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Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action
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Migrants in global cities in Asia and the Gulf
Cosmopolitan dialectics and non-integration
Michiel Baas , Delphine Pagès-El Karoui & Brenda S.A. Yeoh
To cite this article: Michiel Baas , Delphine Pagès-El Karoui & Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2020) Migrants in global cities in Asia and the Gulf, City, 24:5-6, 793-804, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1843278 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1843278
Published online: 30 Nov 2020.
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Keywords migration, global cities, cosmopolitanism, diversity, non-integration, Asia, Gulf URL https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1843278
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Migrants in global cities in Asia
and the Gulf
Cosmopolitan dialectics and
non-integration
Michiel Baas, Delphine Pagès-El Karoui and Brenda S.A. Yeoh
This Special Feature reflects on how cosmopolitanism is inscribed and
refracted in non-western cities with global city ambitions. We focus
on Asia and the Gulf to provide a counter-reading of
cosmopolitan-ism from various cities with both unstated or explicit
non-integra-tion policies, ranging from metropoles where migrants and foreigners
correspond to a small minority (such as Tokyo and Seoul), to
global-izing cities where migrants constitute a substantial minority (such as
Singapore) or to cities where they constitute a large majority (such as
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha). The papers explore how
cosmopolitan-ism works in situations strongly marked by racial, ethnic, social, and
gender hierarchies, in cities characterized variously between the two
extreme poles of ‘mixing’ and ‘segregation’, and reflecting on different
ways of managing diversity. They examine how categories of difference
are constructed, not only by the state (cosmopolitanism from above),
but also by migrants themselves (cosmopolitanism from below). The
papers examine how different categories of ‘migrants’—from highly
skilled professionals to low-skilled, and middle-class migrants, and
794
from students to ‘second generations’—strive to be part of the city while
negotiating opportunities and constraints emanating from the
envi-sioned cosmopolitanism of the global city. Taking the perspective that
cosmopolitan urbanism goes beyond notions of a ‘melting pot’,
métis-sage, or integration, we instead focus on the politics of inclusion and
exclusion that shape the juxtapositions and encounters between
dif-ferent social groups. In this spirit, this Special Feature revisits
cosmo-politanism through non-western cities to reconceptualize cosmopolitan
urbanism outside the prevailing western paradigm of integration.
Introduction
T
he nexus between migration, diversity, and globalizing cities has attracted increasing attention and generated important debates in recent decades, primarily in the western context (Amin 2002; Erden-tug and Colombijn 2002; Glick-Schiller 2012; Glick-Schiller and Caglar 2010; Martiniello and Piquard 2002; Portes 2000; Sassen [1991] 2001). In a previous issue ‘Migration and the City: Diversity, Migrant Economies and Urban Space’ (Hatziprokopiou, Frangopoulos, and Montagna 2016), City has engaged with these debates by exploring the economic implications of migrant-led diver-sification in urban contexts through the lens of ethnic entrepreneurship. We propose to continue reflecting on this subject but also to broaden the scope of our deliberations by training our analytical lens on notions of cosmopolitan urbanism in non-western contexts. Our key contention is that the catalytic role transnational migrants play in transforming the city cannot simply be grasped through observing the increase in urban population diversity; instead, a more productive approach is to pay heed to the creation of new cosmopolitan possi-bilities and limits in social integration and civic life.Cosmopolitanism has a long-standing history within the social sciences and humanities as a topic of vision and significance (Appiah 2001; Beck 2006; Ken-dall, Woodward, and Skrbis 2009; Vertovec and Cohen 2002). Often used as a loose adjectival synonym by scholars for ‘transnational’ or ‘global’, the concept is inherently ambivalent. Discourses of cosmopolitanism have recently surfaced in relation to the accelerated circulation of capital flows, material production, cultural expressions, and consumption. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism is often cast as the humanist counterpart of globalization in line with visions of global democracy and world citizenship (Cartier 1999). On the other hand, given that cosmopolitanism’s normative orientation distinguishes it from the condi-tions of globalization, more critical accounts make clear that ‘the world may be becoming more and more globally linked by powerful global forces, but this does not make the world more cosmopolitan’ (Delanty 2012, 2).
