Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance

This paper expands on the quotidian perspectives of ‘ordinary cities’ and ‘everyday resistance’ and explores the migrant urbanisms that emerge out of movement, mixing and exchange. The paper argues for a shift beyond a focus on encounter across racial and ethnic difference, to engage with whether everyday social practice can effectively contaminate political practice. The question is raised within the understanding that everyday life is rooted in inequality, and extends to an analysis of migrant participation in city life as creative expression and everyday resistance. Against a pernicious migrancy problematic in the UK that defines migration as an external force assaulted on national integrity from the outside, I explore migrant urbanisms as participatory practices of reconfiguration within ordinary cities, where diversity and innovation intersect. At the core of this exploration is how migrants are active in the making of urban space and urban politics.