Abstract
Most scholarly research on urban restructuring, dispossession, and migration centers on the ‘global cities’ that increasingly dominate the world economy. Recently, however, urban scholars have noted the need to understand how ordinary cities seek to position themselves in the emerging geography of power. In Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration, Çaglar and Glick Schiller heed this call by exploring the urban regeneration strategies pursued by ‘disempowered cities’ – places that self-consciously narrate their trajectory in terms of economic decline – and the role of migrants in these projects of transformation.
Migrants and City-Making examines three disempowered cities – Manchester, New Hampshire; Halle/Saale, Germany; and Mardin, Turkey – all of which have rebranded themselves as migrant-friendly places in an effort to transform their faltering economies. While these landscapes of dispossession at times posed barriers for migrants, they also offered new possibilities for social, political, and economic belonging. Çaglar and Glick Schiller explore several processes through which migrants embedded themselves in the cities’ social fabric by using the concept of ‘emplacement.’
The first process of emplacement that Çaglar and Glick Schiller consider is small business ownership. Focusing on Halle, Germany, they explore how landscapes of economic decay initially facilitated migrants’ ability to establish small businesses. The authors consider how German reunification after 1990 created opportunities for migrant entrepreneurs as the city sought to open itself to capitalist enterprise. The low-cost goods and services offered by small migrant-owned businesses were accessible to a financially struggling local population, and these businesses flourished even while more expensive Western chain stores failed. This changed, however, as the city advanced its regeneration plan. Urban redevelopment priced migrant businesses out of the city center and changes to immigration policy favored the arrival of professional migrants as part of the city’s efforts to make the local university the center of the city’s new ‘knowledge economy.’ By emphasizing how urban economic restructuring shaped migrants’ opportunities for emplacement and displacement, the authors link migrants’ experiences and opportunities for participation to larger regional, national, and global forces.
The second example of migrant emplacement is through the daily ‘sociabilities’ that emerged between migrants and non-migrants. These everyday interactions of mutual support were forged through common experiences of urban dispossession and displacement in the wake of urban regeneration in both Manchester and Halle. Instead of ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ or ‘ethnic networks’ as the primary sites where migrants sought social support and emplacement, the authors argue that neighbor networks, workplaces, and institutions were the key spaces where migrants and non-migrants built relationships of mutual support and friendship that allowed them to survive and build a sense of belonging.
The third form of emplacement that Çaglar and Glick Schiller observe is religious membership – specifically in global networks of Christian Pentecostalism – which can act as a domain of political claims-making and a ‘pathway to social citizenship.’ The authors build on concepts of social citizenship to explore how those who are excluded from formal citizenship construct claims to membership and belonging ‘from below.’ Here, social citizenship is not a status but a set of practices through which social citizens assert their rights. In Halle and Manchester, the migrants and non-migrants that constituted these congregations countered their disempowering experiences with the state with a born-again Christian discourse that promised congregants rights through the higher authority of God. Members of these local congregations belonged to global networks of Christian Pentecostalism and adopted an anti-racist, pro-migrant stance that viewed everyone as potentially saved. As Çaglar and Glick Schiller note, however, these global born-again Christian networks also connected congregants to US imperial foreign policy, nationalist ideology, and rising Islamophobia, placing serious limits on the inclusiveness of their social citizenship vision.
Finally, Çaglar and Glick Schiller turn to war-torn Mardin on Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Historically a place of religious and ethnic diversity, beginning in the 1970s Mardin was mired in the armed conflict between the Kurdish PKK and the Turkish state, plunging the region into economic decline. During this period, many of Mardin’s prominent Syriac Christian minority fled to Europe. After the 1999 ceasefire and the European Union’s acceptance of Turkey’s candidacy for membership, the return of Syriac Christians became an important component of Mardin’s urban regeneration strategy. Christian returnees were important to Turkey’s rebranding as a place of diversity and tolerance as it vied for inclusion in the EU. The return of Syriac Christians allowed Mardin to signal its openness, stability, and security as it sought to attract capital investment and redevelop its economy through tourism. Displaced Syriac Christians found new openings for emplacement as the state facilitated their return, the re-establishment of property rights, and the redevelopment of abandoned Christian communities. However, by 2015, Turkey’s withdrawal of its EU application, the rise of right-wing political nationalism, renewed conflict with the PKK, and the emerging Syrian Civil War plunged the region into uncertainty and closed many of the openings once available to Syriac Christian returnees.