The concept itself provokes contrasting views among scholars: some cele-brate cosmopolitanism as a supreme moral model for peaceful coexistence in ethnically diverse places (Safier 1996; Sandercock 2006) or prefer it as a more positive rendition of a globalized city (Douglass 2009); others reject the concept
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for its close association with the elites (Robbins 1998; Skrbis and Woodward2007) or Eurocentrism (Jazeel 2011), and prefer to replace it with ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007), a term which has gained considerable traction as well as cri-tique recently. In this issue, we opt for a more empirical approach to cosmopoli-tanism by heeding calls for more work on ‘grounded cosmopolicosmopoli-tanism’ (Lejeune et al. 2021; Skrbis, Kendall, and Woodward 2016). We propose detaching cosmo-politanism from normative frames or elitist visions (Calhoun 2002) to make it more attentive to pragmatic and concrete translations, as discussed in ideas of ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism (Schmoll 2003).
Grounded cosmopolitanism and the politics of inclusion and
exclusion in non-western contexts
In this Special Feature, we assert that cosmopolitanism can be used as a heu-ristic concept if one accepts its ambivalent nature. In particular, we argue that the dialectic between inclusion and exclusion is a useful device, specifically for characterizing authoritarian contexts where non-integration policies prevail, as is the case for many cities in Asia and the Gulf with globalizing ambitions. Following Harvey’s (2000) call to analyze conditions for the emergence of cos-mopolitanisms in their historical and geographical contexts, this Special Feature explores the geographies of cosmopolitanism within the non-western context of global city ambitions. Grounded in their specific contexts, the papers collectively examine how different categories of ‘migrants’—from highly skilled profes-sionals to low-skilled, and middle-class migrants, and from students to ‘second generations’—strive to be part of the city while negotiating opportunities and constraints emanating from the envisioned cosmopolitanism of the global city.
While cosmopolitan individuals are often associated with mobile transna-tional elites (Hannerz 1992; Ong 1999), a more recent strand of thought has spawned work on ‘working-class or vernacular cosmopolitanisms’ (Werbner
2006). With the rapid growth of the middle classes in the cities of Asia and the Gulf, the place of ‘middling’ or mid-level skilled migrants also deserves fur-ther attention in theorizing cosmopolitan urbanism. In this light, scholars have turned to notions of ‘actually-existing cosmopolitanism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ (Lamont and Aksartova 2002) to reflect on dimensions of social life that are ‘grounded in an open, experimental, inclusive, moral and ethical consciousness of the cultural other’ (Werbner 2012, 157). For example, Kothari’s (2008) ethnographic work with Bangladeshi and Senegalese street traders in Barcelona associates non-elite cosmopolitanism with ordinary people such as street peddlers who are artful political subjects in their use of translocal social networks to acquire resources and respect; while McFarlane (2008) reveals a different form of non-elite, cosmopolitan modernity articulated through the work of the Slum/Shack Dwellers International Network (see also Jeffrey and McFarlane 2008). By exploring changes in consumption patterns, possibilities for cultural learning, the development of new sensibilities, and the negotiation of cultural differences, Yeoh and Soco (2014) identify emancipatory hope for migrant domestic workers as potential ‘working-class cosmopolitans’ despite the retrogressive contours of transnational domestic work, while Nava’s (2007)
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work on vernacular cosmopolitanism foregrounds the importance of attend-ing to gender dynamics in shapattend-ing relations of care and intimacy. Along with other social factors, gender is undeniably significant. Not only does it greatly influence actual migration trajectories, gender also conditions the way specific groups are able to make use of public space in global cities (for a broader dis-cussion, see Hochschild 2012; McDowell, Batnitzky, and Dyer 2009; Parreñas
2000). It is by treating cross-cultural exchanges across the intersectional axes of race, ethnicity, nationality, class and gender unfolding in different kinds of spaces—from the flexibly open-minded to the severely constrained—that the true breadth of cosmopolitanism can be more fully appreciated.
