Sum up of week 1

Hi everyone! Congratulations! You have made it to the end of the first week of the course. Here we sum up what we have learned during this week.

We presented the different types of urban-bound migration and we considered the relationship between migration and cities across history, underlining the fact that all cities have been shaped by migration in some form or another, be this internal or international.

We provided a number of cases of urban migration during the last five centuries. In her interview, historian Rosa Salzberg explained how the population of Venice almost doubled during the sixteenth century as a result of inward migration from across the central and eastern Mediterranean. Even though the city’s authorities attempted to spatially segregate the residential quarters of different groups (which included setting up Europe’s first Jewish ‘ghetto’), everyday street life was characterized by a mixture of ethnicities, languages, and customs.

During the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries the industrial city, the non-Western city and the colonial city were all influenced by mass movement, which we illustrated through the examples of Manchester, Berlin, Chicago, Tokyo and Rabat.

We ended by looking at the different types of migration to Western European cities during the postwar period – postcolonial migration to UK and France, guestworker migration to West Germany and internal migration in Italy. These different types of migration all held something in common: each was fundamental to the economic growth of those cities that had slowly started to recover following the destruction of the Second World War.

In week 2, we will turn our attention to the present day and explore some key issues: employment; the impact of globalisation upon urban economies; the residential distribution of migrants in cities; and the relationship between migrant groups and public space.

We will also consider some of the contemporary problems that have arisen in cities as a result of migration: xenophobia in South African cities, and homelessness among migrants in London due to their inability to access public funds.