowledging the key role of the state in shaping migrant-led diversification in cities, several papers in this special issue move the analysis beyond the state to consider a wide range of non-state intermediaries.
Focusing on Tokyo, Yamamura’s (2022) contribution speaks to the saturation of migration-driven urban change across the superdiverse global city. Examining high-status migrants in a city that is often assumed to be homogeneous, she illustrates how and where different transnational spaces are produced beyond the commonly known ethnic towns in the city. Global corporations and their auxiliary services, such as real estate brokers located within Tokyo, play active roles in shaping the socio-spatial dimensions of differential inclusion within the (super)diversifying metropolis. Sidhu and Rossi-Sackey’s (2022) paper extends the intermediaries of diversification from state and corporations to education and health organisations. Conceptually anchored in Derrida’s notion of hospitality and Glick-Schiller and Caglar’s idea of cosmopolitan sociability, they investigate the conditional, selective landscape of care in Brisbane that is, at different times, extended to or withheld from asylum seekers. Focusing on different groups of urban actors and organisations, Sidhu and Rossi-Sackey (2022) also point to the acts of care, solidarity and resistance as a response to state-driven measures that include/exclude vulnerable migrants at their discretion.
Also attending to the educational institutions that characterise arrival cities, Leung and Waters’ (2022) paper presents yet another range of intermediaries that significantly shape the spatial politics of diversification. Their entry focuses on the development of Hong Kong as a diverse ‘education hub’ through examining the daily border-crossings of children who attend school in Hong Kong while living in Shenzhen. This form of education mobility is often stigmatised as the border-crossing school children are often either framed as victims or thought to embody undesirable differences. Also giving weight to spatialities as a cross-cutting theme, the paper goes to show how shared spaces such as boundary control points, schools and homes become mediation points – indeed, spatial intermediaries – where social differences are played out, inclusion and exclusion practiced, and social hierarchy negotiated. In a similar vein, Robertson et al.’s (2022) paper not only clearly connects with space but also establishes the importance of intermediaries. The paper demonstrates how networks and cultural formations of Chinese-Australians within Sydney’s ‘Sinoburbs’ challenge the boundaries of ethnicity. In pointing to the heterogeneity of Chineseness within and across three Sinoburbs, the authors show how the intersection of ethnic networks with businesses, commercial and state infrastructures function as intermediaries to shape the processes of differential inclusion within migration-driven diversification.
Norms
Socio-spatial norms serve as ‘subtle yet prevalent forms of power through the mundane in which urban diversity is encountered and governed’ (Ye, 2019: 486). Norms structuring differential inclusion are present through banal and commonplace encounters that are themselves shaped by wider forces. The resulting diversity is part of the messy process of incorporation, constituted through quotidian, often unremarkable and sometimes unexpected forms of differential inclusion (see Wilson, forthcoming).
Robertson et al.’s (2022) paper further examines localised norms of internal diversities in the modern ‘arrival city’. These norms are shaped by the geo-political dynamics, urban development strategies and migration patterns that shape the city’s ‘Chinese ethnoburbs’. By taking historical changes of diversity into consideration, they argue that multicultural integration is not bound by ethnicity but rather, is now constituted through practices of ‘living-together-in-difference’. Shared spaces also become sites of negotiating inclusion and exclusion in Ye et al.’s (2022) paper. Singapore’s linguistic landscape reflects a history of migrant-led diversification and strategies of inclusion, including Chinese languages other than Mandarin, such as Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien and Teochew spoken by earlier waves of migrants from Southern China. Against this already multi-linguistic backdrop, new migrants from Mainland China are contributing to this diversity. Through the lens of ‘metrolingual multitasking’, the paper examines norms of integration through the spatialisation of Chinese languages in public interactions. In so doing, the authors show how norms of code-switching in spaces such as markets and churches in diversifying Singapore exemplify the problems and potential gain associated with migrant-led urban diversification. Also demonstrating the power of norms in naturalising ideological underpinnings, Goh and Lee’s (2022) paper argues that norms re-embed exclusions through representations of integration and multiculturalism. Government efforts that increased the number of recreational centres for low-waged migrant men throughout densely-populated Singapore were intended to reduce their congregation in the city centre following the Little India riot in 2013. Yet, this increase has also resulted in locals sharing these centres with migrants. The intended spatial confinement of migrant men has ironically brought them into closer proximity with other urban dwellers. The consequent, unintended, ‘accidental’ diversities from this space-sharing lay bare the ambivalence of differential inclusion.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of the papers in this Special Issue were first presented at an August 2019 workshop on Migrant-led Diversification and Differential Inclusion in Arrival Cities across Asia, organised by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, with support from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We would like to thank both institutions for their generous support. We are also very grateful to all the anonymous reviewers for putting time aside to make incisive comments on the papers, despite the challenges of COVID-19 times.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this paper was made possible by a Start-Up Grant No. 04INS000370C430 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