Beyond focusing on a broader swathe of humanity, locating everyday cosmo-politanism in cities is an equally complex undertaking requiring attention to at least two sets of intertwining logics. The first relates to the impact of cultural glo-balization and consumption in specific urban locales. Latham (2006, 90), for exam-ple, describes Auckland as becoming more cosmopolitan as it transforms from a parochial city characterized by sameness and conformity towards embracing a ‘vigorous and pluralistic urban public culture’. This is evidenced by the reconfig-uration of places of consumption such as cafés, bars, and restaurants in response to ideas and models from elsewhere (for example, French cafés or Italians bars) in contrast to the local pubs. The second set of logics relates to immigration and the increasing diversity of people from a variety of national origins, provoking ques-tions as to whether increasing population diversity in the spaces of the city fos-ters more everyday interactions and produces openness and acceptance. Extant scholarship has not provided definitive answers to these questions, but it is clear that the reality on the ground is immensely complex. Valentine’s (2008) study of urban residents’ interchanges in the United Kingdom, for example, shows that demographic assortment alone is no indicator of cosmopolitan hospitality, and that geographies of encounter in the city are structured by socio-spatial inequal-ities and insecurinequal-ities. To avoid the paralyzing debate between descriptive and normative definitions of cosmopolitanism, we take the perspective that cosmo-politan urbanism goes beyond notions of a ‘melting pot’, métissage, or integration. We instead focus on the politics of inclusion and exclusion that shape the juxta-positions and encounters between different social groups (Yeoh 2004). Instead of desperately seeking the ‘truly cosmopolitan city’, we find it more productive to examine cosmopolitan urbanism along a continuum by taking into account a variety of cities, characterized variously between the two extreme poles of ‘mix-ing’ and ‘segregation’, and reflecting on different ways of managing diversity. In this spirit, this Special Feature revisits cosmopolitanism through non-western cities, not only because cosmopolitanism takes on different meanings in different geographic contexts, but also because this exercise allows us to reconceptualize cosmopolitan urbanism outside the prevailing western paradigm of integration.
How does cosmopolitanism work in situations marked by
strong hierarchies?
The papers included in this Special Feature explore how cosmopolitanism works in situations strongly marked by racial, ethnic, social and gender hierarchies.
797
They examine how categories of difference are constructed, not only by thestate, but also by migrants themselves. The papers analyze how migrants con-tribute to the production of the city, study interactions between migrants, res-idents, and the built environment in rapidly changing landscapes. They show how migrants create distinctive forms of belonging to the city while appropri-ating various kinds of public spaces through everyday practices. They draw on notions such as ‘cosmopolitan canopy’ (Anderson 2011), ‘spaces of encounters’ and ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1992), which function as privileged places for commu-nicating with and confronting the ‘other’ but which are decidedly not exempt from tensions and frictions. The papers collectively address a commonplace and important question: to what extent are people ‘mixing’ in hyperdiverse places governed by a mix of integration and non-integration policies, and with what effects?
By bringing together scholars from various disciplines (geography, anthro-pology, sociology, urban planning), this Special Feature contributes to academic debates on migration and multicultural cities in non-western contexts, with special attention to race, class and gender.1 For this Feature, we have chosen
to focus on Asia and the Gulf2 to reflect on how cosmopolitanism is inscribed
and refracted in non-western cities. Our point is to provide a counter-reading of cosmopolitanism from various cities with both unstated or explicit non-in-tegration policies, ranging from metropoles where migrants and foreigners correspond to a small minority (such as Tokyo and Seoul), to globalizing cit-ies where migrants constitute a substantial minority (such as Singapore) or to cities where they constitute a large majority (such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha). As shown by Söderström (2006), cosmopolitanism is often revealed in the shaping of urban forms so in this vein the papers study a large diversity of urban spaces: universities, religious places, parks, imposing mega-projects sym-bolizing elite consumerism, real estate, informal places of gathering, parking lots, vacant spaces, and more. The four articles on Gulf cities, with dispropor-tionately numerous foreigners and strongly segregated versions of cosmopol-itanism, work with and against the grain of the three papers on Asian cities, which have more ambivalent discourses on the place of the migrant in the ‘cos-mopolising’ city (Yeoh 2004). In the rest of this introduction, we draw out three argumentative threads linking the papers together.
Cosmopolitan urbanism and its contradictions: state visions
and multiple permutations ‘from below’
In Asia and the Middle East, cities striving for global positioning often narrate their urban aspirations in the language of cosmopolitanism, celebrating diver-sity as a key marketing strategy to attract and retain ‘foreign talent’ such as tourists and investors, who will then contribute to the urban ‘growth machine’. What is novel, as Baas (forthcoming issue) demonstrates, is that these narra-tives also appeal to migrant workers. Building on extensive research among migration agents operating in the Greater Chennai region of Tamil Nadu and migrant workers in Singapore, Baas’ paper explores why Tamil men might be willing to pay more to migrate to Singapore than, for instance, the Gulf. Beyond
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assumptions of cultural closeness suggested by Singapore’s historical migratory connections with Tamil Nadu, Tamil men also appear willing to invest in costly migration trajectories to Singapore due to the city-state’s brand value. This chal-lenges the dichotomous reasoning that underpins research on the cosmopolitan attractiveness of global cities, where it is often assumed that only highly skilled, capital-rich migrants would be interested in (and can afford) cosmopolitan life-styles, while capital-poor migrant workers who sell their labor power migrate purely for money. Instead, migration aspirations are complexly folded as global and cosmopolitan allure crosses socioeconomic boundaries.
