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Across global cities of the world, urban spaces of arrival tend to be characterized by a multiplicity of informal practices, and therefore also marginality, being most prevalent in relation to local economic practices, and increasingly more the legal status of foreigner migrants residing in such spaces. This article aims to understand these dynamics in arrival spaces at the margins by exploring both domains in a unique manner. Over recent decades, urban and migration studies have separately given rise to new research that is critical of the pervasive binary views around formal versus informal economies and legal versus illegal migrations. Drawing on this literature, and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in an Istanbul locality that has served as a zone of arrival for varying migration flows over several decades, this article examines how both business proprietors and migrants working and/or residing in the locality actively and continuously re-negotiate their positions within spectrums of in/formality and il/legality. It shows that arrival spaces at the margins are places of intense calculation and that the chosen direction along these spectrums depends on an evaluation of all kinds of social, political, spatial, and temporal factors transpiring at a particular moment and place. In focusing on this processual nature of in/formalities and il/legalities, the article also suggests reconsidering various other dualities, including margins versus center, exclusion versus inclusion, and arrival versus settlement, and argues that the intensity of having to manage one's experiences of these dualities is what really distinguishes inhabiting arrival spaces at the margins in today's global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ‘top down’ conceptualizations of globalization, people often enter the analytical picture merely as resisters to globalization or as receivers of corporate produced goods, messages and ideas. This article, in contrast, focuses on a process in which ‘ordinary’ people are the active makers of global processes and meanings. I describe the transnational trade network between post-Soviet countries and Turkey, in which Western fashions and images get circulated and transformed through the activities of informal entrepreneurs. I thus challenge accounts of globalization in which the dissemination of images is depicted as a top down process originating in corporations located in metropolitan countries. Based on ethnographic evidence collected in Istanbul and Moscow on the informal ‘shuttle trade’, I demonstrate that the mobility of ‘ordinary’ people across borders facilitates the flows of signs and images. Moreover, Western images and fashions get remoulded and acquire new meanings in the process of circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]