A gateway to the global city: Mobile place-making practices by expats

Communication, migration, and place connections

The more people move and travel, transporting and maintaining connections to a series of places through relationships, memories, knowledge, cultural practices, etc., the more places have become understood as stretching beyond geographic sites. Although Massey (1994: 162) argues that the boundaries of place have always been constituted by social relations more than postal codes, she points out that those relations are increasingly stretched out over space and, as such, “less and less of these relations are contained within the place itself.” She suggests, rather than “thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (154). Appadurai (1996) describes such spaces as translocalities.

As places have become increasingly networked or translocal, forms of communication are imagined as both a contaminant and a corrective in relation to the meanings associated with them. One set of perspectives describes how, as images and practices are deployed across multiple contexts, becoming less identified with any certain site, a kind of non-place is created (Augé, 1995); through living and traveling in spaces that are dis-embedded from historically situated geographical and social territories, we experience a sense of deterritorialization (Tomlinson, 1999). However, as noted in the epigraph by Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema (2008), in a deterritorialized context, communication also becomes crucial for creating and recreating a sense of place. Through recurring practices of communication and social engagement, the production of new meanings and feelings of belonging and attachment to a place may occur. This reterritorialization, enabling one to become “at home” in a globalizing environment, is developed as the subject finds oneself in contact with others who share similar understandings, finding comfort in “the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without the need for long explanations” (Descombes in Augé, 1995: 108).

Media practices play an important role in creating this rhetorical sense of place and, in fact, scholars increasingly acknowledge that meaningful places may even be virtual ones. Moores and Metykova (2009: 316) emphasize the importance of everyday media routines for place-making, noting how, “in the course of everyday living, people might routinely inhabit media environments…as they simultaneously inhabit physical environments.” Golub (2010) highlights the role of relationships in this process, arguing that while progress made in the realism of online worlds certainly improves user-experiences, what makes these worlds seem like “real” places is when they become meaningful to participants through undertaking projects with others. Plunkett (2011) contends that if a virtual environment provides a meaningful experience, participants may develop a sense of place in, and place attachment to, that online world.

Parallel to this strand of thinking is a growing awareness of the interrelation between online and offline environments in meaning-making. A range of studies supports the notion that online technologies are embedded in and shaped by larger social contexts, ¹ and a growing seamlessness of interrelations between digital and face-to-face communication suggests that the relationship between online and offline sociality will become increasingly taken for granted (Andersson, 2012). In fact, according to Andersson, media should be seen not only as used within everyday territories but as playing a “vital role in the constitution of the territories, be it the home, or the city one resides in” (12). Jansson (2009: 308) identifies this interrelation between space, place, and social relations as the space–communication nexus; to examine this nexus, he says, we should analyze “how space produces communication and how communication produces space.”

These strands of thinking on place (that places are constituted through social relations and communication, combining on- and offline practices) create the conceptual starting-point for examining how a series of digital practices facilitate place-making processes through a hybrid of online and face-to-face communication. The importance of the “face-to-face” in this process cannot be overstated, for, as much as transnational mobility has been enabled and, arguably, made emotionally easier by developments in new communication technologies (and thus an ability to maintain connection to people and places across distance), people also feel an acute need for what Conradson and Latham (2007) call “emplaced encounters” – or, an actual meeting of bodies in co-located places. That concept builds on Amin and Thrift’s (2002: 30) treatise on contemporary urban environments, in which they portray places, “not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter.” Putting “the encounter” at the heart of the definition of place is important to the context of this research, as it highlights how places may be ad hoc and ephemeral without losing their meaning. As I will demonstrate, while such encounters may be fleeting, the sense of place created is no less real to the subjects who rely on them for a feeling of belonging.

In the following sections, conceiving of emplaced encounters in the Paris expat meet-up scene as mutually constituted by online and offline discourse and routines, I suggest meet-ups might be seen as mobile “emplacement platforms” that enable users to create and access global Paris on a local level. Such platforms are particularly suited to the lifestyles of the mobile professionals I engaged through this research, as many of them live permanently or semi-permanently in what Sloterdijk (in Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema, 2008) calls “transition space,” residing outside of their home countries but with no conscious plans to settle down permanently in their current city of residence. While some have come to Paris for a short period with plans to return home after fulfilling a particular experience, many more are there for a longer-term or open-ended stay with aspirations of relocating to yet another foreign city in their next move.

