The Routledge Handbook of the Governance of Migration and Diversity in Cities

Tiziana Caponio, Peter Scholten, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Tiziana Caponio, Peter Scholten, Ricard Zapata-Barrero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351108454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

How have immigration and diversity shaped urban life and local governance?

The Routledge Handbook to the Governance of Migration and Diversity in Cities focuses on the ways migration and diversity have transformed cities, and how cities have responded to the challenges and opportunities offered. Strengthening the relevance of the city as a crucial category for the study of migration policy and migration flows, the book is divided into five parts:

• Migration, history and urban life

• Local politics and political participation

• Local policies of migration and diversity

• Superdiverse cities

• Divided cities and border cities.

Grounded in the European debate on "the local turn" in the study of migration policy, as contrasted to the more traditional focus on the nation-state, the handbook also brings together contributions from North America, South America, Asia and the Middle East and contributors from a wide range of disciplines. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars working in political science, policy studies, history, sociology, urban studies and geography.

1

INTRODUCTION

The governance of migration and diversity in cities

Tiziana Caponio, Peter Scholten and Ricard Zapata-Barrero^*

By 2050, the majority of the world’s population will live in cities (United Nations, 2015). Human mobility across urban areas and the answers cities will give to migration and diversity will be critical for their economic development and their place in an increasingly global context. From a migrant’s point of view, nations and states are seen as mere restrictions for their personal mobility among cities. Migration-related diversity in cities has been increasing, and in a growing number of cities more than one-third or even more than half of the urban population has a migration background. For migration studies this “city focus” represents more and more a key premise for conducting research: migration is basically seen as an urban phenomenon.

Cities are the places where migration and diversity manifest themselves most clearly. Migrants first arrive in cities, and there they find a home, go to school, search for jobs, interact with others and thus make their first steps toward incorporation (or to onward migration or remigration), building their life expectations. This means that the governance challenges associated with migration and migration-related diversity become usually manifest at the city level, from access to services and socio-economic resources to the conflicts arising from social inequalities, power relations and racisms.

The term “governance” refers to how multiple actors in specific settings attempt to manage or solve issues such as migration and diversity (Kjaer, 2004; Colebatch, 2009); it emphasises the growing interdependency between state- and non-state actors in addressing such societal issues, often operating together in complex networks (Rhodes, 1997). We believe that the concept of governance is particularly fit for the study of migration and diversity, as in this area relations with, and sometimes even dependency on, non-state actors is likely to be very significant. Therefore, contributions to this handbook devote particular attention to the role not only of local governments, but also of NGOs (non-government organisations), migrant organisations, trade unions, social movements, schools, housing corporations, health institutions, etc. It brings together insights from various disciplines to shed further light on how cities deal with challenges, conflicts and opportunities related to migration and diversity, including contributions from sociology, anthropology, history, policy sciences, political sciences, urban studies, geography and various others. The handbook covers a broad range of cities across the globe (see Figure 1.1). This also involves variation in terms of cities’ types, including well-known global cities of migration such as New York and London, smaller highly diverse cities such as Rotterdam, and other specific types of cities that have been marked by migration and diversity, such as border cities, harbour cities and cities that find themselves at the crossroads of two different nations or cultures.

Figure 1.1 Cities analysed in this Handbook.

Our focus is on migration-related diversity, even though in the cases of divided cities like Jakarta or Tel Aviv the interaction with national minorities-related diversity is also considered. Furthermore, most of the contributions focus on international migration, even though internal migration is a crucial dimension that we take into account in the case of Bogotá and Delhi. The question as to whether diversity related to international or internal migration involves cultural, ethnic, religious, legal or any other form of diversity is defined in this book as an empirical one. It depends on the specific local setting of a city. This also includes variation in terms of whether only first-generation migrants or also second and later generations are considered part of “migration-related diversity”. In other words, we believe that it is more important to capture variation between cities in terms of diversity, and explore the consequences for (or the roots in) governance, rather than imposing one definition of migration-related diversity that may misrepresent specific local perceptions.

However, this handbook does not aim only at providing a review of existing scholarly research on the governance of migration and diversity in cities. As will be discussed here below, by stimulating a dialogue between different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives, our goal is that of defining a roadmap for future research to address the complexity of migration and diversity governance. To put it differently, our aim is to reach beyond the state of the art on cities of migration and shape a research agenda that exploits interdisciplinary cross-roads to develop a deeper understanding of the urban governance of migration and diversity.

Beyond academic debates, the handbook aims also to provide practical insights for the urban governance of migration and diversity. Practitioners, especially those directly and indirectly involved in the governance of migration and diversity in cities (either with government or non-government organisations), will find in this handbook unique material on how the challenges of migration and diversity are managed in different cities and on the possible drivers of social innovation and development linked to the presence of a diverse population.

The local turn in the study of migration and diversity

This book focuses on the city as unit of analysis for the study of the governance of migration and diversity and sets itself apart from a longer established tradition of research centred on the national level in migration studies. Issues of migration and diversity often tended to be studied in national terms, which has been described by Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) as a form of “methodological nationalism”. Both the regulation of migration and the incorporation of migrants were seen as a central national prerogative. Defining who is and who is not allowed entry to (or exit from) a specific territory was and is often still considered a key part of national sovereignty, although supranational institutions (such as the European Union) and international treaties (such as the UN Refugee Convention) have at least partially limited this sovereignty (Joppke, 1998).

