SIXTH INTERNATIONAL METROPOLIS CONFERENCE

WORKSHOP 36: Identity, Citizenship, and Territory: Neighbourhoods as both Contexts and Sources of Local, National and Global Attachments

Wednesday, November 28, 2001
14:00 - 15:30


ORGANIZERS

Drs. Dirk Hoerder & Helen Ralston
University of Calgary, Canada

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

As modern states seek to incorporate immigrants and refugees within their bounded but porous territories, and especially in urban settings, concerns for social cohesion arise for states tend to seek to homogenize, temporalize, localize and stabilize their citizenry, while developing consensus around its driving narratives. Like national, federated and multi-national states, cities work by policing their territory, producing their people, constructing their citizens, defining their monuments and services, and constructing locales of memory and commemoration.

The problematics posited as part of the process of entering into relationships between identity and context (Appadurai, 1996) are those of the production of locality in a world that has become multicentric, pluralistic, deterritorilized, diasporic and transnational. Yet neighbourhoods serve as contexts receiving immigration which may be seen as another wave of colonization, introducing peoples upon spaces that had already become places, thus modifying and creating new forms of neighbourhoods and public places. Just as affinities with friends and families may be of variable strength and durability, so too may be the ties to neighbourhoods.

Spaces in countries of origin, of passage, and of residence(s), similarly interact dynamically in the process that is immigritude, serving as neighbourhood contexts for temporary and more permanent attachments. Of particular interest to immigritude, neighbourhoods serve to localize new arrivals as they do for those of prior residence, with familiar and familiarizing streets, thoroughfares, shops, means of transportation, and institutions such as schools, hospitals, courts, and places of worship.

When neighbourhoods are situated in world wide contexts, they allow residents to live locally, nationally and globally, the experience of globalization which foregrounds economic, political, cultural, social and religious dimensions. Viewed with either extreme pessimism or extreme optimism (Turner, 2000), these dimensions transact with the tensions between patterns of citizenship and the changing nature of politics including the politics of identity.

Set in the context of the vast networks which states, including cities, establish to maintain their sovereignty, create categories of identities, socialize their citizens as productive active participants in democracy, and preserve their boundaries, this workshop focuses upon the general policy issue of the absorption capacities of cities and states. The workshop's specific policy issue, the capacity of neighbourhoods to absorb immigrant youth as part of the process of becoming a citizen, is addressed by means of a central question:

$ How can states, cities, schools and neighbourhoods effectively shape absorptive capacity so as to support the construction of immigrant youth's identities and affiliations as part of urban and human development?

as well as these more specific questions:

$ How are neighbourhoods defined by the state to create forms of allegiance and affiliation?
$ How do networks of affiliations and allegiances maintained by immigrant youth contribute to the fragility and elasticity of urban neighbourhoods and other landscapes around the world?
$ How does the socio-cultural capital produced and maintained by immigrants contribute to neighbourhoods and its institutions? How do these influence in turn the construction of socio-cultural capital among immigrants and refugees?
$ How are bounded territories such as states, cities and neighbourhoods transformed, in theory and in practice, by displacement, diaspora, exile, and migration as part of globalization in all its dimension?
$ How can non-governmental organizations be effective in maintaining or increasing absorptive capacity of immigrant youth?

PARTICIPANTS:

Chair:

- Dick Hoerder (University of Bremen Germany): The Global and the Local in Migrants' Experiences: Multiple Social Spaces in a Long-Term Perspective;
- Helen Ralston, (St. Mary's University Canada): Identity Construction of Immigrant Mothers and Daughters in Multiracial Local, National and Global Diaspora Space;

Presenters:
- José Mapril, Univerisity of Lisbon, Portugal: Chinese Transnational Social Fields as Part of the Chinese Commercial Diaspora across Portugal, Europe and China
- Yvonne Hébert, Jennifer Wen-shya Lee, Linda di Luzio, Shirley Xiaohong Sun, Jim Frideres, U Calgary, Canada; and Chiara Berti, University of Genova, Italy: Preferential Use of Urban Spaces as Forms of Attachment among Canadian Youth ;
- Omar de la Torre, General Director for Migrant Assistance in the Office for Mexicans Abroad: Mexico's new public policies for its citizens abroad
- Martine Faille, Directrice par intérim, Direction de la planification stratégique, Ministère des Relations avec les citoyens et de l'Immigration au Québec, Canada: Contributions des institutions publiques dans la formulation des politiques étatiques pour l'intégration de la jeunesse issue de l'immigration,

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Turner, Bryan S. 2000. Citizenship and Political Globalization: A Review Essay. Citizenship Studies, 4, 1: 81-86