Migrants and City-Making makes several important methodological and theoretical contributions. Through their multiscalar analysis, Çaglar and Glick Schiller situate processes of urban dispossession and displacement within the broader dynamic of global capital accumulation. They demonstrate how urban redevelopment strategies – and migrants’ experience of these policies – are linked to broader economic, political, and cultural forces. Multiscalar analysis captures the role of structural forces in urban processes that more narrowly-focused urban or neighborhood studies often miss. Additionally, the authors bring a much-appreciated temporal lens to the study of urban dispossession and regeneration by tracing how shifting global forces – economic expansion and recession, war, and imperialism – have continually reshaped the trajectories of all three cities in consequential ways.
Responding to scholarship that celebrates ‘urban citizenship’ and the ‘right to the city’ as alternatives to the exclusive nature of traditional national citizenship, Çaglar and Glick Schiller make a powerful argument that scholars must more seriously engage with the limits of these frames. Urban citizenship, they argue, is inherently precarious and subject to the changing multiscalar contexts of accumulation in which localities are embedded. Iterative patterns of urban dispossession, redevelopment, and displacement make urban citizenship rights difficult or impossible to secure.
Çaglar and Glick Schiller also offer a strong critique of migration scholarship that tends to imagine migrants as sources of difference within otherwise culturally homogeneous communities and read migrant activities through an ‘ethnic lens.’ They demonstrate how migrant emplacement – through entrepreneurship, everyday sociabilities, or religious membership – was not primarily based on migrants’ cultural background or ethnic networks. Instead, migrants worked to construct diverse networks that spanned the local, regional, national, and global scales.
There is a tension, however, in their argument for moving past the frame of social difference in migration and citizenship studies. First, the fact that ‘ethnic networks’ and ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ did not prove fruitful concepts for exploring migrant emplacement in the disempowered cities they studied is likely explained by the fact that city-making and migrant emplacement operate differently outside of the large cities from which these ‘ethnic’ concepts arise. This point is, in fact, one they use to justify their site selection. The cities examined are small and contain relatively small immigrant communities – one could imagine that ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ and ‘ethnic networks’ may have been weak, differently organized, or simply not have offered the same utility for migrants relative to large metropolitan areas.
Second, their strong critique of the citizenship and migration literature’s reliance on social difference as a frame for understanding migrant emplacement seems to obscure as much as it reveals. While this critique allowed them to highlight how shared experiences of dispossession and displacement allowed migrants and non-migrants to construct relationships that facilitated migrant emplacement, their own data suggest that difference clearly remained salient. The experience of migrants in Mardin, for example, was critically based on their special status as a coveted minority. The supposedly universalizing frame of born-again Christian citizenship rendered non-heterosexual and non-religious others as non-citizens. In Halle, certain pathways to emplacement were foreclosed when the state shifted its focus to attracting professional class migrants to build the city’s knowledge economy.
Similarly, in explicitly seeking out commonality in the experiences of a highly heterogeneous group of migrants, the authors missed opportunities to explore variation in migrant urban emplacement. Attending to differences in legal status, nationality, race, education level, and language background among migrants might have yielded more fine-grained insights into processes of migrant emplacement in these cities. How might these pathways have differed by interaction with the state and immigration bureaucracies; access to institutions like hospitals, schools, and banks; degree of employment mobility; access to welfare programs; and level of vulnerability in public space? Many of the authors’ insights into migrant emplacement hinged on these factors, which are all variable across categories of legal status, nationality, and class background.
In summary, Migrants and City-Making is a thought-provoking exploration of how economic regeneration strategies can have very different implications and consequences in disempowered cities than in the powerful cities that are more commonly sites for urban and migration research. Scholars of migration, citizenship, and urban studies will undoubtedly find it to be a useful and provocative read.