While promoting cosmopolitan discourses to attract the highly skilled and capital rich, Gulf and Asian cities also exert exclusionary practices, in particu-lar, but not exclusively, towards low-skilled and/or low-waged migrants (Baas
2017; Yeoh 2004, 2013). Considered transient or temporary sojourners, these migrant populations are often subject to a politics of invisibilization where they are relegated to the sociopolitical as well as physical urban periphery. Devel-opment projects and various other upgrades are often aimed at reducing the visibility and presence of these migrant workers in the city. Elsheshtawy (2020) speaks of them being understood as a blight on the ‘otherwise’ orderly city. The construction of labor camps and worker dormitories on the outskirts of the city also reflects similar exclusionary policy practice imprinted onto urban space (Yeoh et al. 2017).
Despite its inherent contradictions and bifurcations, cosmopolitanism and its manifold permutations continue to thrive in unlikely places in the city. This is clearly illustrated in Gardner’s paper (forthcoming issue) where he turns attention to the way segregation actually contributes to cosmopolitan condi-tions in the broader context of global inequality. Based on longstanding field-work in the Industrial Area of Doha, Qatar and with its transnational laboring inhabitants, Gardner proposes an ethnography of cosmopolitanism from below by focusing on migrant experiences of segregation in the interstitial spaces. In doing so, he gradually works towards a particularly optimistic and constructive vision of migrant diversity in urban landscapes that are in fact characterized by a high degree of socioeconomic inequality and spatial segregation.
Several papers of this Special Feature also share a sense of the global city as diverse and cosmopolitan yet inherently paradoxical. The proliferation of pre-fixes—‘superficial’, ‘segregated’, ‘transient’ cosmopolitanism, and more—serves to remind us that Gulf and Asian urbanisms are far from ideal exemplars of cosmopolitanism. Scholars studying the city in such non-western contexts are faced with two possibilities: mourn the absence of the ‘truly’ cosmopolitan city, or accept that cosmopolitanism has multiple permutations, exists outside the framework of urban integration, and is ridden with the contradictory dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. Contributors to this Special Feature have in general leaned towards the latter, as illustrated by Pagès-El Karoui’s paper ( forthcom-ing issue). In asking the salient question of the extent to which Dubai can be considered a cosmopolitan city, she points to the intertwined realities animat-ing the city—global city aspirations that aim for no less than the superlative, a heterogeneous population that is seldom matched in most global cities, and the extreme logic of non-integration aimed at protecting its small minority of citi-zens. Even as she shows how the state endeavors to give shape and meaning to a
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cosmopolitan landscape that is particularly oriented toward a globalized form ofconsuming foreign places, recent shifts in state narratives promoting tolerance and happiness are also attempting to become more inclusive toward foreign residents without actually integrating them. Focusing on two large-scale urban projects, Pagès-El Karoui shows that these state discourses transform urban spaces through celebrating diversity and happiness. Happiness here does not reference political freedom, increased rights, or democratic aspirations; instead happiness takes the form of consumer citizenship, fitting neatly with the way Dubai sells itself as a cosmopolitan destination of consumerism and leisure that is home to global business. Other contributors (Gardner, Elsheshtawy, Assaf) confront the variable impact of these state discourses by highlighting the wide range of migrant everyday experiences, ranging from deep satisfaction to strong alienation. They share the same interest: How do migrants themselves adapt and respond to hyperdiverse and exclusionary contexts?