Within this state of transience, they must make concerted efforts to access, or create, connections to a local social network. Constituted online but manifest in physical sites around the city, these interactive meet-ups produce a mobile yet consistent sense of place to which users may belong.

An ethnographic study of combined on/offline sites

Practitioners of ethnographic methods have debated how to take advantage of the level of detail and description that is typically associated with a geographically situated site to obtain empirically based understandings of meaning-making and sociality understood to be located globally and/or virtually. Ethnographic methods suited to the study of online and digital spaces have been developed (e.g. Hine, 2000, 2005; Johns et al., 2004), and researchers increasingly conceive of hybrid fields constituted by on- and offline worlds (e.g. Bakardjieva, 2009; Rosen et al., 2011). In this context, Appadurai (1996: 52) is instructive, suggesting that ethnographers turn globally and virtually situated questions back to the local, by asking, “What is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized world?”

This research comes out of a larger study of social networking sites that offer access to local, user-organized events in cities around the world, and focuses on four Paris-based meet-up groups: The Paris New-in-Town MeetUp; Expats Paris; INC/The International Nomad Community; and International Events in Paris, as well as a separate organization called Internations.org. The “site” of study is mutually constituted through on- and offline interactions, wherein web discourse and face-to-face interactivity are seen as integrated components of the research field. Over a six-month period, I conducted digital ethnography of the groups’ online presence, which entailed close and critical readings of web texts produced through interactivity of group founders and members. During the latter half of the research period I spent three months in Paris as an ethnographic participant, which involved attending an average of two events per week, writing thickly descriptive notes after each, as well as conducting 23 one-hour interviews with a total of 25 meet-up users, including three group organizers. ²

Meet-up group webpages are designed to make the single newcomer feel welcome, with language and a friendly tone encouraging new members to attend events, with assurances that they should feel comfortable arriving solo. While there are various trappings of social networking sites (e.g. member profiles, walls to post on, photos), each group’s page is most prominently built around publicizing the next event. Members click on a tab to RSVP about whether they will attend, and all members can see the RSVP list. Thus not only is it possible to see how many people (along with their names and profile pictures) are planning to attend, but after the party is over it is also possible to return to the list to look up people whose acquaintances have been made, and even contact them by posting messages to their profiles. New members create a profile by uploading a photo, and answering a variety of template questions, chosen by each meet-up group’s organizer upon set-up. Hosts typically post welcoming messages on new member profiles, and members often write messages on the profiles of others who have RSVP’d to the same event.

The other site from the study, InterNations, is unique in that its “local events and activities” function is just one part of a larger, global project, and its online component equals or surpasses its offline function. Once admitted to the group (by filling out a form with a brief explanation of what makes you a global mind) members create a profile and must choose a location from the list of over 300 cities where InterNations has a local presence. Upon selecting a local city, a member’s homepage changes to reflect the services, events, other members, and forums for that city. InterNations is global in that people located in cities around the world participate in user-generated “world forum” discussions accessible to all members; can access other member profiles; and can become friends with other members irrespective of location. The site is local in that each city has ambassadors who are asked to plan events and be open to receiving emails from members with questions about the local community, and has a series of local forums, activities, and groups. If planning to visit another city, members can easily select that city to access its local content, and from there may contact members, post questions in the local forum, look for events, and check out the local commercial directory.

Among the groups studied, two meet-ups – Expats Paris and International Events in Paris – are most active, with the largest number of attendees. Their events occur with regularity and are consistently packed wall-to-wall with people. The two are among the five largest expat-focused meet-ups in the world, which speaks to the dynamism of Paris’ expat population.

Context: global Paris

Paris has long been known as a multicultural crossroads and today legal foreign residents make up 14% of its more than two million residents. Despite its cosmopolitan positioning, Paris has been characterized by friction between an imagined authentic “inside” and its constituting outside, and such tensions live on today between the city’s local and global ambitions. ³ On the one hand, City Hall benefits from situating Paris as a global, rather than simply French, capital; Paris ranks third in the world for the number of headquarters of major global corporations (A.T. Kearney, 2012) and is among the world’s top four global cities, alternating with Tokyo and Singapore for third place in a variety of indexes ⁴ – an important distinction, considering that for densely located European cities, the race for global city status is a competition for foreign investment. The former French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, made “reshaping Paris for the 21^st century” a top priority, and mayor Delanoë has launched separate projects to globalize the city (Vienne, 2008: 2).

