In Migrants and City-Making Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their work in comparative ethnographies of three cities struggling to regain their former standing-Mardin, Turkey; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Halle/Saale, Germany-Çağlar and Glick Schiller challenge common assumptions that migrants exist on society’s periphery, threaten social cohesion, and require integration. Instead Çağlar and Glick Schiller explore their multifaceted role as city-makers, including their relationships to municipal officials, urban developers, political leaders, business owners, community organizers, and social justice movements. In each city Çağlar and Glick Schiller met with migrants from around the world; attended cultural events, meetings, and religious services; and patronized migrant-owned businesses, allowing them to gain insights into the ways in which migrants build social relationships with non-migrants and participate in urban restoration and development. In exploring the changing historical contingencies within which migrants live and work, Çağlar and Glick Schiller highlight how city-making invariably involves engaging with the far-reaching forces that dispossess people of their land, jobs, resources, neighborhoods, and hope. 

"Ayse Calgar and Nina Glick Schiller make a timely and compelling case for migrants as 'city-makers.' Departing from commonly portrayed dichotomies between migrants and non-migrants, they situate, contextualize, and embed them into complex “multi-scalar” processes of urban regeneration. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - G. R. Innes (Choice) "This fantastic book is a result of committed long-term research by Çaglar and Glick Schiller on migration and the regeneration of cities." - Susanne Urban (Urban Studies) "A theoretically rich book that immerses us in the relationship between migration and localities that are not urban centers of global power. . . . Migrants and City-Making has a theoretically rich and engaging methodology, which will be useful for anyone teaching courses on transnational migration, urban studies, urban anthropology or urban sociology." - Hulya Dogan (City & Society)

"Its programmatic and didactic approach will make Migrants and City-Making a useful teaching tool for students of migration and urban theory. The argumentation is bold and restated at multiple points in the book."

- Madeleine Reeves (Laboratorium) "... Immigrants and City-Making is a thought-provoking and ambitious study that provides a compelling appraisal of migration, place making, and urban theory. ... A unique, innovative, and valuable contribution to our comparative understanding of migration, cities, and the manifestations of growing economic inequality on a global scale." - Steven Gold (American Journal of Sociology) "Migrants and City-Making is a thought-provoking and ambitious study that provides a compelling appraisal of migration, place making, and urban theory…. The book is a unique, innovative, and valuable contribution to our comparative understanding of migration, cities, and the manifestations of growing economic inequality on a global scale.” - Steven Gold (American Journal of Sociology) “The book provides fascinating and important insight into the experiences, challenges, and agency of migrants and nonmigrants in disempowered cities. . . . The book will particularly interest scholars and researchers in those fields and would serve as an excellent introduction to some key debates and developments for anthropologists and sociologists beginning to think about the longer-term effects of urban regeneration efforts and how to study them.” - Sara Jean Tomczuk (Contemporary Sociology) “[Migrants and City-Making] challenges disciplinary divisions between migration studies and urban studies which limit our understanding of global processes of city-making.... I highly recommend this book especially for those who work at the intersections of migration and urban studies and want to go beyond the national and ethnic lens.” - Pinar Ensari (Urban Geography)

Ayşe Çağlar is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and coeditor of Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants.

Nina Glick Schiller is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is coauthor of Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, also published by Duke University Press, and most recently, coeditor of Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities, and Discontents.