Transnational place-making and resilient sociability: two types
of migrant adaptation in exclusionary contexts
Under conditions where long-term residency and/or integration is refused to migrants at their destinations, adaptive strategies may include transnational place-making exercised at a distance. Varrel’s research (2020) highlights the importance of transnational connections shaping the social and urban fabric of two cities—the South Indian city of Bangalore and the Gulf city of Dubai. Using a multi-sited approach, she focuses on the way highly skilled, mid-dle-class Indian migrant professionals living in Dubai choose to invest their savings in real estate in Bangalore. She argues that their precarious status as transient migrants in Dubai and exclusion from the local property market make them reconsider investing their resources in their home country. Fueled by exclusionary practices that limit their ability to participate in the shaping of the cosmopolitan landscape in Dubai, they turn to investing in property back in booming Indian cities such as Bangalore and, in doing so, facilitate an alterna-tive, transnational expression of cosmopolitan place-making. In enacting such transnational strategies, Indian property developers play an important role in building upon the insecurity and anxiety produced by the impossibility of per-manent residency or citizenship and luring investment-savvy Indian migrant professionals into committing to the future of Bangalore as a global city.
Building resilient sociability is the second kind of migrant adaptation to exclusionary contexts featured in some of the contributions. By comparing migrant practices at three different sites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Elshesht-awy (2020) shows how migrants who are often excluded from formal public spaces come together in informal ways to shape and reinvent their own spaces. His work moves away from the city’s conventional sites of spectacle and draws instead on extensive mapping studies carried out over a period of six years with the aim of uncovering the informal activities and behaviors of people in public settings. He concludes that spaces that permit a certain degree of com-ing-togetherness provide fertile ground for an alternative reading of more con-ventional (aspirational) urban cosmopolitanism. These gathering spaces reflect
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and enable migrants’ desire to come together to participate in the diversities of urban life while circumventing the restrictions placed on them by the architec-tural and spatial structures of the global city.
Like Elsheshtawy’s paper, Assaf’s paper (2020) addresses the question of migrant resilience. By focusing on the cosmopolitan subjectivities of second- and third-generation Arab migrants born in Abu Dhabi, she shows how the young adults in her study craft modes of sociability and daily practices that make use of urban interstitial spaces such as vacant plots of land and parking lots. Despite—or because of—their precarious status, they build a strong sense of belonging to the city at a local scale, thus bypassing the national community to which they lack access. Their appreciation and appropriation of interstitial spaces, which until now have resisted urban redevelopment, stand in direct relationship to the way they seek to express their sense of belonging to the city. The latter is rooted deeply in urban experiences specific to their generation. Assaf argues that such localities are inherently cosmopolitan, characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity. In contrast to more hegemonic depictions of the city, Assaf’s work points to the way ordinary cosmopolitanism is at play in shaping Abu Dhabi’s specific localities, and, in turn, why this matters to young migrants’ subjectivities and expressions of belonging. In a context where these young Arabs cannot become part of the national community, their sense of belonging is entwined with their intimate knowledge of the city. It is this kind of intimate cosmopolitanism that underpins the legitimacy of their presence in the city, irrespective of nationality and passports. As Assaf argues in her con-clusion, the ‘practices of belonging rather than urban citizenship’ play a role in young non-national residents’ lives: they shape the contours of an urban com-munity whereby age and generational belonging take (temporary) precedence over divisions of nationality.
Cosmopolitan spaces: institutionalized versus spontaneous
encounters
In several papers, a contrast of sorts is set up between the formal city character-ized by a planned cosmopolitan urbanity that functions in a hegemonizing way, reflecting an appearance of diversity and coexistence but lacking in spontaneity and serendipity, and the informal city, more organic in its development and dependent on happenstance. While this formal/informal dichotomy should not be overdrawn, it provides a useful framing in some of the contributions dealing with migrant-local encounters. Here it is particularly important to acknowledge the place a particular migrant group takes up within the ambitions and visions of a city. Are they considered to contribute to its cosmopolitan gloss or merely reflected on as making the city possible in utilitarian terms?
Foong and Yeoh’s paper (forthcoming issue) draws on the concept of different kinds of contact zones when analyzing the enactment of cosmopolitan sociabil-ity among international students enrolled in the campuses of two globalizing universities in Asia’s foremost global cities—Singapore and Tokyo. These cam-puses are microcosms of urban life in the way they reflect the mix of nationali-ties interacting in the course of everyday life. Based on biographical interviews
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with international students, they examine how students encounter andnegoti-ate difference in two types of spaces, one characterized by formality (classrooms and laboratories), the other more casual and informal (such as student dormito-ries). The paper builds upon a particular momentum that is characterized by the rise of globalizing universities in Asian cities, predicated on increasing interna-tional student flows and more diverse urban campuses. Even though scholars have suggested that students’ learning experiences in more diverse settings are potentially conducive to the development of a more cosmopolitan orientation toward living with ethno-national difference, this paper shows this is not auto-matically the case. Instead, contact zones and safe houses generate a spectrum of institutionalized and spontaneous encounters that provide varying oppor-tunities for learning to negotiate the micro-politics of difference. While spatial designs and the creation of innovative spaces seek to encourage inter-group mixing and foster meaningful relationships, students’ agency and willingness to actively participate in such shared activities are crucial to building new bridges at the frontiers of difference. As microcosms of the urban, globalizing universi-ties should not be automatically equated with cosmopolitan spaces just because of their diverse student body. Instead, it makes more sense to characterize them as hopeful spaces of encounter where these students are confronted with both institutionalized and informal opportunities to step out of their comfort zones into contact spaces that destabilize pre-held notions of difference.