Yet in the face of varying government efforts to assert leadership in a global political, economic, and cultural sphere, some foreign-born residents and citizens claim a counter-reality: societal marginalization in the face of a deeply entrenched localism. ⁵ Indeed, it is one of the great clichés of European travel stories to hear that the French people were rude, and the Internet is full of articles and blogs with advice on how visitors might avoid the ire of Parisians. Among the expatriate crowd, it is not uncommon to hear accounts about initial efforts made to enter French social groups, only to turn to the meet-ups after encountering barriers to a local scene. ⁶ Although some stereotype this exclusivity as a generalized French trait, many foreign residents with extensive history in Paris say the claim that the French are closed to newcomers is exaggerated. Part of the problem may be related to the temporary nature of many expat stays. Martina, ⁷ a German expat, explained:

I’ve heard from a lot of French people that Paris is a passing-through city. You meet someone, you get along well, you become friends, and then two months, three months later, the person’s gone again. And some of them have said that they’re getting tired of just always investing time and then the person leaves.

Scott (2006) makes a similar point in his study of middle-class British migrants in Paris. Among the “types” he studies are the “young professionals” living in the city because of international jobs. Recounting that one of the main complaints of interviewees in this group was that they could not break into French social groups, he adds, “however, given the ephemeral nature of the young mobile professional’s presence within the city, the response of the French is hardly surprising” (1119). Although they may spend anywhere from one month to five years or more in the city, the “passers-through” in Paris are marked by their transience, evident in both their lack of connection to the place of the past and an ambiguous relationship to the local future. Yet, because of this transience, a connection to a local Paris is exactly what they need.

Although previous expats were known for reconstructing national communities abroad, the ethos of the new generation values integration into the city life rather than segregation into a community populated only by compatriots. With meet-ups, this is accomplished through meeting diverse groups of other foreigners. Kata, from Cyprus, explained: “With the French, it’s a bit difficult to enter some circles, [but] I have some friends from ‘Internationals’ and so through that I felt more connected, maybe, to Paris.” In the sections below, I explore how the on- and offline discourse and routines of meet-up use contribute to the production of this connection to Paris, through what I call “digital emplacement.” First and foremost, these practices create a sense of belonging to an “international community” in Paris; secondly, crucial to this belonging is that it allows participants to feel like “locals”; and thirdly, these practices facilitate the development of “mobile localities” that may be extended elsewhere.

Belonging to an “international community”

Taken as a whole, the re-occurrence of emplaced encounters creates a broad sense of place, which becomes collectively known and experienced by participants as the “international community.” Meet-up users and organizers constitute this community in multiple ways. Firstly, because many meet-ups serve an overlapping population, participants attend multiple events and often do not remember which group is associated with each, which leads to the creation of an “international community” as a diffused concept. This is illustrated through an excerpt from an interview with Phoebe, a British expat who had been living in Paris and attending meet-ups regularly for over one year. Here, we are talking about how the presence of French people at some meet-ups, but I am trying to figure out if we are talking about the same group. I cannot tell because she is conflating the names of the two main groups, Expats Paris and International Events in Paris:

While organizers think of their groups as individual and specific, the participants themselves experience them as a conglomeration, which they tend to associate with “the meet-ups” or “the international community.” As most members attend multiple meet-ups, faces become familiar across different groups, and the difference between groups is flattened. However, this effect is pronounced by the fact that many of the other groups do not actually organize their own events in Paris. Rather, they often partner with meet-up groups or use their web space to promote specific expat-oriented events being hosted by other organizations. For example, InterNations.org is thriving in many cities around the world, but during the period of this fieldwork in Paris, the InterNations ambassadors were also co-organizers of the meet-up group, Expats Paris. Because of this, the main InterNations local events were tied in with the Expats Paris events – the two websites acted as different portals for accessing the same social scene.

