Migrant incorporation and city scale : towards a theory of locality in migration studies

The impacts of migration on the restructuring of locality remains neglected by both migration scholars and urban geographers, although the importance of global forces in structuring the flows of people, identities, subjectivities, and cultural production and consequent alterations in a time/space continuum is widely acknowledged. Yet migrants both experience and contribute to the forces of integration and fragmentation, as they participate in the rescaling of urban economies, politics and governance and the reshaping of geographies of representation. Consequently any analysis of the restructuring of urban social fabrics will be incomplete without considering the impact of migration and migrants.