240030 VS Migration and Cities (3.3.3) (2020W)

This course will be taught in person.

The aim of this class is to discuss political, economic, and social ways by which cities and urban governance comes to include migrant communities in their narratives, policies, and trajectories. With the ever-growing movement of people as a result of wars, shifting economic and political conditions, environmental migration, and other socio-political dynamics globally, understanding trajectories of populations and their settlement is paramount to understanding how societies are reorganized and restructured. Simultaneously, governments, whether national or local, respond to processes of migration in different ways, giving room for the emergence of policies and programs that welcome migrants, for a variety of reasons, or further push exclusionary tactics. This class, aims for exploration into the aforementioned dynamics.

The course further aims to place together the fields of migration and urban studies as mutual, instead of separate, in our understandings of making and re-making of urban spaces. The materials and readings within the course will challenge the assumptions that migrant communities and cities they live in are somehow separate, further scrutinizing the conceptualizations of integration and depictions of native/migrant binaries. Instead, the course places migrants as integral actors in the urban fabric, as city-makers who are part of city politics, social spaces, and shifting landscapes.

In the class, students can expect to learn and engage with terminologies and concepts that can be utilized to explain and understand migration and cities. With the engagement of theoretical and empirical examples, this class additionally emphasizes the historical perspective in analysing contemporary framing of migration and cities, and the way historical trajectories come to influence local governance and different political and social policies. Further, students will engage with the notions of scale and the way different actors in different positions and networks of power influence and shape city-making.

This course is seminar style and students will be expected to read all of the materials and come to class prepared to participate in discussions, ask questions, and critically engage with the text. Students will also be expected to give presentations and initiate discussions based on the assigned materials in each class.