This national container view has influenced policymaking as well as the development of migration research itself. Favell (2003) refers in this regard to the development of the so-called “integration paradigm”, which legitimated states intervention in the incorporation of migrants in national structures and national values and norms. As such, there was a clear coproduction between states and academia, with the use of concepts, such as integration, that became a taken-for-granted lens of analysis in migration studies. Furthermore, early migration scholarship tended to reproduce specific “national models of integration”, referring to historically developed and institutionally embedded ways of promoting migrant integration in specific national contexts (Thränhardt and Bommes, 2010; Bertossi, 2011). This national container view impeded for a long time the development of comparative research and a more theoretical orientation to what drives migration and diversity policies in different countries and at different levels of analysis.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, migration scholarship has witnessed a rise of interest in international and global developments (Soysal, 1994), as well as developments at the local level (Penninx et al., 2004). What we refer to as a “local turn” in migration studies (see also Zapata-Barrero et al., 2017) involves “the discovery” of a local dimension of migration and diversity, leading to efforts to theorise the relationship between specific local settings and local processes, policies and outcomes. Such efforts aim to provide deeper insight in the local variation in migration and diversity, and help migration scholars reach beyond the container view of national models. In this book, this local turn is developed with a particular focus on issues of governance.

Importantly, this local turn does not mean that we replace methodological nationalism with methodological localism. Throughout the book, we will devote attention both to multilevel relations across various government settings (local, regional, national, supranational), as well as to variation between (and sometimes even within) cities. Just as for nations, there is no “one size fits all” for cities either. In fact, throughout the book, we will address various types of cities, often facing very different governance challenges. A port city like Naples may face very different challenges than a cosmopolitan city like Amsterdam. The importance of local variation has become highly manifest in a broad range of studies that have over the last decade or so drawn attention to the city as level of analysis (Jones Correa, 2001; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Alexander, 2012; Caponio and Borkert, 2010; Foner et al., 2014; Filomeno, 2016; Zapata-Barrero, 2015). Different cities may present very different migration patterns and have very different migration histories. Some cities are literally “cities of migration”, as they have evolved out of migration flows, like New York, whereas other cities define migration as a more recent phenomenon, as is shown in this handbook by the cases of Lampedusa or Warsaw. Also in terms of diversity, there are significant differences between cities. Some cities like London have become, as Vertovec (2007) describes it, “superdiverse” in the sense that they are marked by a high degree of complexity in terms of migration, which defies notions such as ethnic groups or “minorities”. In other cities, diversity may take very different shapes, sometimes even leading to divided cities where migrants and natives live largely separate lives, as pointed out in this volume by the case of Tel Aviv or Istanbul. This book will appreciate rather than reduce the urban variation in migration and diversity, and focus in particular on how differences between cities may correlate with different urban approaches to the governance of migration and diversity.

Interdisciplinary crossroads: mapping a research agenda

The handbook brings together insights from a variety of disciplines. Such a multidisciplinary design is required to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the object of study in this handbook. The complexity of governance of migration and diversity can only be appreciated when done so from various disciplines. Therefore, the outline of the book has been structured in accordance with several core governance themes that are addressed from various perspectives, i.e. migration, history and urban life; local politics and political participation; local policies of migration and diversity; superdiverse cities; divided and border cities.

The parts of the handbook, however, are not only representative of different research themes in scholarly literature; taken together, they compose a map of the possible factors and processes that influence and shape the governance of migration and diversity in cities, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The first theme addressed in this handbook builds on both historical and sociological understandings of urban governance. It shows how migration histories, and the social constructions of these histories, matter to contemporary urban life and governance of migration and diversity. For instance, as will be argued in this part, city specific histories of migration often remain visible in the spatial as well as social structures of cities today. And in some cases legacies from the past, such as neighbourhoods hosting specific groups of migrants, may continue to shape opportunities for migrant integration in later generations. And even beyond such objective structures, cities often also construct narratives of their own migration histories. Some define migration and diversity as key aspects of urban identities; others may have different representations of their own migration histories, sometimes even denying long-rooted migration, such as in the port city of Rotterdam.

Figure 1.2 Factors and processes that shape the city governance of migration and diversity.

The second core theme, explored in Part II of the handbook, concerns the local politics of migration and migration-related diversity, with a particular attention to migrants’ participation. This speaks to contributions from political sociology as well as from political sciences in general. The presence of active immigrants in cities emphasises the need for local migration studies to consider immigrants from the beginning of their migratory process as agents who have needs and claims, and for this reason develop ways of participation in the city where they live. Among the wide range of possibilities for them to be politically active, their involvement in local politics has probably been the first public space of activity, through different channels (mobilisations, associations, consultative local councils, etc.) in alliance with different key actors and stakeholders (local political parties, local government, local NGOs and civil society). These are likely to be key actors in the governance of migration and diversity in cities. However, beyond the participation of migrants themselves, migration and diversity have also become key topics in the broader political arena. In fact, as will be argued in this handbook, politicisation has influenced the governance of migration and diversity at the local level as much as it has on the national level.

The local politics of migration and diversity is clearly intertwined with local policy. This is at the centre of Part III, bringing together chapters mostly from a policy studies background, on how local policies regarding migration and diversity have evolved and affected governance relations at a city level. Specific attention is also devoted to multilevel governance, i.e. to how local policies are developed in complex networks including multiple actors and institutions operating at different territorial scales, i.e. regional, national and supranational (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Caponio and Jones-Correa, 2017).

The last two parts analyse the governance of migration and diversity in three different types of cities, marked by very different migratory patterns and diversity traits. The first type of cities, which has received particular attention over the last decade also because of its relevance to broader conceptual and theoretical issues in the field of migration studies, is superdiverse cities (Vertovec, 2007), at the centre of Part IV. These are cities where the size and the complexity of migration-related diversity – over ethnic lines but also over cultural, economic, legal, political and social lines – has grown to such an extent that one can no longer speak of distinct “minorities” (Meissner, 2014; Crul, 2016).

Two other very specific, but conceptually highly relevant types of cities, are analysed in Part V: divided citie...