Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Since the seminal work of Manuel Castells (1972), the “urban question” has formed a focal point among critical urban scholars in their effort to unpack and understand the complexities of the multilevel and multiscalar processes of urban restructuring. This paper centralizes the question of the urban as one of infrastructure and migration. Through the notion of the “urbanity of movement,” the paper deconstructs both the category of the urban beyond that of “the city” together with the complex category of the spatio-political figure on-the-move beyond that of “the migrant.” Thus, the paper problematizes the fixed and static ontologies which have been central in both urban- and migration-research. Through the lens of the infrastructures of human movement, this paper deconstructs Castells’ concepts of the “space of flow” vis-à-vis the “space of places” (1996) and, instead, posits the in-between figure in the space of in-between as the central foci of analysis with the aim of hybridizing “the city”/non-city and “the migrant”/non-migrant categorical dichotomies. This analytical shift allows us to conceptualize the notion of movement and those on-the-move not within a place but that of place, thus actively (re)producing and (re)creating the space of flow[s] within the space of places.