I had planned to study two other Paris expat groups with a web-presence, Horn’s Club and Kunveno.com, but those turned out not to have a separate physical presence. The Horn’s club sent out weekly emails to members with a list of local events, but events turned out to be organized by other groups (when I showed up to one event asking about the Horn’s Club, I got blank stares). Kunveno’s events page reads: “Kunveno is joining InterNations for shared evenings in Paris” – adding another layer, once removed from the actual event organizing done on behalf of InterNations by the meetup.com group, Expats Paris. The fact that numerous websites act as portals to offline events creates a sense of many social outlets provided by a range of groups but, because the sites actually direct participants to a limited number of events, the offline scene is much smaller than is portrayed online. While this can be confusing, and limits the diversity of events to which a person has access, the streamlined nature of using various channels to drive people to fewer events contributes to the impression of an international community in Paris.

This international community is also produced and supported through online structures and discourse. Scrolling down the member pages of Expats Paris, alongside each person’s name is a list of other meet-ups to which we both belong. I can see that most of the members of any one expat-related meet-up are also members of the others, which confirms that we are all “in” something together. Members express this feeling through their profile introductions, which are addressed to the presumed community. For example, a sample of profile introductions includes the following: “Hey everyone, after 3 years in New York and Sydney, I just moved to Paris and I look forward to meeting new friends;” and “Hi there, recently moved to Paris for at least 3 years and looking forward to meeting some new people. Hi, Hi there, Bonjour, Hey, Hi-ya… these common profile salutations pre-suppose the existence of a coherent audience, which is being addressed in common. A member who writes, “New in town and would love to meet everyone,” suggests that an “everyone” exists and that it might actually be possible to meet them. Members refer to each other as being international, suggesting a common identity and membership. For example, Mikela writes on her profile, “Wishing to meet international people;” Rafael posts that his goal is “to continue meeting great international people, wherever I move.” Such communication acts, while simple, augment the idea that upon joining the meet-ups, new members have found a place where they might belong. Organizers typically post welcoming messages on a new member’s “wall” and many members reach out to each other directly via wall posts, just to say hello, to ask for information, or to suggest meeting at the next event. Although most of a member’s profile page information is specific to each particular meet-up group, the wall area (under general profile information, on the same page) combines the messages from all groups to which s/he is a member. The collation of social messages reinforces a sense of connectivity across all groups. Online practices, such as these, set the stage for welcoming new members and suggesting they are a part of something bigger than any one group, continually refreshing and reproducing the sense of community.

Feeling like a “local”

A common theme among participants is that the decision to move alone to Paris had involved anticipation and imagination about what it would be like to live there, daydreams that were often interrupted by the reality of what it is to arrive in a foreign city, knowing no one and often not speaking the language. Through encounters that begin at the online interface that sets up expectations and commonalities, and extend to face-to-face meetings that manifest in one physical site after another, the international community becomes a site through which meet-up members may “feel like locals.” Meet-up rhetoric and practices facilitate the development of this feeling. For instance, although events usually occur in spaces segregated from other patrons, the language promoting them tends to accentuate the local-ness of venues, building an impression of connectedness to a Parisian scene. This is illustrated in the following invitation from Expats Paris:

Hello everybody!! Here we are back again at Charlie Birdy for another international drink. This awesome lounge-bar is located in the “quartier du commerce” (15th arrondissement), away from traffic and the city center’s mess. Lots of local Parisians like it for its ethnic-lounge atmosphere and trendy-world food cuisine. The first floor is being reserved for us so we can socialize and enjoy ourselves… So, come and meet other internationally wandering people and share your stories!

This text emphasizes that local Parisians like the bar, but does so while using keywords of globalization, such as ethnic, world, and international, and specifying that the group will have its own reserved place, set aside not only from the rest of the bar but from the “city center’s mess.” Through this reserved space, the group can enact its connection to the local scene while protecting itself from the rejection or alienation that any one member may experience if left to wander alone into a bar. Although most participants would not consider Paris a dangerous place, the spaces created by meet-ups offer a social safe-zone that would otherwise be difficult to produce individually.

This local connection expands beyond the events themselves, as each time attendees participate in these temporary encounters they are reminded that there are others like themselves, and take this knowledge with them into daily struggles. The importance of this process can be seen in Martina’s story: originally from Germany, Martina is a multilingual secretary for international law firms and is living in Paris for the second time. She is a member of Expats Paris, International Events, and a few more clubs for foreigners. It is not that she does not know any French people; Martina actually has a French flat-mate, French colleagues, and even some French friends. Yet she does not feel she can become truly integrated into those local networks the way she can in expat groups. As she explained:

Mostly the people who live here, who have lived here for awhile, they were born here, they have their friends from school, they have their little network… They don’t need me in their network…[T]he expatriates, they are going through the same situation – they’re in the same position: they’re looking for people.

