Bringing people into global cities: Migration regimes and global city networks

Abstract

Whilst global city theory originally indeed include the perspective of international migration and especially the social polarization in the cities as part of the global city making, the phenomena surrounding migration had successively not been embraced as much as the role and function of transnational professionals and also not beyond quantitative analysis of the flows of migrant population. What the COVID-19 pandemic has however crystallized is the significance the agency of mobility, and how the privilege or the lack thereof had emerged as a crucial topic especially in global cities where the global economy is thought to take place. Although the focus on global economic (corporate) actors and economy-related policies allowing the neoliberal development of the global city network was logical and at the core of the global city theory, the increasing significance of national policies beyond the solely economic in navigating the urban population seem to not have been considered sufficiently, or even neglected as being specific features to regions such as Asia. However, as the last decades have shown, international migration, - be it about the competition of higher skilled talents, the need for lower skilled workers or even the acceptance of refugees ‑, has become an inherent part of global urbanization that cannot be ignored and need further scrutiny also in the context of global city making. By revisiting approaches on the so-called developmental state urban models discussed in the context of Asian global cities, there is a potential to rethink the connection between not solely migration itself and the cities, but particularly between different migration regimes, migration industries and their impact on urban differential inclusions and the global urbanization. Bringing the highly selective mechanism of mobility of international migrants to the picture of global cities, this paper bring a new lens to discuss the global urbanization and to reconsider the original context of the world system theory which the global city theory emerged from.