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This publication is with permission of the rights owner (Sage) freely accessible., Migration industry has recently emerged as a lens through which to theorise the intertwinement of non-state actors who aim to provide diverse migration-pertaining services. However, while much of their work is done in and through cities, consequently (re)forming variegated urban landscapes, scholarly literature has thus far neglected the nexus between cities and the migration industry. In this special issue, we begin filling this gap by exploring the significance of migration industries – as a resurgent concept and an area of research from migration studies – for understanding the urban. We start by reviewing the urbanisation of migration studies, highlighting its key limits. We then move on to introduce the migration industries debate, pointing out its existing implicit urban dimensions. We proceed by elaborating our main argument about why and how migration industries provide an especially productive lens for urbanists to consider. Specifically, we stress the three key analytical vantage points that the attention to migration industries enables us to see as central to contemporary city-making. These are its political-economic embeddedness, the urban-constitutive nature of trans-local connectivities, and how business-driven city-making dovetails with more serendipitous, bottom-up shaping of the arrival city. Each of these points also describes how individual papers speak to them. We conclude by briefly outlining a research agenda for migration industries that is thoughtfully embroiled in the (post-)pandemic urban.

Through exploring the spatial conditions and materializations of caring practices and relations, this chapter aims at developing an urban(ized) understanding of care. It thereby seeks to interweave care debates into conceptual debates in urban studies and planning theory. The chapter discusses the tension between fields of care and ‘uncare’ as an analytical lens to situate care debates—and the ambivalences unfolding around them—within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban life. By taking a spatial perspective and by fostering an understanding of care geographies, three perspectives are developed: 1) How the scale of analysis and research in urban theory contributes to a wider understanding of the changing landscape of care; 2) how moments of presence and of encounters in public space allow both the acknowledgment and alteration of caring infrastructures; and 3) how care and crisis are fundamentally linked, and how care perspectives bear a potential to move analytical prisms beyond crisis-centered narratives.

Der Artikel stellt die vor allem in der angloamerikanischen Literatur virulente Urban-Citizenship-Debatte ausführlich vor und diskutiert deren Potenziale für die kritische Stadt- und Migrationsforschung. Der Ansatz wird als besonders innovativ eingeschätzt, da er einerseits die Perspektive des städtischen Regierens der Migration aufwirft und dabei gleichzeitig in der Lage ist, migrantische Akteure und migrantische agency jenseits ethnisierender und kulturalistischer Paradigmen zu thematisieren. Im Kontext neoliberaler Subjektivierungspolitiken in der Stadt setzt sich der Artikel darüber hinaus mit der Prozess- und Konflikthaftigkeit von Citizenship-Dynamiken auseinander sowie mit zunehmenden Fragmentierungsprozessen, die zu neuen städtischen Akteurskonstellationen führen.

Keywords: Borders, Citizenship, Cities, Europe, Schengen Schlagworter: Grenzen, Burgerschaft, Stadt, Europa, Schengen

The election of Barack Obama was possible because he was supported by a broad movement including many parts of the US-Left. The article analyzes the heterogeneous composition of this movement Obamas development during the election campaign and the expectations of the US-Left.

Entrepreneurial urban politics not only aim at up-grading a locality for interurban competition. Under the label of New Public Management, they also remodel the city administration according to economic criteria of efficency. As a result, the political arena for urban social movements is undergoing severe changes. In the case of Berlin, New Public Management reforms seem to disadvantage grassroots groups that protest the privatization of public space, and lead to a political gap between social movements and left political parlamentarians.

Over the past 25 years, Berlin has undergone a rapid process of neoliberalization. This article argues that the city’s transformation has been heavily crisis-driven and fueled by a strong political agenda. Two watershed events are crucial for an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at work: The collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989, followed by a neo-conservative and nationalist, entrepreneurial strategy for the reunified German Capital; and the financial crisis of 2001, which brought a coalition between Social-Democrats and Socialists into power that strongly emphasized Berlin’s (sub-)cultural and cosmopolitan identity, but effectively put the city on a fierce austerity track.

All along the European border, the year 2006 set new records: Spanish authorities reported 6,000 refugees dead, drowned in the Atlantic Ocean while trying to reach the Canary Islands, off West Africa.1 Hundreds more suffocated in containers, trucks, and cargo boats in the ports of London, Dublin, and Rotterdam, or froze to death in Eastern Europe. Others, locked up in one of the innumerable internment camps spread all over the heart of Europe and North Africa, desperately decided to end their own lives.2 At the same time, Europe reported the lowest rate in years of refugees officially seeking asylum. This list obviously doesn't point to a more peaceful world. What it indicates instead is that in Europe the criteria and procedures for securing legal refugee status have become so restrictive that most migrants no longer bother to apply for it. In 2006, Germany for example counted only 20,000 petitions for political asylum, the lowest number since 1977. If we include the member states of the European Union (EU), that number rises to 200,000.3 However, the real story of the border regime, and its constriction of the category for legal entrance and residence, is in the rising body countThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.