Fitting in is made easier in a circumstance where others are “in the same position.” She explained:

Even the most beautiful cities in the world are not anything if you don’t know people. And it’s nice to look at but it loses interest quite quickly, and you have to think, what are you doing here? And even, like next week there is this Meet-up, and I don’t even know if there will be anyone there that I’ve already met, but I’m already looking in my calendar and, “Oh!! I’ll be there! I have a plan for next week!” … You know you’re not alone.

Meet-ups enable Martina to drop in to a Parisian bar and instantly feel as if she is a part of a local scene. Her calendar is dotted with such events weekly, and just the knowledge that they are coming up makes her feel incorporated into the city life. It is not a simple solution – events can be chaotic and hectic, or quiet and dull. Yet, through the integration of meet-ups into her routine social life, and the continual reinforcement of the understanding that there are others in a similar situation, the daily practices and complexities of “global living” now start to seem connected to something rather than as alienated movements through an unfamiliar place. As Martina described it:

There’s so many other people from anywhere and…just a little excuse to start talking. Not even oh, let talk about this and that topic. No – it’s just we meet at 8:00 at that shop and that’s it – and that’s enough to connect people.

That connection builds partly from commonalities shared by participants: knowing they represent a range of nationalities, that most have had previous migration and/or travel experiences, and that they may draw on these “global” perspectives and experiences to discuss a range of topics. In addition, daily routines, including event attendance, but extending to tasks undertaken individually but in common (dealing with French bureaucracy for the important health and residency cards; challenges with language, food, customs, and the search for various foods or services) also knit attendees together and connect them to a new way of living locally, in an international community.

However, an interview with Kata reminded me of the ambiguities of this connection. When I met Kata, she had been living in Paris for two and a half years. Originally from Cyprus, she had moved from New York, and before that had studied in London. Discovering the meet-ups after her first year in the city had made a big difference; she had been lonely at first, and found it hard to make friends with French people. As mentioned above, Kata explained that the international meet-ups, in that they had people from many nationalities, made her feel “more connected to Paris.” I had not been surprised to hear this, as many other participants stated something similar. Yet, frustrated by the vague language of this common response, I pushed her to describe what it was that she felt connected to. She explained, “[We] are mostly internationals. [We] have something in common… that’s what brings people together.”

What stands out about this comment in the context of this discussion about space and place is how abstract the commonality is in relation to the intensity of the insistence that there is connectedness. Indeed, what was apparent from my conversation with Kata (in conjunction with other observations) is that although being of different nationalities may act as an initial icebreaker, spurring conversation at gatherings, the commonality is less important to building the connection than is the routine of interaction and participation, of creating and reproducing moments of encounter. Although Kata had made some good friends from the groups, she recognized that the expat community was unstable (“people come and go”) so she continued to go to events, explaining, “There’s always somebody I know, but there are always new people.” Routine attendance was crucial to maintain that feeling of connection to a local, international community.

Developing mobile localities

The growing presence (and use) of web-facilitated projects for bringing strangers together in a network of sites around the world allows the expat-place to be replicated and stretched across geographies, and the sense of an “international community” is extended even more widely. After becoming familiar with the routines of social meet-ups, many participants find that the mobility of the platform means they can easily extend their use to other locations, effectively facilitating local connections across multiple geographic contexts. The technological formats themselves make this easy: meetup.com does not require members to anchor their participation to any one geographic location and members can join meet-ups in unlimited sites. Similarly, while a home location is foregrounded on each member’s homepage on internations.org, it is very flexible; any member city can be easy selected from a drop-down menu on the homepage, instantly transforming the user’s homepage to highlight events and information based on the new location. These are not simply clever design features that allow for the web-based companies to serve populations located around the world, but are in fact integral to the way that numerous participants use the sites for both travel and relocation. As participants develop increased comfort with the digital emplacement format, many extend their use of these platforms to situations of short-term business or leisure trips, and begin to see them as integral to the process of arrival in a new place and, in fact, to the creation of a consistent lifeworld across multiple sites and cultures.

