Migrants and City-Making

"This is a book that needed to be written for our present Western moment with its surge of refugees. It joins a very few other texts that show how immigrants are a positive economic and social presence in our cities at a time when negative interpretations are on the rise.” - Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

“This book offers a brilliantly original analysis of how migrants have shaped contemporary strategies of urban regeneration—and their contestation—in three marginalized cities. In so doing, the authors also elaborate a pathbreaking approach to the multiscalar, fluidly mutating geographies of migration and a new methodological strategy for spatialized ethnography and comparative migration studies. Migrants and City-Making is a major work of migration studies, urban studies, and sociospatial theory.” - Neil Brenner, author of Critique of Urbanization

"Ayse Calgar and Nina Glick Schiller make a timely and compelling case for migrants as 'city-makers.' Departing from commonly portrayed dichotomies between migrants and non-migrants, they situate, contextualize, and embed them into complex “multi-scalar” processes of urban regeneration. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - G. R. Innes, Choice

"This fantastic book is a result of committed long-term research by Çaglar and Glick Schiller on migration and the regeneration of cities." - Susanne Urban, Urban Studies

"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." - Sarah Farr, International Sociology Reviews

"A theoretically rich book that immerses us in the relationship between migration and localities that are not urban centers of global power. . . . Migrants and City-Making has a theoretically rich and engaging methodology, which will be useful for anyone teaching courses on transnational migration, urban studies, urban anthropology or urban sociology." - Hulya Dogan, City & Society

"Its programmatic and didactic approach will make Migrants and City-Making a useful teaching tool for students of migration and urban theory. The argumentation is bold and restated at multiple points in the book."

"... Immigrants and City-Making is a thought-provoking and ambitious study that provides a compelling appraisal of migration, place making, and urban theory. ... A unique, innovative, and valuable contribution to our comparative understanding of migration, cities, and the manifestations of growing economic inequality on a global scale." - Steven Gold, American Journal of Sociology

“Migrants and City-Making offers a very compelling anthropological analysis that students and scholars of urban life and governance, globalization, and refugee and immigrant studies will learn a great deal from.”

"Migrants and City-Making is a thought-provoking and ambitious study that provides a compelling appraisal of migration, place making, and urban theory…. The book is a unique, innovative, and valuable contribution to our comparative understanding of migration, cities, and the manifestations of growing economic inequality on a global scale.” - Steven Gold, American Journal of Sociology

“Migrants and City-Making builds an important critique of methodological nationalism—intellectual enquiry confined to the borders of the nation-state—and narrow approaches to migration studies that overemphasize national origin as a primary axis of difference. It serves as an important reminder of the need to confront dispossessive capitalism at all scales, and to form social networks that challenge migrant/non-migrant divisions. These insights are particularly crucial in this historic moment…”
  - Jessie Speer, Social & Cultural Geography

“The book provides fascinating and important insight into the experiences, challenges, and agency of migrants and nonmigrants in disempowered cities. . . . The book will particularly interest scholars and researchers in those fields and would serve as an excellent introduction to some key debates and developments for anthropologists and sociologists beginning to think about the longer-term effects of urban regeneration efforts and how to study them.” - Sara Jean Tomczuk, Contemporary Sociology

“[Migrants and City-Making] challenges disciplinary divisions between migration studies and urban studies which limit our understanding of global processes of city-making.... I highly recommend this book especially for those who work at the intersections of migration and urban studies and want to go beyond the national and ethnic lens.” - Pinar Ensari, Urban Geography