Abstract
Immigrants are widely regarded among the most vulnerable resident communities in cities across Europe and around the world. Such vulnerability originates not only active discrimination, but also in a selective form of service underinvestment by public and private policy actors, alike. Lacking service provision results in a scarcity of socio-economic empowerment opportunities among urban immigrant communities, who often experience policy issues like systematic unemployment, organized criminality, and segregation more than any other urban population. However, recent scholarship has revealed that immigrant communities produce special social resources, in the form of often vast inter-personal networks, which immigrant individuals can leverage to achieve socio-economic emancipation. These in-group resources characteristic of immigrant communities, collectively referred to as migrant capital, are typically construed as a direct yield of inter-personal connections. Extant literature often neglects the extent to which public infrastructures provide platforms of such connections to develop and express themselves. This study aims to expand the current notion of migrant capital to include all the public services that immigrant communities are offered or, more often than not, denied. Drawing a parallel with the ecological model of coupled socio-ecological system, we illustrate how the service and infrastructural environment impact integration efforts among urban immigrant communities. By taking immigrant communities in the Durham, NC (United States) and Bergamo, Italy (Western Europe) as case studies, this investigation takes a comparative approach to describing the ways migrant capital often layers over the infrastructural environment, giving rise to a multi-level conception of migrant capital as distinct for natural capital.
Presenters
Lorenzo MaggioSocial Researcher, X23 Science in Society, Bergamo, Italy Agathe Nour Semlali
Social Researcher, X23 - Science in Society, Agrigento, Italy Cecilia Olivieri
Science in Society, Italy
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age
KEYWORDS
URBAN GREEN SPACE SEGREGATION, MIGRANT CAPITAL, URBAN ECOLOGY, HUMAN-NATURE INTERACTIONS