Rosen et al. (2011) have demonstrated how this works with the worldwide CouchSurfing community – where members interact online to exchange information, set up get-togethers with local people, and organize short-term stays in other members’ homes while traveling. Through participation in the online networking aspect of the organization, people form social network ties that make them feel connections not only with the individuals with whom they interact, but the groups and communities of which those members are a part. While previous studies understood that travelers utilize their own social network connections, they discovered that, in providing those ties to users, the CouchSurfing community “specifically allows people to locate, negotiate, and establish new social network ties in any geographic location, as opposed to existing ties in a finite cache of locations” (984).

Martina, introduced above, originally discovered meet-ups when living in London, after becoming frustrated by many unsuccessful efforts to go to a pub alone and strike up conversation. There, she attended events hosted by American, Italian, French, and German groups, and turned to meet-up immediately upon moving to Paris. Hers is a common story. Online profiles are replete with references to temporary access, for example, a Bulgarian woman living in Germany explains that she comes to Paris every two months for work and that, “Since I’m a member of meet-up Dusseldorf and will be in Paris for the last week of May, I would love to join the Paris group too.” Another woman explains she used to live in Paris but has relocated to Berlin; her profile on Expats Paris explains: “Lived in Paris – now visiting for a few days…” A Brazilian posts that she is “in Paris just for this week and would like to meet new people.” A Cameroonian man who had lived in the city for a couple of years explained in our interview that he had joined the Paris meet-ups after attending meet-up events when visiting his brother in Seoul, Korea. Nick, a Korean-American participant, recounted how he had utilized the “events” function on a site similar to meet-up to plan a dinner party when traveling in Argentina; he just put up a note on a forum section, saying, “Hey…who’s up for doing something?” and found a group of companions for an evening out. The following night he saw a separate post announcing a party, emailed for details, and was rewarded with another get-together.

In fact, as Nick described his travels, tales focused much more on the people he had met and the social interactions that occurred in each place than on any particular geographical or cultural landmarks visited. For him, fundamental to a positive travel experience is to live like a local; the fact that he can use digital platforms to temporarily immerse himself in each local social scene is key. On the other hand, for some participants the meet-ups are much more about coping with frequent business travel than about embracing the social opportunities of globalization. Suzy is a Chinese-American who completed her master’s degree in finance at a university in Shanghai and is now working for a French company in New York City. She is frequently sent to the Paris headquarters, typically for two weeks at a time, and because she sometimes participates in meet-ups in New York, she decided it would be a good way to go out at night in Paris. As she explains it, “otherwise I just order room service and watch TV in my hotel.” In that she is now able to work during the day and go out at night, meet-ups allow her to turn a trip that would have been focused only on work into something vaguely resembling her routines at home.

An exclusive, yet expansive place

Scott McQuire (2008: viii) argues that media convergence, understood in the context of 21st-century cities, “has catalyzed new means of producing social space and created new forms of social agency,” which follow from the mobilities that increasingly define spaces and subjects. While the forms of mobile place-making illustrated above provide ethnographic support for the spatial aspects of this claim, they also involve new exclusions in addition to social agencies. As Stokowski (2002: 368) points out, the power relations embedded in place-making practices affect attachments to place, and in terms of this study, it is worth asking who is welcome in these digitally managed spaces. The answer to that question at once invites critical reflection on the types of cosmopolitan exclusivity that pervade the expat meet-ups, while also illuminating new agencies that digital place-making provide to factions often marginalized in these urban, European public spaces, such as women and non-white males.

Although events are “open” and free to attend, with attendance limited to those vetted by an online rhetoric that extends the welcome to expatriates and international people, as well as a physical separation from regular clientele, the locality of the space is called into question. Jansson (2011) notes how social/networked media contribute to the creation of “cosmopolitan capsules” – social spheres of likeminded individuals where participants may, on the one hand, live out the cosmopolitan ethos of cultural openness and global engagement, while also remaining safely sheltered from perceived perils of their foreign host environment. Within this encapsulation, actors build and expand their networks and further reinforce their sense of purpose and belonging to the capsule. Although he refers to online networks, the concept can certainly be extended here. Through events that combine open online platforms with segregating rhetoric and set-apart offline spaces, and where both on- and offline a cosmopolitan, mobile lifestyle is prerequisite to belonging, the demarcation of meet-ups demonstrates how digital encapsulation may manifest in co-present spaces. However, in spite of the exclusions through which cosmopolitan cultural capital mediates access to the meet-up scene, digital place-making arguably opens up access to public spaces to a range of individuals.

