Mobility and Migration as Constituting Elements of Urban Society: Migration as a Gendered Process and How to Challenge Digital Universalism

Abstract

The paper aims to present an ensemble of new theoretical frameworks that would allow historiographies of architecture and urban design to take into consideration the question of migration as a gendered process. Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. In such a context, mobility and migration are constituting elements of urban society. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective of this paper is to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies. This shift is related to the fact that migration studies are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention is paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship that draw on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of migration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in migration studies. The paper reflects upon the implications of establishing methods based on the endeavour to merge migration studies, urban studies and gender studies for the perception of the concepts of placemaking, displacement and domesticity, on the one hand, and for how the mobility from city to city is understood within the contemporary transnational context, on the other hand. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between the migration processes and social sustainability. Additionally, the paper examines the role of new media technologies in rethinking the dynamics of migration. It also analyses how we could shape strategies of using urban scale digital twins and big data for decision-making in urban planning that are able to challenge digital universalism.