PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the course of globalization of the world economy, cities are increasingly seen as nodes in networks that are shaped and constituted by manifold flows intersecting there, including migration flows. Early conceptualizations of cities from the network perspective, such as “global city,” assumed that only a small set of powerful cities are embedded in the network of interrelations, and saw the role of migrants primarily as part of the urban labor force as well as the factor responsible for the increasing diversity in the city. With the assertion of a transnational perspective on migration, migrants began to be seen as actors and all cities as being affected by global interconnections. Relationships between migrants and cities are theorized in the concepts “transnational urbanism,” “transnational urban spaces,” and in “comparative theory of locality,” which has been developed based on the concept of city scale.