While participants in the larger research project, of which this study is a part, were gender balanced and represent a broad assortment of ethnic and national identities, the people who provided interview anecdotes and online data most relevant to an exploration of place-making practices turned out to be either women or non-white males. This detail is significant. Although women make up a growing percentage of mobile professionals, and corporations are increasingly recruiting individuals with non-white and non-European backgrounds for their ability to work successfully with teams and clients in “emerging markets,” the business world and its social/public spaces (e.g. “happy hour” bars) in Europe continue to be zones where they are minorities (particularly standing out as such if arriving alone). As Massey (1994) suggests:

Among the many other things [that] clearly influence that experience [of space], there are, for instance, “race” and gender… Survey after survey has shown how women’s mobility, for instance, is restricted – in a thousand different ways, from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply “out of place.” (2)

Martina recounted how she tried many times to go into a bar in London and strike up conversations with strangers, only to be ignored or treated as “strange.” It was not until she accidentally arrived at a bar with a meet-up in progress that she found a welcoming crowd, and from then on meet-ups became her main social tool. Many other women still found arriving alone intimidating even when they knew it was the meet-up norm; in those cases, the strategy was to reach out to other women through the site function allowing people to post on each other’s walls, to make plans to attend events together. Suzy told me how she realized she could use the meet-up email function this way:

I’ve had like seven guys who emailed me [on meetup.com]…This one guy who was kind of creepy was hitting on me…and I was like, “I hope I don’t see him again at this event!” I was saying like, I should email girls on there so that I have a female friend in Paris!

Kata also found that having female friends at events was helpful in warding off the men who, while not necessarily representative of the “typical attendee,” were only there to pick up women. These men were easily identifiable, not only by their behavior at events, but also through their online behavior. For instance, she explained that if a man posted something on her profile wall, she immediately looked to see on which other women’s profiles he had posted messages and what he had said. Tara, a Scottish co-organizer of one of the meet-up groups, said she had received quite a few “vulgar and suggestive” emails from men through the site, but conceded that although this behavior makes her feel vulnerable, it is better to get it online and then know who to avoid in the offline events. Digital place-making, in that it allows for communication and behavior expectations to be set up and connections to be made in advance, in the semi-private spaces where participants meet online, seems to open up opportunities for women to more comfortably and equitably access the corresponding offline spaces.

Conclusion

If our experience of places are constituted more through relationships and communicative interactions than by geographic location, then online interfaces that both produce and manage offline interactions can be understood as platforms for mobile place-making. This paper has explored this form of place-making in relation to a type of migration that is growing rapidly as businesses continue to expand into new global markets: the lone professional migrant. I have aimed to demonstrate how combined online and offline practices are used in a form of recurrent place-making that is particularly suited to the itinerant lifestyles of these mobile professionals. For many participants, the emplaced encounters created through meet-ups and similar sites provide a sense of belonging to the local scene, by way of becoming part of an “international community” in Paris. I have shown how, through extended use of the sites across multiple locales, this international community expands to other global cities, creating a local sense of place that is digitally managed and mobile. These examples are useful for illustrating specific instances of how places can be extended across geographic space, as well as for considering how the production of space can be a mobile process – indeed, how places themselves may be mobile.

Yet, alongside a case that mostly celebrates and appreciates the new agencies afforded by mobile place-making is the recognition that, “space and place are used to structure a normative landscape” (Cresswell, 1996: 8). In conclusion it is worth asking, what broader social transformations might be shaped in part by the development of mobile place-making as a “new normal”? In a global economy in which a key segment of the professional labor force is oriented towards the ideal of permanent or semi-permanent mobility – never completely settled, always ready to go – the growing use of digitally organized mobile emplacement occurs in relation to significant changes to social life in post-industrial capitalism. On the one hand, participant experiences reveal that such tools provide them with an important service by opening a gateway to a city in which they would otherwise be very much alone. However, as professional labor trends increasingly assert the value of placeless-ness, tools that combine communication with location-based digital organizing will only grow in importance, and the “support” provided by these digital emplacement technologies should continually be interrogated.