Diasporic urbanism : concepts, agencies & 'mapping otherwise'.

The term ‘diasporic urbanism’ addresses the difficulties of operating
with diasporic space and of accommodating the material complexities
of migrant lives. It proposes displacement and reterritorialisations as
methodologies and ‘mapping otherwise’ as a tool for representing and
working with migrant spatialities. Diasporic space is theorised as a
relational space, whilst diasporic subjectivity is described as ‘nomadic
consciousness’. The politics of the diaspora are addressed through the
need to accommodate conflict (Mouffe) and through introducing ‘things’
and ‘matters of concern’ (Latour) into the democratic relationship.
These concepts were tested in practice through my research which
focuses examples of diasporic agencies in the everyday. From the
Turkish and Kurdish kahve to a street whose physicality forces a certain
visibility on to those who traverse it, to a park in East London that
through being claimed by one diasporic group has come to symbolise
wider notions of political representation. The mapping of these particular
spaces has addressed the question: within the networked, global
condition of the migrant, what objects, subjects and processes can play
the role of mediation and translation that is required between ‘here and
there’, or between the layers of this multiple subject?
The need for such approaches is apparent in the increasing diversity of
European cities. The everyday geographies of people’s lives can easily
lose themselves in the enormity of the questions and the complexities
of the issues surrounding migration. Yet, it is exactly the specificity of
individual lives, the way that geo-political borders and territories inscribe
themselves onto the intimate topology of migrant and diasporic bodies,
half-here and half-there, that is so difficult to account for. This then
is the challenge set down for ‘diasporic urbanism’—how to make the
conditions necessary for those other than the privileged to participate in
the imagining of our cities.