Finally, Asor’s paper (2020) tackles the cosmopolitan potential of spaces of encounters through its study of Filipino religious spaces in Seoul. She contrasts purposeful encounters between migrants and Korean volunteers in migrant centers with the accidental encounters which occur when migrants perform ‘strange’ but legitimate sociocultural and religious activities in public spaces. These two encounters engender what Asor refers to as ‘ambivalent hospitality’ whereby the Korean public tolerates, accommodates, and even accepts Filipino migrant presence in urban space when it is legitimized and mediated by local organizations such as the Korean Catholic Church. However, she cautions that the public at large may become resistant and less welcoming when these same migrants become ‘hypervisible’. In Asor’s work, urban encounters are not just sites of conviviality and spatial contestation but part of a relational process that can reconfigure the urban landscape by rendering visible and respecting ‘strang-erhood’. She points out that this is an ordinary feature of urban life rather than an extraordinary spectacle. As such, encountering strangers in urban spaces and extending a hospitable welcome to migrants are now becoming important features of global city-making and cosmopolitan urbanism. Asor argues that understanding the larger processes of urbanization, globalization, and cosmo-politanism can benefit from theorizing migrants as strangers and urban dwell-ers as hospitable hosts.
Together, these papers continue City’s important engagement with migrant diversity, the way it impacts cities, and the possibilities of migrant-led cosmopo-lization of urban space. Our focus on cosmopolitan urbanism in non-western contexts makes a counter-reading of cosmopolitanism possible by attend-ing to globalizattend-ing cities governed by often explicitly non-integration policies that set them apart from their counterparts in the west. While it cannot be denied that these global cities themselves are characterized by economic and
802
political difference, they make use of comparable models of governance that hinge strongly on inclusion and exclusion politics to manage their ballooning migrant populations. In this sense, they take a fundamentally different approach to comparable cities (in terms of size, diversity and economic importance) in the West. Zooming in on a diverse array of urban spaces, ranging from massive building projects and universities to parks and even parking lots, we argue that when understanding the catalyzing role that skilled migrants variously perform in the transformation of urban space, it is crucial to pay attention to the creation of new cosmopolitan possibilities that often stand in direct relation to the lim-itations imposed on sociocultural integration and civic life.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude for the insightful comments and suggestions provided by the anonymous peer reviewers. The Special Feature has also benefited significantly from the editorial steer City provided and subsequent discussion on the various themes and topics discussed in its articles in this and the next issue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This Special Feature benefited from a joint grant from Université Sorbonne Paris Cité (USPC) and National University of Singapore (NUS) awarded in 2017 to Michiel Baas, Del-phine Pagès-El Karoui, and Brenda Yeoh.
Notes
1 All the papers gathered here were initially presented in a workshop entitled Migrants
in Global Cities: Experiences from Asia, the Middle East and Europe (30–31 October 2017,
Singapore).
2 Although the cities analysed here—Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Bangalore—could arguably be categorized as belonging geographically to Asia (as did Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy in their seminal book Worlding Cities: Asia
Experiments and the Art of Being Global),
we prefer to stick to traditional regional categories.
ORCID
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui http://orcid.org/ 0000- 0001-8165-2315
Brenda S.A. Yeoh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0240-3175
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Michiel Baas is a senior researcher with the Max Planck Institute in Halle, Germany. Email:
michielbaas@yahoo.com
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui is Associate Professor in the Department of Arab Studies at the National Institute for Eastern Languages and Civilisations (INALCO), Paris. Email:
dpages@inalco.fr
Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Raffles Professor of Social Sciences at the Department of Geogra-phy, National University of Singapore. Email:
